Aging Without Disconnecting: What Those Who Still Have Something to Do, Someone to Love, and Somewhere to Go Teach Us
Sometimes we think that aging well is, deep down, a matter of doing everything correctly. Eating better, moving more, sleeping well, controlling stress, getting ahead of problems. As if living many years were a kind of exam that you have to pass.
But it is enough to sit down and listen to those who have already made it far to understand that it is not always like that.
In recent years I have interviewed many older people. Some have passed ninety, others one hundred. I have spoken with centenarians who lived through wars and postwar periods, with women who started over in their seventies, with men who continue working the land past one hundred, with people who have lost a great deal and even so are still there, in a way that cannot always be explained.
And if there is something that repeats itself in all those conversations, it is this: they do not live thinking about how to do everything better. They live like people who still have life ahead of them.
The case of Simón Saura, former city councilman and now writer. At 93 years old he was preparing a trip to Ethiopia with a daughter and a grandson. He was not looking for comfort or easy tourism. He wanted to live alongside others, to mingle, to understand how other people live. “For me, traveling is walking, talking, and getting to know the people of the place. I do not like hotels; I prefer people’s homes that will take me in,” he told me. In those words there was something more than a preference: there was a way of being in the world. The certainty, at 93 years old, that there are still things to discover—and he, the desire to go looking for them.
I think of Susana Gross, an American writer, 78 years old, settled in a town in Alt Empordà. When her body asked her to move more and stop spending so many hours sitting down, she did not give up writing. She transformed it. Now she goes out walking with a recorder and writes while she walks, at dawn and at dusk. She does not fight against the limit: she incorporates it.
In Galicia, I met Eustaquio Pérez, a 104-year-old shepherd who still gets up at dawn to care for his sheep. And Esperanza Cortiñas, who, at 109 years old, after a hip fracture, spoke about her desire to dance again. And José Salgado, who left us a short while ago and who worked his garden until he was 97 years old and also reached one hundred.
I also remember Pere Quintana, 107 years old, defending curiosity as a way of not aging on the inside. Pepita Bernat, who at 106 years old still dances every Sunday at La Paloma and lays claim to love discovered late—she truly fell in love after seventy. Pilar Pallás, flying in a paratrike at 84 and saying that if someone proposed going to the moon to her, she would accept. And Montserrat Torrent, who at 100 years old still plays the organ at least two hours every morning. Not out of inertia, but because it is part of who she is. “When I play the organ, I grow younger.”
None of them talks about longevity as a theory. They live it as routine, as character, as a way of being. And in all of them there is something that does not usually appear in manuals: they have not retired inwardly.
Which does not mean that they have not had difficulties. Quite the opposite. There is illness, loss, widowhood, tiredness, physical limitations. Hard stories. But what is striking is not the absence of pain. It is the absence of surrender.
They still have something to do, someone to talk to, a place to go, a small expectation. They do not live only remembering what was, nor waiting for what will no longer come. They keep doing, loving, going.
In a time when we talk so much about habits, prevention, metrics, and control, listening to those who have lived a long time introduces a contradiction: there is no single formula.
Some have been disciplined; others, not so much. Some have taken care of their diet; others have lived with more intuition. Some have exercised; others have simply worked, walked, danced, cultivated, have continued being curious.
But there is something that does appear, again and again: connection. Connection to life in its most concrete forms. To a task, a routine, a passion, a community, a conversation, a gesture repeated every day.
Perhaps that is why real longevity—the kind that can be touched and heard in concrete biographies—looks more like a way of remaining connected, of continuing to belong, of not completely abandoning the conversation with life.
Because aging is not only losing. It is also remaining. Remaining in the world, in others, in what can still happen. And perhaps there lies the most important lesson left by those who have lived a long time: not so much how to lengthen life, but how not to step out of it before time.
In a society obsessed with living longer, perhaps the question should be another one: are we still inside the life we are living?
Because making it far is not only a matter of time. It is not retiring before everything ends.
