PUMPING IRONY: Great Expectations

Anne Lamott, writing last week in The Washington Post, offered what struck me as a fairly convincing argument for moderating our expectations as we grow older. And her parable seemed especially appropriate, coming as it did at a time of year when we tend to project ourselves into the near future with varying degrees of hopefulness and fecklessness.

In Lamott’s case, the appealing vision of the future revolved around something few of us would anticipate with any measure of glee: cataract surgery.

Her husband, who Lamott describes as someone “with the worst eyesight of any nonblind person I know,” had undergone the procedure and emerged transformed. It wasn’t just that his repaired eyes allowed him to marvel at “the veins of leaves” hanging from the trees outside their living room window; the sedation administered prior to the surgery made the experience remarkably painless and tranquil — and slightly psychedelic. For an hour after the procedure, he was floating serenely above it all.

“So, naturally, a girl’s thoughts turned to her own shot at experiencing this,” she writes. “Also, having been clean and sober for more than 38 years now, I thought of the twilight sedation. This sounded like heaven.”

It would be different from her “old doper days,” which always carried the risk of finding herself “half-clothed, behind the wheel, or married” when the drugs wore off. This episode would occur within the cozy confines of an operating room, under the direction of a trained anesthesiologist. She could hardly wait to embark on the trip.

The reality turned out to be quite different from what she’d expected.

“He pushed the drugs in — and I hated it,” she admits. “Horribly, it seems, I now crave presence and clarity, even in these dark, wintry, postelection days.” Rather than enjoying a groovy stoned postsurgical rendezvous with her husband, who was annoyingly eager to know how she liked the fentanyl and tranquilizer, the amazing light show, the entire psychedelic vibe, Lamott imagined “pushing him out of the car on Highway 101 to make him stop talking.”

He drove her home and she went straight to bed, slept for three hours, and awoke feeling like her “stinging eyeballs were thickly coated in Vaseline.” So much for high expectations.

He drove her home and she went straight to bed, slept for three hours, and awoke feeling like her “stinging eyeballs were thickly coated in Vaseline.” So much for high expectations.

There’s a difference, I suppose, between expecting a taste of nirvana and harboring a modicum of optimism when anticipating some specific event or pondering the hazy future. I’ve always found it helpful to lower my expectations without succumbing to the paralyzing effects of fatalism. It’ll probably be OK, is my mantra. Of course, my cataracts have not yet required surgery.

If recent research is any indication, however, leaning toward the nirvana option (however defined) may be the better choice as we shuffle through our golden years. The results of a survey of seniors published last summer in the journal Aging & Mental Health, for instance, showed that respondents who scored higher on a scale measuring their expectations of aging tended to also score higher on a cognitive test than their less-optimistic peers.

“Aging expectations are malleable and influence an individual’s perceptions of their cognitive functioning,” the authors concluded. “Modifying older adults’ aging expectations could support healthier cognitive aging through increased awareness and accurate assumptions about the aging process.”

Previous studies, including Becca Levy’s landmark work at Yale, have found similar links between an optimistic view of the aging process and better overall health and well-being as the years accumulate. How the “optimists” differ from the “expectant” among the senior set is probably fodder for debate, but the point seems to be that tamping down our fears about growing old is generally a salutary approach.

And Lamott’s experience doesn’t necessarily mean isolated disappointments produced by unreasonable expectations lead to a lack of hope for the future. Her eyes stung for a week, and she still can’t read without her glasses, but her “crash course in low expectations” did not appear to sour her on life. The veins in the leaves on those trees in her front yard are still there and someday they may reveal themselves to her aging eyes.

“So much that we love will almost certainly be stolen from us in the years to come, and we must not look away, give up, or give in,” she writes. “But so much greatness will remain in nature, art, best friends, our interconnection and caring, and we need to be on the watch for these — maybe squinting — and cheer.”

I couldn’t agree more. After all, as we like to say up here in the North Country, “It coulda been worse.”

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