Older hands carry skills that a quick impression of weakness can overlook.

A quick glance registers slowness and stops there. What it misses is that the hands in question may have done a thing forty thousand times, and that the pace is often precision rather than decline. Skill of that sort lives in judgement, in knowing when something is finished, in feeling a fault before it shows, and none of it announces itself. Impressions formed in a second tend to be about the body rather than the work.

Ask an older person to show you something they are good at rather than tell you about it. Give the demonstration as long as it needs.