Honestly I did lie several times about my age when I was in my early 20s, around my last 2 years of college. I thought I was supposed to have a long list of impressive extracurricular activities and know what kind of career I should pursue at the time. I thought in my final year of college, I was supposed to be pretty sure of myself and make all the right decisions. It didn't happen that way. Maybe unconsciously, I did think that lying about my age could actually stop me from getting older. I was afraid to let people know my "real" age because at 22, I was completely lost. The only few things I knew for sure at the time were:
1, I love my best friend.
2, My family might not understand me inside out but they love me nonetheless and they will always be there when I reach my rock bottom.
3, I want to travel, experience and see the world with my naked eyes.
And to be completely honest, those are still the few things I know for sure now, when I'm 26 (already have lots of grey hair - I guess it's a genetic thing). I do know one more thing though. That I'm not a static being, I'm becoming and I actually like the person I'm becoming. And I'm not supposed to know everything. But somehow, deep down, I know I still have this fear of old age, even more than death. I'm afraid of waking up one day, looking at the mirror and only see a stranger with lots of wrinkles staring back at me. One of the reasons I keep holding on to my Europe journey is that I feel young living in this old continent, even 30-somethings seems pretty young in Europe. It doesn't seem that way in Vietnam. I feel old thinking about moving back to Hanoi. Does that even make sense? Can I become a different being while I still remain myself?
The truth is, we're all aging all the time. I am aging right now as I write these words. Old age is a continuum and everyone is on it. Yet somehow I feel like we don't really think about growing old and we don't like to talk about it. We focus more on how to stay young. It seems like we don't have a culture of aging and I don't want to become someone who desperately clings to youth culture when the time of my old age comes. I figure at some point in my life, I'll probably not want to keep raging, raging against the dying of the light of my youth. I want to learn how to make peace with old age and maybe I'll be able to age gracefully. And then, I stumble across Eric Weiner's "How to grow old like Beauvoir".
From the movie UP (2009)
Eric Weiner, like most of us, struggled with old age. He wanted to write about how to grow old gracefully but did not how so instead, he focused on how to accept being old. He wrote and I quote “As we age, the balance shifts, from control to acceptance. Acceptance is not the same as resignation. Resignation is resistance masquerading as acceptance. Pretending to accept something is like pretending to love someone. [...] Learning acceptance—not resignation but genuine openhearted acceptance—is itself a project, perhaps the most important one of all."
And here are my summary on the subject from his words.
1. Own your past
Just like Steve Jobs once said "you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward", and Weiner wrote “There is another kind of recollection, one more creative. I call it the Great Summing Up. The old, standing near life’s summit, can see further. They discern hidden contours of their past, narrative arcs that eluded their younger selves, and see their life whole. They also begin to notice benign coincidences—“the meeting-point of many converging lines,” says Beauvoir.”
2. Stop caring what others think
“Something curious and wonderful happens when we age. We no longer care what others think of us. More precisely, we realize they weren’t thinking of us in the first place. [...] This sort of de-caring helps explain why old age can be intellectually liberating. “By a curious paradox,” says Beauvoir, “it is often at the very moment that the aged man, having become old, has doubts about the value of his entire work that he carries it to its highest point of perfection.” This was true for Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Verdi, Monet, and others. No longer seeking praise, they were free to doubt their own work and thus, as Beauvoir puts it, “go beyond themselves.”

3. Stay curious
“The problem with the elderly is not that they act too young but that they don’t act young enough. They act like twenty-seven-year-olds when they should be emulating seven-year-olds. Old age is a time to reconnect with curiosity or, better yet, wonder. What is a philosopher, after all, but a seven-year-old with a bigger brain?”
4. Pursue projects
“Old age, Beauvoir believed, should rouse passion, not passivity, and that passion must be directed outward. Have projects, not pastimes. Projects provide meaning. As she says: “There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence meaning—devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work.”
5. Be a poet of habit
“A habit is not a rut. Think of it as a container—or, if you will, a bag. A bag enables us to hold the pieces of our lives. This makes a bag useful. We get into trouble when we confuse a bag with its contents, habits with the meaning they contain.
In her sixties, Beauvoir embraced the poetry of habit. She did what she always did: she wrote, she read, she listened to music. But she did not read the same books, listen to the same music. “In their rhythm, in the way I fill them, and in the people I see, my days resemble one another. Yet my life does not seem at all stagnant to me.” Beauvoir owned her habits.”
6. Do nothing
“There is a time for activity, and there is a time for idleness. Kairos." Everything has its time.
7. Embrace the Absurdity
“Interesting, but what does this have to do with growing old? Isn’t life just as absurd when we’re twenty-five years old as when we’re seventy-five? Yes, but at seventy-five we’re more aware of it. We’ve amassed enough accolades, saved enough money, to know how meaningless they are. Sisyphus at twenty-five still holds out hope that maybe, maybe this time the rock won’t roll down the hill. Sisyphus at seventy-five has no such illusions. Sisyphus’s task, and ours, too, is to accept “the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it,” says Camus. We must imagine Sisyphus happy. But how? [...] By throwing himself into his task, despite its futility, because of its futility. “His fate belongs to him,” says Camus. “His rock is his thing.… Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart.”
8. Disengage constructively
“As we age, we cling more tightly to life. We must learn how to let go. We need to practice what I call Constructive Disengagement. It is not apathy, a turning away from the world. It is a gentle stepping back. You are still a passenger on the train, still care about your fellow passengers, but are less unnerved by each bump and shimmy, less concerned about reaching your destination.”
9. Pass the torch
“What the French critic Paul Valéry said of poems applies equally to our lives. They’re never finished, only abandoned. Unfinished business isn’t a sign of failure. The opposite. The person who departs this world with no unfinished business hasn’t lived fully. As our future shrinks, other futures grow. Our unfinished business will be finished by others. This thought, perhaps more than any other, takes the sting out of old age."

10. Make friends
“The latest research confirms what Epicurus observed two millennia ago: friendship is one of our greatest sources of happiness. The quality of our relationships is the most important variable in the happiness equation.”
And for now, this note will be kept here for me and I will probably read it again at least a few more times to learn how to let go of my fear of old age.