“You look great,” someone said to me last week. “Have you lost weight?” Which is always nice to hear, but it got me thinking.
In the first place, I haven’t lost a pound, I assure you. I eat just as much bread as I always have, which is to say all the bread I can find. I would like to lose weight, of course — a lot of us would, right? — but because that takes concentrated effort and a certain amount of physical activity, I’m staying put, belt-size-wise. In June, I will hit a major age milestone — none of your business which one — and part of getting older is being liberated from the allure of self-improvement. “You’re done,” I keep telling myself when I entertain new ways to get healthy, organized, or achieve my goals. “You’re done,” I say, “this is going to be you until there’s no you anymore.”
Which sounds depressing, when you put it down in words like that. But it’s a great feeling of freedom. Because I no longer expect to be efficient, fantastically rich, or a terrific skier, I am released from feeling the pangs of unreached potential that have plagued me since grammar school. I have friends my age who are still striving to be better and smarter and healthier — and these days, those things seem to require something called a “morning cold plunge,” which involves three words I’ve never liked in an order I find impossible to contemplate — but when the dinner party conversation turns to ways each of us is trying to improve ourselves, I reach for the last piece of bread, take a slurp of my wine, and say, “I’m done.”
That is, until something intervenes, which happened last week when I was told that I was looking good. I knew it wasn’t a few missing pounds, but that left me wondering: What’s different about me? Had I changed my hair? Was I wearing different clothes? Was I standing up straighter? No, no, and no.
Here’s what I came up with: I had shaved. I think it was as simple as that.
I have hated shaving since the moment it became something I needed to do. In the early years, I would let the scraggly whiskers grow out in the way they sometimes do with elderly women, sprouting in patches of unappealing tufts, and then later, I enjoyed sporting the French movie star look of rugged stubble. But then the whiskers started coming in grey — the nice term is “salt and pepper” — and eventually pure white. And the rule is: Dark stubble looks dashing and attractive, but white stubble looks like you’re a victim of elder abuse in a badly run assisted living facility.
Last autumn, despite my personal mantra of “I’m done,” I started to shave every day. I don’t think I made a conscious decision to do so, but my life was suddenly different from what it had been for the past few decades. I went back to school, to Princeton Theological Seminary, to get a master’s degree in divinity and, I hope, eventual ordination in the Episcopal Church. Yes, at my age.
So I’m a student now, and I have to get up in time for 8 a.m. classes in which I’m contending with young minds that are a lot nimbler than mine and can manage on a few hours of sleep and a sip or two of coffee. They can shuffle along to class in their sweats and ratty sweaters because when you’re young, you always look good. When you’re old, not so much.
Shaving every day means shaving my white whiskers, the undeniable evidence of my many years on the planet, and when you look younger, you look better and thinner, for some reason. And I think that’s what the “Have you lost weight?” comment was all about. It’s an all-purpose compliment — it’s the thing you say when you can’t quite put your finger on how or why the other person suddenly looks better to you.
The problem is, “I’m done.” Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself and everyone around me. I have officially declared personal improvement bankruptcy. My daily ritual of shaving, though, suggests that I’m not as done as I thought. I’m still not quite as free as I want to be. That may have to wait until the next big milestone birthday. If there is one.
Rob Long is a television writer and producer, including as a screenwriter and executive producer on Cheers, and the co-founder of Ricochet.com.
