Years ago when I was on a teaching sabbatical I was walking through Manhattan to a class. I remember crossing a street near The New School. It was around noon. I was wearing a gorgeous sweater I made under a red coat. It was early Winter, somewhat cloudy and I remember the chill. It was about twenty-eight years ago. I was pregnant with my son.

A young man approached me and said something like, “you look happy, would you like to get a cup of coffee?”

He likely approached me because I was smiling. I often smile to myself when I am in the street. I decided that even if I wasn’t deliriously happy, there had to be something to smile about. Sometimes people look at me strangely, but more than often: People smile back.

Maybe it is just something innate, this smiling thing. But as I get older, I seem to get it.

In today’s The New York Times there is an op-ed article called “Why Elders Smile.” So listen, y’all, if you aren’t feeling that grin, maybe you’re just a bit too young.

” When researchers ask people to assess their own well-being, people in their 20s rate themselves highly. Then there’s a decline as people get sadder in middle age, bottoming out around age 50. But then happiness levels shoot up, so that old people are happier than young people. The people who rate themselves most highly are those ages 82 to 85.”

If you are middle aged and kvetching around and feeling miserable it might just be that you are a mere tot on the happiness scale and have a ways to go. It’s all about shedding those crappy quotidian woes and getting back to the basics: you are still here and you survived. And just you wait ’til you’re eighty!

As I age, and according to this article, I have sometime to go before I reach that stage of euphoria–or is it dementia–I find myself lightening up. “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” “Death.” “Now is THAT so bad?” Alright, I am rationalizing.

I have viewed several elderly folks from a much younger vantage point over the years and noted that indeed, as these curmudgeons advance in age something happens; they seem to lighten up. It’s a veritable transformation! They no longer have to work at their grinding jobs, come home and cook for a family, fall asleep in front of the television and turn around and find it is time to get up again for work. They are in essence, FREE!

“Older people are more relaxed, on average. They are spared some of the burden of thinking about the future. As a result, they get more pleasure out of present, ordinary activities.”

“ ‘The ability to grow lighter as we go is a form of wisdom that entails learning how not to sweat the small stuff,” Holland and Greenstein write, “learning how not to be too invested in particular outcomes.’ ”

So, there is a change to look forward to. It might come sooner than later for some folks and later than sooner for others, but for now, I’ll continue my tradition of smiling in the street.

Maybe it will be contagious.

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