When I packed up my apartment in New York City six months ago for my move to Portland, Maine, it had been 23 years since I had last done that. In 1983, I hadn’t noticed any particular effort involved, but by 2006, I was exhausted at the end of each packing day.

It was harder this time to hoist a box of books across the room or onto a stack of other boxes. They were the same books, same size boxes, but I don’t remember them being so heavy in the past and this year, after hauling several of them around, there was ache in my back and arms I’d not felt before. I was 42 in 1983; this year I am 65. It makes a difference.

There are some people, often elders themselves, who insist our bodies do not decline with age. It’s all in your head, they say. It is the negative messages and expectations you give yourself that bring on your decline. If you develop a better attitude, you will remain as strong and supple as you ever were.

While there is no doubt that mind has much to do with health in many ways we don’t understand yet, anyone who believes bodies don’t slow down, muscles don’t lose strength and elasticity, and organs don’t function as efficiently in old age is fooling him- or herself. In fact, the rate of decline is precisely predictable. As geriatrician William H. Thomas explains in What Are Old People For? (the best book on aging ever written for a popular audience):

“Measurements of normal human physiological functions show a steady decline of between 0.5 and 1.3 percent per year every year after age thirty. Yes, you read that right. The thirty-three-year-old Wall Street bond trader ages at the same rate as the ninety-two-year-old retired cop...”

“Old age may be a time of loss and decline, but it is not only that. There is a countervailing and equally significant increase in the power of adaptation.”

Without putting much notice to it, I began adapting several years ago. When doing all the housecleaning on Saturdays, as I had done for decades, wore me out for any other activity that day, I spread out the cleaning over the week, one room a day. I don’t book social engagements two nights in a row anymore. And I’ve taught myself now that a project like unpacking and shelving 50 cartons of books doesn’t need to be done all in one day.

These are, so far, minor adaptations. According to Dr. Thomas, there will be a need for more complex changes in my activities in coming years and his description of an elder’s adaptive way of walking is almost lyrical:

“Old people alter their gait in specific ways that account for very real changes in strength, endurance, coordination, sensation, and reaction time. The ‘shuffling gait’ keeps the feet close to the ground and maximizes input from position sensors. The stance is widened to improve balance. The number of steps taken per minute is decreased to accommodate changes in endurance and to allow for increased reaction time.

“Keeping a human body upright and moving is a spectacular feat of coordination and reaction under any circumstances. Doing so in the ninth decade of life magnifies rather than diminishes the beauty of this achievement.”

One reason aging is abhorred and denied is that adulthood is held up as the unquestioned gold standard of life. But what if there are compensations to growing old? What if we looked at aging as a ripening instead of decline? And most of all, what if, instead of urging elders to maintain a facsimile of youth, we returned to them their traditional roles: Dr. Thomas again:

“Menopause, which might seem to be a purely biological phenomenon, also eases the transition to elderhood by ensuring that older women cease ovulating. No longer in direct competition with the younger women around them, they are able to inhabit distinct new social roles.

“Likewise, age whittles male strength and aggressiveness and, with time, ensures that the old cannot overthrow the young by force. Secure in this knowledge, adults in traditional societies have long allowed those who reach advanced age to opt out of the relentless maneuvering for prestige and power…

“When such persons can no longer fulfill the duties of adulthood, they are allowed to put down those burdens and enter into the old age the culture has prepared for them. Safe within its embrace, the elders are free to transmit the fullness of the people’s culture to a new generation.”

How many ways, do you think, we could improve modern life socially and economically if we gave elders such a role in the culture? But to do that we must stop denying the reality of physical decline and reinterpret it as preparation for the role of elder.

* Contributing Editor Ronni Bennett also blogs at Time Goes By, What it’s really like to get older.