To Appreciate Your Youth, Embrace Your Inner Granny

Samantha Fellin
6 min readMay 28, 2020

Have you ever known, really sensed deep down that you were destined for something? Some people grow up knowing that they’re meant for a long and fulfilling career in medicine, others to be a mother or a father. I’ve always known that I was destined to be old.

Yes, we’re all technically destined to (hopefully) reach those golden years, but I always felt I was really ready for it, constantly thinking ahead to the next birthday, the next milestone where I’d have the chance to take on more delicious responsibility. In hindsight, it seems silly to wish your life away, to not revel in the carefree life of a child, but that just wasn’t who I was.

When I was young, I’d lay in bed thinking about how great it would eventually be to decide my own bedtime, and to have a house of my own, quiet and tucked away with no distractions (read: brothers). In high school, I daydreamed about how great university life would be. The partying and clubbing I could take or leave, but think of the unbridled library access!

Yes, my career as an old woman began young, and has continued unabated for twenty-odd years. I may be 29 in human years, but in grandma years, I’m pushing 60.

When I chat with my grandmother, there’s a sense of kinship I feel with her that surpasses the familial bond. In many ways, she seems to “get” me and my lifestyle more than my own parents do, which has come as somewhat of a surprise considering the age difference.

It’s been interesting to consider the parallels between my generation (Millennials) and hers (the Silent Generation): like the Millennials, her generation’s lives were marked by chronic global instability, both on a geopolitical and economic scale. World War II and the Depression had a psychological impact much like 9/11, the 2009 recession and now, the Pandemic are having on Millennials.

Like my grandmother, I tend toward frugality, always searching for a deal, obsessively budgeting my money, reusing and thrifting instead of always buying new. While Baby Boomers (such as my parents) grew up trusting the systems that surrounded them, the Silent Generation and Millennials seem to have largely seen past the social myths of the stable Capitalistic society, of exponential growth, of finding contentment and meaning in external structures. We have learned instead to go within.

I’ve always been attracted to the vision of a simpler, slower life: having a quiet place of my own, living with my partner and a couple beloved pets in relative solitude, spending my days tending to my garden, cross stitching, cooking from scratch, reading by firelight in the evenings. Far from being a passing fancy, my desire for this life has only deepened as the years pass.

It might be my somewhat anxious disposition, but I’ve always felt comfort in the ability of “old lady hobbies” to ground me when I get too caught up in my mind. Many seniors seem to intuitively understand that pastimes like crafting, baking, drawing, and even walking are highly tactile in nature, and require us to concentrate and “get back into our bodies.” As a cohort, they seem to rely much less on external stimulation than my generation does to feel happy. Of course, being social and engaged in the world is an important part of anyone’s life, but my grandmother’s generation typically seems more secure in spending time alone, reflecting and resting without needing to hop from one social engagement to the next to be “filled up”.

Clearly, every person is different, and to speak too broadly about generational differences is more reductive than helpful. But what I’m trying to get at is that in order to be happy, I’m realizing the necessity of integrating both my inner child and my inner granny.

In life, there’s a time to embrace the group, and there’s a time to retreat. There’s a time to be in the action, and there’s a time to step back and reflect. When I was a child, I was far too focused on being a “mature adult” (insert eyeroll here) to the point that I sometimes took my youth for granted. As we age, there can also be the opposite tendency to look back on the past in an overly-nostalgic way. But if we embrace both sides of us, and learn to hold them both up as equally valid, I believe we can live more contented lives.

By embracing the elderly woman that I will become, I can appreciate my youth and vitality in the present moment. After all, when I look to my elders to see the wisdom in their way of life, I can appreciate that some of those lifestyle choices are out of necessity: what used to be a jog around the block is now a walk because of knee pain, and a weekly spin class is now water aerobics due to arthritis. By seeing that it won’t necessarily always be a given that I’ll be able to take that yoga class, or easily meet up with friends for dinner, it allows me to appreciate my energy, my health, and my social life in the here and now.

On the other hand, by embracing my youth, I also recognize that there are times when I’m too caught up in plans, in ideas, in frittering away my energy on distractions like social media that don’t bring much value to my life. By looking to my “inner granny,” I’m able to hold those forces in check a little more, so that they express themselves in healthier ways. By embracing the impulse to slow down, I’m able to admit to myself that as much as I love discovering the world around me, some nights I just want to hermit myself in my apartment with a good book, and that’s okay too.

At the risk of sounding trite, aging is a definite taboo in Western society. We hide our wrinkles and greys, we vehemently resist titles like the dreaded “ma’am,” and where we once died at home surrounded by friends and family, we now spend our final moments hidden away behind closed doors in the sterility of a hospital bed.

We might treat death like the illegitimate child we’d rather keep hidden in the attic, but we do so at our peril. Death allows us to appreciate life. Aging allows us to appreciate youth. And ultimately, embracing aging as the natural way of things means embracing the agelessness of the inner child.

We may accumulate wrinkles with the passing of years, but the inner child never ages. We may forget about her, but she’s always with us. We’ve all seen that 80 year old who seems to be imbued with a certain light. They’re quick to laugh, they don’t sweat the small stuff, and they move through life gently, like it’s all a kind of dance. We’ve also all met the older person who seems angry, stuck in their ways, and who’s moving through life, well… as if it were deathly serious. The difference between the two is that one of them has forgotten to honour the child deep inside. It’s our imperative to embrace this inner child, to stay young at heart, to never stop growing. In this way, we break away from the confines of aging in a way that is deeper and more permanent than dying our greys away.

That being said, we mustn’t deny our aging to get in touch with our youth. We have to embrace the inner granny along with the inner child, recognizing the realities of aging, decline, and death, and not backing away from them. It’s not an easy task, but if we can spend our lives learning to accept these truths, we will feel more prepared when we inevitably have to start giving up some of the things we once enjoyed. By learning how to slow down now, by getting in touch with the joys of quiet evenings in spent crafting or reading, we teach ourselves to rely less and less on external stimuli for happiness. By learning to look for contentment in the little things, even in an ugly little cross stitch or a lumpy scarf we’ve knitted, hobbies transcend being mere pastimes: they become vehicles for self-understanding, patience, and acceptance. Make no mistake: life will teach us these lessons one way or another. I say, might as well embrace the curriculum and get knitting.

Originally published at http://equanimish.ca on May 28, 2020.

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Samantha Fellin
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Reading, writing, meditating, petting as many cats as possible. My work explores the place where reason meets human. www.equanimish.ca