Tag Archives: aging well

The Numbers

challenges-make-life-interesting

Age is just a number. However, some numbers are much more intimidating than others, and turning 50 is one. It happened to me a few years ago and to a friend of mine just this week.

To me, at this milestone, I have conflicting feelings. I assume all people are the same. I have fears and insecurities about life, just as I did when I turned 40, 30, 20, or even 10. Hopefully, I have developed tools and learned lessons that have helped me positively navigate the aging process—embracing the experience. Reflection is one of the tools that I use to understand the value of an incident. To take that lesson into living my life every day.

Challenges

Life is designed to bring a series of challenges we all have to navigate. Each challenge presents us with choices. Choices challenges and choicesthat define our lives. A problem may overwhelm us, crush us, and destroy our confidence if we allow them to. However, there is always another choice. To seek the better version of ourselves and choose to rise and live our lives in a way that reflects the best version of the living. These choices we have been making from the beginning and will continue to build until we reach the inevitable end. The challenges we face and the choices we make about them will dictate the experience of our lives.

People tend to keep their most painful lessons to themselves. This secrecy is to keep up a perception that we are in control. Handling all events efficiently and with style. In Reality, all people are just making it up as they go. It is self-delusion, and a person believes they understand it all. There is always more, no matter how much one learns, observes, and understands. The vast undiscovered iceberg of knowledge is still floating toward us undiscovered. There is always something else to learn and more growth to achieve.

Growth

To be your best is the ultimate goal of life. Not to accumulate a large cache of material possessions but to become the best version of yourself. That is where the challenges come in. Without change, things become stagnant.

growth is constant
The opportunity for growth is constant.

Often we become so comfortable in life, just the prospect of change is tremendously scary.

Reflection and growth can only come when challenged and forced to take in new information and experiences. Life is a gift, and you need to grow to get the most out of it. The alternative is to shrink a little each day until your gs are challenging to remember and your passion has faded.

Fortunately, it is never too late to recapture the passion for your dream. Your creativity is still there, dormant underneath all of the routine, predictability, and conforming expectation behavior. It is just waiting for you to remember. The sad thing is that many will not remember, but you decide your destiny.

You choose your path and direction. You allow life’s experience to push you. Will you fight or flee? Will you stand proud or hide in shame? Only you can decide.

I have turned 50  and feel I am only at the beginning of things. I am ready for the growth and the challenge of life. I look forward to it, and I embrace it. Regardless of your age, I wonder how you face life.

“There must be a goal at every stage of life! There must be a goal!” – Maggie Kuhn

“Aging is not ‘lost youth’ but a new stage of opportunity and strength” – Betty Friedan

“This is a youth-oriented society, and the joke is on them because youth is a disease from which we all recover.” – Dorothy Fuldheim

“Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.” – Franz Kafka 

“You can only perceive real beauty in a person as they grow older.” -Anouk Aimee

 

How Old are You?

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?

by Jonathan Hilton     

Why is it that we get all hung up on labeling our journey through life by the number of years we have simply existed.  I have to admit, when you are young, it is a great day to be the center of attention and get some great gifts, but that changes as you age.  From being kind of a neat day to becoming another discriminating notch on the journey of life.

Since I like life, publicly admitting I am one year closer to the end of this existance, is not a fun exercise.  Yet even if we don’t acknowledge it in public and hide from it, we still age.  If I had suddenly lost count somewhere around 22 and had no idea what my label should be, what would I guess my age to be?  That is the reason for the disection of the aging process.

How old are You?
I am proudly 16850 days old

You Look Marvelous!

As you look at the physical self, you have to be careful because there are two ways to look at yourself. One is through what the mirror tells you, and that can be depressing if you rely on that.

Gray hair, or no hair can be a clue as to the aging process, but as I often say, (the more gray I get, the more I say it), just because there is snow on the rooftop doesn’t mean the fire isn’t burning inside.

Many people including myself, have invested so much into relating to our physical beings that we sometimes don’t think we look quite like we do.  In fact, we have an image of ourselves that is quite a bit dated.

If you want a reality check sometime, take a moment, and really look into the mirror. Don’t thing about what you would change, just observe how you look.  You do not look the same as you did even last year much less ten or fifteen years ago.

Accept the person that you see, enjoy what you do have and send a little love your own way.  You have earned it.

That leads to the next part of this equation for me, to look at how you feel. I personally do not feel a bit different from I did 25 years ago. I don’t have the same speed, stamina, or resiliency physically, but other than that I feel exactly the same. OK so I am not 21 physically, but I am not in the retirement home, I would put my physical age at 35.

I Can’t Be As Old As I Think

Mentally I am glad that I am not back in my earlier development, because the quality of thoughts that I entertained were neither deep nor were they

how old are you?
Not me yet.

all that positive. Fortunately I was not an overly negative person, but I was also clueless in my thoughts.

I was young and somewhat self-centered, so I am glad that those days are over. I would like to think that I have found a nice balance at this point in life around not only the quality of thoughts I entertain but in my acceptance and care for the rest of the world. My mental age would be 55 at least.

It is one of the trade offs you get with an older body, an older, wiser mentality. There is more understanding and a broader view of things.  I can only hope the depth of thought and acceptance of others continues to grow, as the number label of age rises.

Spiritual Age

Spiritually there is no way to calculate this age because the older you get the more you understand that there is very little that we understand about life and God and spirituality.  There was a time I thought I knew

spiritual age
I meant Ten

what life was all about, and how we all fit in, I was sure of that.

Today as I look at those thoughts, I can see them only as steps up a winding staircase that keeps the answer hidden from me.

The more I climb the closer I feel I am to understanding, but I still can’t see what is at the top of the stairs.  So I would give myself a spiritual age of 10, knowing nothing. However I am hopeful that by climbing the stairs, my intellect will increase with the experience. One can only hope.

If you average those out and divide by three you come up with an age of 33.33333333 and I guess that works for me.  It is a lot younger than I actually am so it makes me feel good about this post.

By the way I am exactly 16850 days old today.

Age is just a number

In the end, the time you have been living in your life is just a number and it is up to you to decide for yourself what you think is the appropriate level of activity and amount of thought.  How you treat and accept others will probably stem from this reality. All of us are facing battles each day. With the experience of age, generally comes an understanding of others.

I would encourage us to label our journey in a more relevant way, the number of kind things we do, or the positive impact we have on the world.  You could be 111,000 acts of kindness, or perhaps you have been accepting of others 289,324 times.  Or any other more worthwhile measure than age.

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?

I will get by, I will bet by, I will get by, I will survive.

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