The Importance of Aging Gracefully

Stay fit and retain your playful spirit, but refrain from making yourself ridiculous.

Here on Maui, my old friend Doug asked me if I wanted to go tow surfing on a huge north swell that visited the island a few days ago. For readers who aren’t familiar with tow surfing: it’s a technique for getting a surfer onto a very large wave using a jet ski, a tow rope, and a surfboard with foot straps.

In the year 2019, when I was surfing every day on Maui, I might have been in good enough shape to do this, but that was a long time ago, and I’ve been mostly sitting at a desk ever since.

I called my brother, who lives on Maui, and asked him if he recommended it.

“You probably won’t drown, but you will find it stressful and you will probably get hurt,” he replied.

“A man’s got to know his limitations,” as Detective Harry Callahan famously said in Magnum Force. The same principle applies to women.

For a long time I thought the habit of Papua New Guinea tribesmen of wearing so-called “penis gourds” was the weirdest thing I’d ever seen.

However, this morning, after watching a video of Madonna on tour, I believe that she has taken weirdness to the next level—to eleven on the amplifier setting. As I watched the video, I could hear the posh accent of British anthropologist, Andrew Strathern, narrating with something like the following:

While the Egyptian Pharaohs aspired to achieve immortality with mummification and pyramid sarcophagi, American celebrities in 2025 have struck on a different strategy—that is, by simply pretending it is the year 1990, when they were 35 years younger.

As we embark on this New Year, we should resolve to stay fit and mobile, to retain a playful and adventurous spirit, a sense of wonder, and spontaneity. However, we should also resolve to refrain from making ourselves ridiculous.