How could I resist a headline like this: "With Age Comes Resilience."  The story focuses on an elderly woman battered by the hurricane but who bounces back quickly and happily.   The story then widens to consider how older folks are generally able to absorb life’s crises better than younger adults.  A psychiatrist is quoted:

"Study after study has shown that for older people, negative emotions
have less of an effect than with young people — and for the elderly
those effects dissipate faster…"

    As with any social science research average experience does not capture all experience: we can all think of older people unable to adjust to sudden change. Good health seems to be an important factor here: older people without big medical problems are the ones who do well.   But that general conclusion confirms Confucius’s view that we get better as we get older.  One of his more famous sayings:

The Master said: "At fifteen I devoted myself to learning, and at thirty stood firm.  At forty I  had no doubts, and at fifty understood the Mandate of Heaven.  At sixty I listened in effortless accord.  And at seventy I followed the mind’s passing fancies without overstepping any bound. (2.4)

   I think about this idea excerpt a lot.  When friends turn forty or fifty I copy it and give it to them.  But it rarely helps ease the foreboding, encouraged by so much of American culture, that attaches to aging.  Yes, as we get older we get closer to death and that can be scary.  But I have to say that I am much more at ease with myself now (I am 48) than I was when I was in my twenties. 

     There was so much uncertainty then about career and location and social life.  I feel much more comfortable with myself now, with what I can do and what I cannot do; turning fifty is not something I dread.  Perhaps this  is a function of the relatively secure economic position and good health I find myself in now, but I think it is also simply a matter of experience.  The more times you go around the cycle of years, the fewer things there are that scare you, even the inevitability of the end.  And for older residents of New Orleans, on average, even a hurricane cannot keep them from following "the minds passing fancies without overstepping any bounds."