This is 54: Author Elizabeth Gilbert Responds to The Oldster Magazine Questionnaire

I felt untethered from my age and femininity and thus swimming in great new swaths of freedom and time. One might shift again and again like this, through intimacies, and not outpace oldness exactly, but match its weirdness, its flagrant specificity, with one’s own.

The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fuelled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible – the quest to become the optimised, infinitely capable, e

‘So what?’ She cut him off. She was not going to allow him to undermine everything. ‘I’ve had a wonderful life, thank you. I have a very dear friend who looks after me. I have my beloved dogs. And I have a windmill! I wake up on the South Downs every morning. You might think that’s a small life, compared to yours, but I don’t think it is – I’ve don

If all the trappings were stripped away, leaving only my true self, who would I be? Am I living fully as that self in every moment? And when it ends, will my story have meaning?”

“I think people get old when they stop thinking about the future,” Ric told me. “If you want to find someone’s true age, listen to them. If they talk about the past and they talk about all the things that happened that they did, they’ve gotten old. If they think about their dreams, their aspirations, what they’re still looking forward to—they’re yo