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quotes on getting older

Posted on June 7, 2023August 21, 2024 by Dr. Toni

Growing older is one of the most pervasive preoccupations of humankind. The passing of time is, after all, an inescapable part of the human condition. And aging, like love, is one of the most common themes in literature, be it the calm of poet Robert Brownings’ “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be,” or poet Dylan Thomas’ raging against the dying of the light.

Being the paradoxical creatures we are, people generally want to live a long life, but at the same time, we lament getting older. We long for our days of youth and say “Youth is wasted on the young,” as the old adage goes. But while we can’t fight the inevitable aging of our bodies, we can shift our perspectives on what it means to grow older.

To some extent, aging is a state of mind. Instead of mourning the loss of youth, we can celebrate every extra year and be grateful for getting older. Many great minds and famous figures have said as much, and the following quotes might just change the way you think about getting older.

Nothing is inherently and invincibly young except spirit. And spirit can enter a human being perhaps better in the quiet of old age and dwell there more undisturbed than in the turmoil of adventure.
–

Philosopher and writer George Santayana

The older I get, the greater power I seem to have to help the world; I am like a snowball — the further I am rolled the more I gain.–

Susan B. Anthony

A human being would certainly not grow to be 70 or 80 years old if this longevity had no meaning for the species to which he belongs. The afternoon of human life must also have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage to life’s morning.–

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung

Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young.–

Henry Ford

Nobody grows old merely by living a number of years. We grow old by deserting our ideals. Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul.–

Minister and columnist Frank Crane

I believe the second half of one’s life is meant to be better than the first half. The first half is finding out how you do it. And the second half is enjoying it.–

Activist and writer Frances Lear

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.– Eleanor Roosevelt

The complete life, the perfect pattern, includes old age as well as youth and maturity. The beauty of the morning and the radiance of noon are good, but it would be a very silly person who drew the curtains and turned on the light in order to shut out the tranquillity of the evening. Old age has its pleasures, which, though different, are not less than the pleasures of youth.–

English writer W. Somerset Maugham

Odder still how possessed I am with the feeling that now, aged 50, I’m just poised to shoot forth quite free straight and undeflected my bolts whatever they are… These are the soul’s changes. I don’t believe in aging. I believe in forever altering one’s aspect to the sun. Hence my optimism.–

Virginia Woolf

The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve been.–

Author Madeleine L’Engle

There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.–

Sophia Loren

If you are pining for youth I think it produces a stereotypical old man because you only live in memory, you live in a place that doesn’t exist. I think aging is an extraordinary process whereby you become the person that you always should have been.–

David Bowie

Since our society equates happiness with youth, we often assume that sorrow, quiet desperation, and hopelessness go hand in hand with getting older. They don’t. Emotional pain or numbness are symptoms of living the wrong life, not a long life.–

Author and speaker Martha Beck

When you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you. I know people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them. If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.–

Warren Buffett

Today, I am 64 years old. I still look good. I appreciate and enjoy my age… A lot of people resist transition and therefore never allow themselves to enjoy who they are. Embrace the change, no matter what it is; once you do, you can learn about the new world you’re in and take advantage of it. You still bring to bear all your prior experience, but you’re riding on another level. It’s completely liberating.–

Poet and activist Nikki Giovanni

Photo credit: v2osk/ Unsplash

About the Author

Tony Dunnell

Tony is an English writer of non-fiction and fiction living on the edge of the Amazon jungle.

Ripening with Age- Richard Rohr

Posted on September 24, 2022 by Dr. Toni

September 18–September 23, 2022

Sunday
Old age, as such, is almost a complete changing of gears and engines from the first half of our lives, and does not happen without many slow realizations, inner calmings, lots of inner resistance and denials, and eventual surrenders. All of them by God’s grace work with our ever-deepening sense of what we really desire and who we really are. —Richard Rohr
Monday
What looks like falling can largely be experienced as falling upward and onward, into a broader and deeper world, where the soul finds its fullness, is finally connected to the whole, and lives inside the Big Picture. —Richard Rohr
Tuesday
Now, this period, this aging process, is the last time we’re given to be more than all the small things we have allowed ourselves to be over the years. But first, we must face what the smallness is, and rejoice in the time we have left to turn sweet instead of more sour than ever. —Joan Chittister
Wednesday
There is no more noble way to spend these years than to become an elder, to bear witness to the world as placeholders for peace, love, wisdom, and fearlessness. —Kathleen Dowling Singh
Thursday
As we grow old we realize that, in all we have been through, Love has been using us for its own purposes. And for this we feel immensely grateful.
—James Finley
Friday
The soul of the “grand” parent is large enough to embrace the death of the ego and to affirm the life of God in itself and others, despite all imperfections. Its spaciousness accepts all the opposites in life. —Richard Rohr

Week Thirty-Eight Practice
I Will Sing a New Song

We invite readers to join theologian and mystic Howard Thurman (1900–1981) as he prays for the courage and ability to stay renewed over the course of his life:
The old song of my spirit has wearied itself out. It has long ago been learned by heart so that now it repeats itself over and over, bringing no added joy to my days or lift to my spirit. It is a good song, measured to a rhythm to which I am bound by ties of habit and timidity of mind. The words belong to old experiences which once sprang fresh as water from a mountain crevice fed by melting snows. But my life has passed beyond to other levels where the old song is meaningless. I demand of the old song that it meet the need of present urgencies. Also, I know that the work of the old song, perfect in its place, is not for the new demand!
I will sing a new song. As difficult as it is, I must learn the new song that is capable of meeting the new need. I must fashion new words born of all the new growth of my life, my mind and my spirit. I must prepare for new melodies that have never been mine before, that all that is within me may lift my voice unto God. How I love the old familiarity of the wearied melody—how I shrink from the harsh discords of the new untried harmonies.
Teach me, my Father, that I might learn with the abandonment and enthusiasm of Jesus, the fresh new accent, the untried melody, to meet the need of the untried morrow. Thus, I may rejoice with each new day and delight my spirit in each fresh unfolding.
I will sing, this day, a new song unto Thee, O God.

Experience a version of this practice through video and sound.

Howard Thurman, Meditations of the Heart (Richmond, IN: Friends United Press, 1953, 1994), 206–207.
Image credit: Katrina Lillian Sorrentino, Entelechy 12, (detail), 2022, photograph, Spain, used with permission. Jenna Keiper, Trinity Tree (detail), 2022, photograph, New Mexico, used with permission. Katrina Lillian Sorrentino, Entelechy 7, (detail), 2022, photograph, Spain, used with permission. Jenna Keiper & Leslye Colvin, 2022, triptych art, United States. Click here to enlarge image.
This week’s images appear in a form inspired by early Christian/Catholic triptych art: a threefold form that tells a unified story.
Image inspiration: Aging and transformation: the natural cycle of life, learning, growing, sharing. We flower, we leaf, we shed, we become.

Pro-Age Advertising

Posted on July 19, 2022 by Dr. Toni

Selling the Idea of Pro-Aging Advertisements
We should convince marketers to create ads that accurately reflect the character and value of older adults

By Jeanette Leardi
July 15, 2022

By now most of us are familiar with such classic advertisements as Wendy’s “Where’s the Beef?” or Life Alert’s “I’ve Fallen and I Can’t Get Up!”, which depict older adults like me in stereotypically defective ways. It should go without saying that consumers age 50-plus don’t appreciate being characterized as comical, incompetent, stubborn, tech-averse people.

Creating pro-aging ads takes a willingness to abandon the belief that fear-based messages presenting aging as a process to ridicule or dread are the best vehicles for generating sales | Credit: Allegro/Youtube
However, too many advertisers still don’t seem to get that message, despite the fact that the older-adult market is a huge and lucrative one, well worth engaging.

In our ageist society, older consumers need to become marketers of their own social value, and to enlist others in that cause.

Creating pro-aging ads isn’t rocket science; it just takes a willingness to abandon the belief that fear-based messages presenting aging as a process to ridicule or dread are the best vehicles for generating sales.

In our ageist society, older consumers need to become marketers of their own social value and enlist others in that cause. The targeted “customers” are the companies who continue to turn out shoddy products in the form of discriminatory ads.

In other words, marketers must be sold on the idea of creating pro-aging ads. Luckily, such models already exist.

Here are three examples of how older adults can be depicted realistically, without being mocked, debased, or pathologized:

Ad #1 — Allegro, a Polish E-Commerce Platform Trading Company
Like all compelling ads, this one tells an engaging story. A man living independently decides he wants to learn English. His reason, as yet unknown to the audience, inspires him to order a kit online (yes, he’s computer literate) and later a suitcase. He has a goal, which he knows will be a challenge, but because he has a positive sense of his own aging, he believes he can achieve it. What’s more, he finds a creative, low-tech way to assimilate new vocabulary and is diligent and persistent, even when he makes mistakes.

There are humorous moments that aren’t presented at his expense. And lest we think he’s lonely or isolated, we learn that he has a female friend and is quite capable of international travel on his own. We finally learn the motive behind our hero’s personal endeavor in the ad’s kicker, the last thing he says … in perfect colloquial English.

Ad #2 — Subaru
After her trip, a grateful grandmother gets a ride home, probably from the airport, in her granddaughter’s car. The conversation in the car is supportive and sharing; their little adventures show the grandmother to be fun-loving, proactive, and a really “cool” person to be around. The auto’s selling point is that the grandmother had inspired her granddaughter to get the same kind of reliable car that she owns. This ad is a paean both to legacy and to intergenerational appreciation.

Ad #3 — French Telecommunications Company Bouygues
This is my all-time favorite pro-aging ad. It begins with a quirky father with a good sense of humor who’s a kind of maverick, believing that Redbone’s “Come and Get Your Love” is an appropriate holiday tune for his Christmas compilation (“Compil’ Noël”) tape. Various Bouygues products are subtly presented throughout the lifespan of the father and his son, showing the evolution of those products (ATM to car stereo to flip phone to smartphone). This parallels the evolution of the father-son relationship, throughout which the father’s passion and lightheartedness never fades.

The commercial ends with an acknowledgment of the father’s legacy through the son’s relationship to his own child — yet another case of intergenerational sharing.

Don’t assume that all older adults are mindlessly brand loyal.

All of these commercials are elegant, imaginative, compassionate and effective. Producing others like them merely requires more proactive creativity and less lazy, stereotypical thinking. The effort can pay off handsomely, once companies and their ad agencies realize that they have been working against their own interests by promoting messages that marginalize current — and future — older adults.

Elders are primed to buy quality products. Let’s all convince marketers to create more effective ways to sell them.

My Advice for Advertisers
Tell us a story that makes us care and with which we can identify. The overwhelming majority of us are neither uber-elders who skydive nor cartoon characters who angrily chase kids off our lawns with brooms. In general, we don’t want to be seen as extraordinary; ordinary is fine. But we do want to be seen — and respected.

Depict us as the complex individuals that we are. We tend to defy the neat boxes into which marketers and advertisers seem to want to put us. Although this is obvious to most of us, we need you to be aware of it, too.

Address the reality of our challenges as well as our willingness and ability to overcome them. Don’t assume that all older adults are mindlessly brand loyal. Show us how your products can directly and practically affect our quality of life. We can be amazingly flexible, creative and resilient in finding ways to deal with limitations. And we are inspirational models for others when we do.

Use humor in ways that build us up, not tear us down. We appreciate jokes about the human condition that allow others to laugh with us rather than at us.

Show us having affirming, productive relationships with others, especially those of younger ages. Illustrating how all of us go through this lifelong process together can add value to your marketing and build your consumer base.

Include us older adults on your marketing teams. Even before you get to the focus group stage of an already prepared advertisement, front-load your effort by using older writers, designers and production people. Not only will the resulting ad be more appealing to 50-plus consumers, it will save you time and money in the process.

The bottom line is this: Know that the messages you use to sell to us may also be seen and unconsciously absorbed by younger people. In welcoming us, you also welcome their future consumer selves.

And after all, isn’t that your goal?

Social gerontologist and Ageful Living blogger Jeanette Leardi is a Portland, Oregon–based community educator and public speaker who gives popular presentations and workshops on ageism, brain fitness, creativity, health literacy, and caregiver support. Her essays, articles, and book reviews have appeared in The Charlotte Observer, The Oregonian, The Dallas Morning News, Stria, ChangingAging, and 3rd Act Magazine. Read More
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Joan Ditzion on Ageism

Posted on June 23, 2021August 20, 2024 by Dr. Toni

Feminist pioneer Joan Ditzion may be best known as one of the authors of “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” After all, the seminal book has been a staple on the shelves of women around the world, ever since the publication of the first commercial edition in 1973.

Joan Ditzion standing in front of several of her artworks. Next Avenue, Our Bodies Ourselves — Joan Ditzion has returned to her pursuit of art; here she is with some of her work | Credit: Joan Ditzion

However, that was only the beginning of Ditzion’s journey into tackling the dual issues of feminism and aging. Now 78, the former art educator-turned-clinical geriatric social worker who lives with her husband Bruce in Cambridge, Mass., spoke with Next Avenue about the latter half of life, the women’s movement, ageism and staying relevant.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Next Avenue: What did you learn from the early women’s movement that has carried forward to your current fight against ageism?

Joan Ditzion: I define myself as an aging activist, and having a sense of agency fuels my purpose in life in many ways. One of the things that profoundly affected my attitude was that my values and visions were my feminist values, having been part of the successful social liberation movement in the “Our Bodies Ourselves” project.

A core lesson I learned fifty years ago, in the early days of the women’s movement, is that sexism is a social construction. I had grown up as everyone did in those days, with my sense of myself as a woman in a patriarchal view of society; that women are inferior to men. I was very well loved in my family, but nonetheless, these were the cultural attitudes I was raised on.

“I define myself as an aging activist, and having a sense of agency fuels my purpose in life in many ways.”

I was the other sex, a sex object to please men. A male-centered view of reality was the reality of the world. When I began to realize that there was nothing biologically pre-determined about this, but it’s really just a social construction based on a patriarchal view of the world and sexist attitudes, I began to change my sense of myself, and embraced my identity as a woman and a woman-centric view of the world.

This was probably one of the most formative experiences of my life. Now, more than fifty years later, I fully embrace my identity as a woman in the second half of life.

And over the last ten or twenty years, I have been dealing with changes in my body and my place in the generational hierarchy, this new stage of life and having less time.

I also have had to deal with ageist responses to me as an aging woman. I was immersed in the aging field for many years and I understood it well, but began to really integrate it personally as I aged myself.

More problematic than the normal aspects of aging, were the ageist, demeaning attitudes that I was bumping up against. I kept bumping into ageism and my anxiety rose and I feared ‘I was over the hill, I’m less than, I’m in decline, I’m more marginal, I’m a sexually invisible’ and all of that.

Old book cover of "Our Bodies Ourselves" by Joan Joan Ditzion. Next Avenue — Early cover of the seminal “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” | Credit: Joan Ditzion

But, in my late fifties and sixtiess, this light went off. I was struggling with internalized — and in turn, institutionalized — ageist attitudes, just as I did decades before when I was struggling with sexism. In the early days, I kept thinking, sexism is a social construction. So, I just kept repeating, ageism is a social construction, and it’s our cultural attitudes towards aging, and it doesn’t have to be that way.

Many of us, aging women and men, are asking: How do we balance the affirming positive attitudes of aging with recognizing the realities and problems of aging?

How do you think older women in particular need to navigate this tightrope?

We know that each stage of this life is much more complicated and much more complex than many of our cultural stereotypes or myths or stories. And if we all age consciously and feel, not ‘less than’ because we are aging, we can individually and collectively transform attitudes in ourselves, in society.

It’s a huge, social, cultural problem. It requires collective action, so we should find ways to shift from an age-segregated to an age-integrated society.

Basic research even shows that there’s much lower rates for any kind of mental health, or psychiatric conditions, for people who resist ageist attitudes.

How can older people, and older women in particular, take action, or push back against ageism?

This is such a timely and important topic for everyone. We can all be aging activists.

“So, I just kept repeating, ageism is a social construction, and it’s our cultural attitudes towards aging, and it doesn’t have to be that way. “

Pre-COVID, I used to look for opportunities. I would try to find things I could do to change attitudes.

For example, when I turned seventy-five, I decided to stop dyeing my hair. So, I went to the local pharmacy looking for some gray tint and was told there’s no such thing, that no woman ever wants to go gray. So I started pushing back — insisting it’s part of my natural aging process.

There are moments like this in everyday life, where we can really change attitudes. And my fantasy is if everyone looks for moments like these, we can really begin to address this kind of thing, and listen to ways people demean or put themselves down or diminish themselves or feel ‘less than’ because we’re aging.

Intensive Journal

Posted on June 15, 2021April 27, 2024 by Dr. Toni

By Ellery Littleton

This article presents a summary of some of the basic ideas of Ira Progoff’s “Intensive Journal Process,” and includes a very brief outline of one of his extensive journal-writing exercise cycles: 12 Entries.

Ellery writes: “The first Intensive Journaling workshop I attended in 1981, was two weeks long, 9 to 5, five days a week. At first, I didn’t think I could possibly write about myself for two weeks; at the conclusion of the workshop, I realized I had barely scratched the surface.”

Ellery Littleton teaches several programs at The Haven. His next is Writing up a Storm: Haiku, March 6–7.

***

Long before there were analysts’ couches, encounter groups, gestalt, bodywork, and the myriad other approaches to personal growth and transformation, people who wanted to search for meaning and perspective in their lives often wrote their thoughts, feelings and dreams in a journal.

Particularly among creative people – from Leonardo da Vinci to Anais Nin – journal-keeping has historically been a vehicle for releasing tensions, resolving conflicts, working through crises and connecting with the intuitive inner self – the “person within the person,” as philosopher/psychologist Ira Progoff described it, who can be the source of so much sound guidance and wisdom – your best counselor and spiritual advisor, in fact.

Progoff, who died at age 77 in 1998, was the godfather of the contemporary journal-writing movement, which has blossomed incredibly in the last couple of decades. His best-known book, At a Journal Workshop (1975), is the basic text and guide to the application of what he called the “intensive journal process.” It still stands as the best, most complete work in the entire ever-expanding library of journaling guides. It is rather like the King James Version of journal-writing books – long, complex and challenging – the source of many of the most enduring and useful concepts in the field.

Writing in a journal about one’s ideas, feelings and experiences is almost always useful, “but an unstructured journal usually just goes around in circles,” Progoff said. “To become a valuable tool of psychological self-care, a journal needs a design that will help a human being answer the question ‘What is my life trying to become?’ “

A student of Carl Jung, Progoff was committed to the adaptation of humanistic Jungian ideas to the process of journal-writing, and began by encouraging journal-keeping among his private patients in the 1950s to help them “sort out their lives.”

Over the years, these rudimentary journals evolved into the sensitively structured, multi-layered, cross-referencing set of notebooks which now form the basis for Intensive Journal Workshops, offered across North America and around the world by the New York-based Dialogue House, established by Progoff in the 1960s. Each workshop participant receives a specially organized looseleaf notebook, which leads them through specific writing guidelines. The process is designed to help people “tap into the underground stream of their interior lives to work out their beliefs, find answers to problems and deeper meaning in their existence.”

“It’s a highly useful, practical method, leading to some profound insights,” Progoff said, “but it’s not a self-concerned approach because the answers usually lie in connection with finding meaning in – and connection to – something larger than one’s self.”

Intensive journal workshops encourage individual privacy, although people are periodically invited to read portions of their journal, so they can experience the emotions that surround reading their entries aloud. No judgments or analyses are invited. “I try to help people get over the habit of constantly judging and diagnosing themselves and others,” Progoff said, “and look at things objectively as they are. The workshops provide a place where you can sit quietly to let the muddy waters of life settle and clarify themselves.”

This atmosphere of meditative silence provides an environment that helps people search deep within themselves, and tune into a larger awareness. “At deep levels within us we know more than we are aware of,” Progoff frequently stated. “The process helps people open themselves to this non-intellectual perception, which draws them fully into their own life story.”

quotes on getting older

Ripening with Age- Richard Rohr

Pro-Age Advertising

Joan Ditzion on Ageism

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