Now that I’m deep in my 80s, I’d like to stay here forever, and I’ll certainly try. I enjoy being here. The decade is the October of aging. And October is a lovely month, don’t you think? […]
Things I can’t do any more: Run. Play basketball or tennis. I also can’t worry myself to death, or I choose not to. Before my October years, there seemed to be nothing, however inconsequential, that I could not stew over until it grew as big and menacing as Godzilla at night. Nothing was too trivial for my troubled mind. No small rejection. Not the slightest slight. I once came up with a rule, “Nobody’s thinking about you — they are thinking about themselves, just like you.” I wrote it but I didn’t believe it. Now I hardly care if anyone is thinking about me, or not. Hardly.
My love of nature has grown much deeper in this decade. I had always felt an affinity with the natural world, but it was general, casual and fleeting. These days you can catch me at the window, gazing in wonder at the East River (estuary technically), and mesmerized by the shapes in the blue-gray water, the welts and eddies, the tides, the invading armies of the waves, the clouds reflected, looking like submerged sheep.
It’s not what you do in this decade that’s so unusual, or what you think, but rather how you think. The air changes in October. I find myself thinking far less selfishly, giving much more of myself to my friends and family. […]
The general improvement is this: In my younger years I was always looking ahead for whatever would befall me. Now I look at what I have. And as those in their 80s appreciate, what one has is considerable. I don’t fear winter, and I don’t regret spring. […]
— Roger Rosenblatt, excerpts “I Don’t Fear Winter, and I Don’t Regret Spring” (NY Times, October 26, 2025)
