The other day, I heard Carly Simon singing beautifully the 1938 song by Hoagy Carmichael called “I Get Along Without You Very Well”, and it got me thinking.

Most people hear it as a lament – the brave face we wear after heartbreak, the lie we tell ourselves when someone leaves. But I hear something entirely different. I hear triumph and good fortune in the change.

When a relationship ends, when a job disappears, when someone we thought essential walks away, we face a choice. We can collapse into the narrative of loss, or we can experience that lightning bolt to the heart and mind: the sudden, electric realization that we are whole without them.

This isn’t about pretending the loss doesn’t matter. It’s not toxic positivity or convenient amnesia about what we shared. It’s something far more profound – discovering that our completeness was never dependent on their presence in the first place.

“I get along without you very well.” Not as denial. As truth.

For those of us in our vintage years, these moments arrive with particular frequency. A decades-long career ends. A marriage dissolves. A friendship fades. Someone dies. Society expects us to diminish with each loss, to become smaller, more dependent, less capable. But that’s not what actually happens when we’re paying attention.

What happens instead is that lightning bolt of recognition and relief: I’m still standing. I’m still capable. I’m still me. Perhaps even more authentically me than before, because I’m no longer performing for their approval, falsely counting on them, or shaping myself around their expectations.

Every ending reveals what remains. And what remains, if we’re honest and awake, is our own resilience, our own agency, our own capacity to create meaning and connection. We discover we’ve become more capable of independence through all those decades of experience, not less.

This is what I mean by sageing versus ageing.

Aging is the story of accumulated losses, of becoming less. Saging is recognizing that each ending also brings clarity – about who we actually are, what we’re actually capable of, what genuinely matters versus what we thought mattered.

When someone leaves and we discover we can genuinely get along without them very well, it’s not cold or dismissive. It’s that moment of reconnecting with our own wholeness. We stop performing. We stop accommodating. We stop shrinking ourselves to fit someone else’s vision or commands of who we should be.

We become one way – authentically ourselves across all contexts – because there’s no one left to perform for except the person in the mirror.

So yes, Carmichael’s song can be heard as melancholy. But listen again, especially if you’re in your later decades. Listen for the triumph underneath. Listen for that lightning bolt moment when you realize: I am wise. I am whole. I am valuable.  I get along without you very well.

Not because I’m pretending. Because I’ve discovered it’s true.

Thanks – Michael (he, him)

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