One way of thinking about being a conscious, cognitively capable being is through the lens of agency.
In this context, “agency” refers to our capacity to take action and implement change, usually to our environments, and usually purposefully—but also internally and sometimes with little forethought.
Whether intentional or accidental, and whether impactful on a personal scale or something beyond that (societal, civilizational, planetary), having agency means we can do stuff that affects other things, and the scope, scale, and nature of our agency is informed by all sorts of variables, ranging from our physical faculties and cerebral wherewithal, to the collection of inputs and influences we’re born with and accumulate over the course of our lives.
By acting upon the world around me—stomping on a plant or making a stranger smile, for instance—I change things, for better, worse, or neutral. And those changes can ripple outward, causing even more rippling, compounding changes (that plant dying, maybe, which impacts the whole of its ecosystem, or that now-smiling person going on to make a flurry of other people smile).
Most of us have an intuitive sense of our personal capacity to act with agency, that capacity bolstered by our various strengths, support systems, and advantages, and tempered by our relative weaknesses, societal limitations, and environmental impediments.
One of the most jarring aspects of aging, to me, has been the forced reassessment of my agentic scope and potency.
Some of my competencies have been amplified (in a few cases greatly) by my slow but persistent accumulation of relationships, resources, knowledge, and know-how.
Others have been diminished, though, partly due to the biological abatements of simply existing, but also because of the social connotations of growing older.
At some point we’re no longer perceived to be youthful and vibrant, with our whole lives (and infinite potential) ahead of us, and we’re thus recategorized by other people and the systems that structure the modern world (which in turn tends to force an internal re-categorization, as well).
Some of these changes are barely noticeable, others are fundamental and life-rewiring, but all of them can change the way we think about things and tweak how we interface with the world.
None of which is particularly revelatory: things change as we get older. This is something we all know, even if we don’t tend to fixate on it for maybe obvious reasons.
But I’ve found that shifting my focus from, “things are changing,” to, “the relationship between me and the things over which I have influence are changing,” has allowed me to notice the more vital (to me) aspects of these shifts, rather than fixating on the (arguably) more superficial aspects of the same.
This has in turn helped me recognize something that I think will be increasingly important as I (hopefully) continue to accrue more years of life: I’m still me, even if my proficiencies change.
I can choose to pull back from life and become despondent as my powers wax and wane, or I can act to counter, adjust, rebalance, and make new investments to remain of the world, rather than dejectedly retreating from it.
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(My new book is about growing older with purpose and intent, if you’d like to read more about this sort of thing.)