By Dr Rahim Said
Henry Miller once wrote that if you could keep falling in love again and again, forgive easily, and resist growing sour, bitter and cynical, then you had life “half licked.” It is a charming piece of advice — optimistic, generous, and slightly unrealistic, like telling a Malaysian motorist that traffic jams build character.
As I approach 80 at the end of this year, I find myself thinking about Miller’s words with a mixture of admiration and suspicion. Admiration because he understood something profound about ageing. Suspicion because he clearly did not live long enough to experience digital comment sections.
When I was 20, the idea of turning 80 seemed about as plausible as colonising Mars. At that age, one measures life not in decades but in semesters, crushes, and exam timetables. Eighty belonged to another species entirely — a distant tribe of elderly men who wore sandals with socks and spoke in nostalgic riddles about “the good old days.”
Back then, my greatest concern was not bitterness or cynicism but romance — specifically, how to survive it.
Before I was married at 40 to the lady who remains the love of my life — and who has tolerated me faithfully for four decades, which qualifies her for sainthood in any religion — I spent a considerable portion of my youth falling in and out of love across three continents. I was not so much a romantic as a frequent flyer in the airline of emotional turbulence.
There were heartbreaks dramatic enough to qualify for the cinema. Some misunderstandings could have been resolved in five minutes if only WhatsApp had existed. Some relationships ended not with arguments but with geography — one person boarding a plane while the other waved bravely and then collapsed into philosophical despair at the departure gate.
At the time, each romance felt like the centre of the universe. Each loss felt catastrophic. Each new infatuation felt like destiny had personally intervened.
Looking back now, it is clear that what I was actually doing was practising Miller’s theory long before I knew it existed.
I was learning to fall in love repeatedly without dying of embarrassment.
Marriage at 40 changed everything. Not in the dramatic way that novels describe, but in the quieter way that real life operates. Love stopped being a series of emotional earthquakes and became something steady, durable, and reassuring — like a well-built house that does not collapse every time it rains.
Four decades later, I remain deeply in love with the same woman, which is statistically improbable and emotionally comforting. We recently celebrated our anniversary, and I realised something Miller understood perfectly: the most impressive kind of love is not the passionate kind that burns brightly for a season, but the stubborn kind that quietly survives decades of bills, illnesses, arguments over thermostat settings, and disagreements about what constitutes “too many books.”
Yet Miller was right about another danger — cynicism.
If anything threatens to harden the human spirit by 80, it is not romance but reality. A lifetime of watching scandals repeat themselves with minor variations. A parade of leaders who promise transformation and deliver press conferences. Bureaucracies that evolve only in their ability to require additional forms.
After decades of observing public life, writing columns, and commenting on national absurdities, one might reasonably expect me to have turned permanently sour.
And yet, surprisingly, I have not.
Partly because cynicism, when overused, becomes exhausting. It requires constant maintenance, like an old car that rattles loudly but never quite stops running. It also isolates. The truly bitter person eventually finds himself arguing not just with the world but with furniture.
What has saved me, perhaps, is the same habit that shaped my younger years — curiosity. The willingness to observe human behaviour with fascination rather than despair. The ability to laugh at absurdity instead of surrendering to it.
Even now, at an age I once considered impossible, I still find myself amazed by small things — the resilience of friendships, the unpredictable kindness of strangers, the absurd persistence of hope in societies that routinely appear to misplace it.
I also find myself still doing something I never expected to be doing at eighty: writing cynical columns for digital platforms, commenting on a world that moves faster than my knees but not faster than my sarcasm.
In a way, this is the final irony of Miller’s wisdom.
He believed that avoiding bitterness meant remaining emotionally alive. What he did not say — but what experience confirms — is that humour is the most reliable defence against becoming sour.
You can survive heartbreak, political theatre, technological confusion, and even turning eighty if you retain the ability to laugh — especially at yourself.
So yes, Henry Miller was right.
If you can keep loving, keep forgiving, and keep from becoming permanently cynical, you have life half licked.
And if you can still do all that while writing biting columns about society’s endless follies at the age of 80, then perhaps you have done slightly better than half.
You have, against all reasonable expectations, managed to stay gloriously, stubbornly alive.
WE