Aging & Wisdom Quote by Al Purdy

Aging is supposed to bring confidence; Purdy makes it bring social vertigo. "At a certain age you're always uncertain" takes the cliché of getting older and flips it into a permanent state, as if the later years don’t resolve insecurity but industrialize it. The line lands because it’s conversational, almost tossed off, yet it smuggles in a bleak recognition: the older self becomes a new, untested character in other people’s eyes, and you can’t control the casting.

Purdy’s "take you" is doing heavy work. It’s not just "understand" but "receive", like a performance, a joke, a body entering a room. The subtext is that age changes the terms of social contact. You’re no longer evaluated primarily on promise; you’re assessed as history. People "take" you as fragile, irrelevant, wise, cranky, heroic, pathetic - stereotypes that arrive before you speak. The uncertainty isn’t vanity; it’s the sudden awareness that your identity is increasingly mediated by other people’s assumptions about time, usefulness, and decline.

Context matters: Purdy, a poet often associated with plainspoken candor and Canadian everydayness, isn’t polishing an epigram for the ages so much as recording a lived embarrassment. The line’s power is its modesty. It refuses the triumphalist narrative of aging, and it refuses self-pity too. It just names the quiet social instability of later life: you don’t stop being you, but you’re never fully sure which version of you the world is prepared to accept.