There is a particular quality of light that comes only in the late afternoon — orange, warm, slanted, and unhurried. Sit on a hill on the east side of Lake Bunyonyi and you will be rewarded with an awesome sight as the sun sets over Mount Muhabura to the west.
Old age, at its best, carries exactly that quality. It is the hour of the day that photographers love, when shadows lengthen and everything is seen with a clarity that the harsh brightness of noon never permits. To grow old, truly and gracefully, is to enter that light.
This is not the story we are told. Our Western-influenced culture, now obsessed with youth and velocity, treats aging as a slow catastrophe, a steady accumulation of losses to be mourned and, if possible, reversed. Advertisements in North America promise creams and procedures that will stave off the visible evidence of the years. Men and women of all races paint their hair black to present an illusion of time having stood still since early adulthood. Some women don wigs and other artificial hair to maintain that youthful look that pleases their eyes but does not ease their aching joints. Men, me among them, shave the heads clean as though the absence of visible grey hair slows down the clock.
All of which reinforces the notion that old age is something to resist until one is carted off to a quiet, dark corner of the house. But this narrative is not only incomplete — it is profoundly wrong.
The joy of old age begins, paradoxically, with loss. It is precisely because time has become finite and visible that it becomes precious. William James, the famous eighteenth-century philosopher and psychologist, observed that one of the great wastes of youth is the sense that there will always be more time — more time to begin, to try, to love, to notice. Old age strips away that comfortable illusion and replaces it with something far more valuable: urgency without anxiety. The African who sits in a garden watching a bee move from flower to flower is not wasting time. They are, perhaps for the first time, spending it correctly.
There is also the matter of freedom. The long middle decades of life are, for most people, years of obligation. Careers must be built and maintained. Children must be raised. Houses built and mortgages paid. Reputations managed. The self is parcelled out in dozens of directions at once. The question of who one really is, gets buried beneath the question of what one must do next. Old age, for many, brings a loosening of these obligations, and with it the startling discovery of an interior life that was always there, waiting patiently.
We can now be fully ourselves. The pressures and ambitions of our youth and middle age have given way to something quieter and more authentic. The seventies have empowered us to bury the chains and embrace liberation, with a willingness to say what we mean, to refuse what does not suit us, to stop pretending enjoyment of things we never enjoyed.
Relationships, too, are transformed by age. Friendships are imbued with pure affection, pure interest in the other person. Long marriages that have survived the friction and frustration of the middle years arrive in old age at a tenderness that was unknown earlier — a knowledge of the other person so deep that it approaches something like grace. Grandparenthood offers another kind of love entirely: the delight of children without the crushing weight of primary responsibility, the chance to be playful and generous in ways that exhausted young parents rarely can.
Then there is the accumulation of experience itself, which is among the most undervalued gifts of a long life. To have lived through historical change, through personal grief and joy, through failure and unlikely recovery, is to possess a kind of knowledge that cannot be taught or hurried. We have seen things resolve that once seemed impossible. We have learned, through long evidence, that most catastrophes are survivable and most wounds eventually heal. This is not naivety or denial — it is earned wisdom, and it produces a quality of calmness and composure that younger people, however brilliant, simply cannot manufacture.
We celebrate the young for their energy and elasticity, though the young cannot wait to have us out of the way so that they govern the country and the world better than we have. Others want us gone so that they can inherit what we have collectively accumulated through hard work, sacrifice, and good old patient investment. The old tradition of respect and reverence for the elders and the elderly is a fading memory, replaced by a quiet, embarrassed pity. Yet we do not need anybody’s pity, even as we struggle to find our reading glasses, consume our life-sustaining pills, walk at a gentler pace, and forget names of classmates and relatives.
Memory, that great companion of old age, brings its own pleasures. The past does not diminish with time; it deepens. A piece of music heard in youth can return, decades later, not merely as a sound but as a whole world — a room, a season, a person's face. “Imagine” by John Lennon induces joyful tears more than half a century after I first heard it. “Many Rivers to Cross” by Jimmy Cliff is a soundtrack in my mind as I recall, with great longing, the many friends that left mother Earth many years ago.
The long life becomes a country with a rich and detailed geography, and the old person moves through it with the authority of someone who has mapped every road. There is joy in this, a form of inner richness that no external circumstance can easily take away. I feel it with special intensity every time I am in Uganda.
None of this is to pretend that old age is without suffering. Whereas all my body parts, except the eyes, are in excellent functioning form, I know that they will become unreliable. Bit by bit. More friends will die. The world will continue to baffle and trouble. These losses and challenges are real, and to minimize them would be dishonest. But loss and joy are not opposites — they are, in fact, deeply intertwined. It is because we love that loss hurts, and it is often the experience of loss that teaches us, finally and fully, how to love.
The golden afternoon light does not last forever. But while it lasts, it is extraordinary — warmer and truer and more forgiving than any light that came before it. Old age, embraced rather than resisted, offers exactly that: a late warmth, a long clarity, and the deep satisfaction of a life that has been, despite everything, fully lived. The Lord is good. All the time.
©Muniini K. Mulera