Interview with Barbie Gummin on TLC5
Conscious Aging
“Aging Gracefully from the Heart of Healing.net”
Enjoy a Vital, Fulfilling Life Regardless of Age
A quick web search on the term “graceful aging” brings up phrases like:
“Combat the signs of aging…”
“Who said that we have to age…”
“Defy the aging process…”
More often than not, aging is viewed as something to be fought off for as long as possible. Regardless of how liberated we’ve become, many women and men still experience aging as a threat to their sense of self worth and quality of life. It is pretty much expected that middle age will bring a “crisis” and far too often we hear seniors lament that “I thought these were supposed to be the golden years.” Whole industries are built on the attempt to stay young – from hair colors to face lifts to Viagra.
Women come into their greatness after menopause.
There is a place for all of these things, of course, but if your reaction to the aging process has you racing to beat time, I’d like to ask you to take a deep breath, relax, and give yourself some space to shift into a different perspective on aging.
What if aging were equated with getting better rather than worse? What if you lived in a culture which reveres the elderly and views them as a repository of power and wisdom? What if it was understood that women really come into their greatness after menopause? Since how we age has so much to do with our attitudes and beliefs, such a shift in perspective could make a world of difference.
Aging Well in the Culture of Youth
To age “gracefully” in a culture which idolizes youth requires inner strength and wisdom. Hopefully we can ask questions together about our common notions and experiences with aging, so that we can not only do away with some myths about aging which limit our quality of life, but also discover some of the “perks” of aging that we often ignore. There are lots of role models who have led the way for us. Did you know, for example, that:
Martha Graham danced professionally until she was 76?
Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals at the age of 78?
Georgia O’Keefe continued painting well into her 90s?
Vitality in “later life” is not just for the famous. Undoubtedly everyone knows at least one person who is living a vital, fulfilling life “despite” their age. This is really the way it should be – life should become better as we age.
Two Basic Requirements of Graceful Aging
What I’ve discovered is that there are two “basic requirements” of graceful aging. To borrow from the “Serenity Prayer”, graceful aging requires the “serenity to accept the things we cannot change; courage to change the things we can; and wisdom to know the difference.” Certainly acceptance of aging is a key to aging gracefully – but which of the changes that commonly come with age are the “things we cannot change” and which are the “things we can change?”
What You Can and Cannot Change — Importance of Relaxation
These two major requirements of successful aging – accepting the aging process and not accepting what we can change — may at first seem contradictory. Sometimes success in life involves the ability embrace the paradox that when we accept life at it is at the moment, it paradoxically opens a doorway for positive change. A common example of this is the couple who finally “get pregnant” when they’ve given up and decide to adopt a child.
The bottom line, as I see it, is the ability to relax with whatever challenges us at any given time and that includes the changes aging brings. When we are relaxed, we are open to different ways of looking at things.
Relaxation brings us out of the “fight or flight” mode that causes us to act impulsively, and gives us more ability to reflect on things. Instead of running out to buy some new anti-aging product, we can spend some time examining our fears and learning whether they are based in reality or on some cultural programming that we’d be better off ignoring.
What We Can Change — The Role of Attitude and Lifestyle
It’s been discovered that attitude has an enormous role in how we age. Much of the decline that people experience with aging comes about due to the belief that decline in function and quality of life is part and parcel of aging. In addition, many of the problems of age are not due to the process of aging itself, but rather due to the effects of a lifetime of stress and poor health habits.
It’s never too late to change the two most important ingredients to graceful aging – attitude and lifestyle.
What We Cannot Change — Coming to Terms with Our Mortality
One thing we absolutely cannot change is the fact that every day brings us closer to death. This one fact alone may account for a great deal of our difficulty with aging. As soon as we see signs of aging, we are reminded that this body is eventually going to die. As we age, we come face to face with our mortality, and to deal with this we are thrown upon our spiritual resources. Our “spiritual health” may well be measured by how we face the fact of our mortality.
With the rest of the things we cannot change, there is more of a gray area, as we are only now starting to make scientific discoveries about the aging process. Nevertheless, it’s safe to say that aging will bring change. With menopause, both male and female, we begin to live with a different hormonal environment. The appearance and function of our body changes and requires that we adapt. Our roles change dramatically as our children grow older and leave home, and we become grandparents rather than parents. At some point, many of us become parents to our parents as they enter their final years.
Growing older also brings more loss. Not only is there loss of many aspects of being young, more people we know die. This may be one of the most difficult aspects of aging. If we haven’t learned to grieve earlier in life, the all important task of learning to live with loss must be learned to avoid psychological and health problems.
Finding a Balance
Finally, graceful aging means finding a balance between acceptance of the inevitability of aging and doing what we can to remain vital and healthy as long as possible. Once again, we emphasize the importance of relaxing. Acceptance involves relaxation into life and the ability to flow with change. When we are relaxed, we stop fighting the inevitable. At the same time, relaxation is a key to better health and greater vitality.
“Aging as a Spiritual Journey”
Ron Cebik from Huffington Post
Psychotherapist & Teacher
It happens. Yes, we all come to the moment we realize we are growing old. It just happens differently for each of us. If we picture our life span as a trajectory with an ascendency, peak, and descent, somewhere after the peak, we notice changes and events that indicate loss. Wrinkles appear where there was smoothness. Our energy ?ags or our muscles no longer do what we had demanded of them. Some things are gradual to the point of not being apparent for years while other events are dramatic indices of decline. Whatever it is, what was gained in ascendency is the victim of attrition. When we choose to avoid what is happening, in the words of the Bhagavad Gita, our choice is in vain, for nature will compel us to look into the face of reality. That is why I have chosen to characterize “aging” as a spiritual journey.
The descent from midlife into old age and ?nally a confrontation with mortality has a melancholy tone that is a residual of the grief that accompanies loss. It is the challenge with which life confronts the character we and culture have built to this moment. Now, we are tested for the courage to continue the rest of the journey with integrity or despair our lot as the bearers of what was, dreading what lies ahead with the complaints of the present. That is why aging is a spiritual journey. It is a test of character to understand life, itself. It is a time to leave acquisition behind and learn to be. That is the goal of spirituality. It is not the easy answers that assuage the fears of aging, but asking the hard questions of life?s meaning that comprise the journey that ends with the expiration of our final breath.
For 15 years I have experienced the loss of my mobility and speech. I am, by nature, subject to a melancholy, that by some grace, has the beauty of an underlying religious chant that gives a certain pleasurableness to experiencing the ambiguity of life?s experiences. In my eighth decade, I have reached a modicum of stability. That is not necessarily desirable. In a world of systems subject to the laws of thermodynamics, stability is achieved when forces are in balance (they cancel out one another?s effects) or there is not enough energy to enable the system to change or grow. In the biosphere, this is known as death. Stability is only desirable when it can be punctuated by the input of enough energy to enable a system to achieve a new level of complexity. Otherwise, the system disintegrates, its matter becoming a source of energy and matter for other systems. In biology those systems range from microbes to the sentient beings known as humans. This is just another way of describing aging and death. However, it is also a way of describing what it is to be human without the hubris that envisions all that is as orbiting in the gravitational pull of my being.
Mitch Album, in his book Tuesdays With Morrie, described his conversations with his old professor dealing with his own confrontation with aging and mortality. Morrie, similarly dealing with neurological wasting, viewed life, in my opinion, through the lens of an optimist and had a somewhat saccharine world view. That being said, I have grown patient with the modern American penchant for romanticizing those who “keep a stiff upper lip” or go beyond “coping” to making their adversity into a small stage production. The alternative is avoiding contact with the presence of decay and death. Morrie followed his life-long path of buoyant optimism into his time of wasting. It brought companionship, meaning, and posthumous fame. That path, celebrated as the American spiritual ideal, is only a path amongst many. I do not believe we choose our paths as much as we follow those paths for which we have maps; maps constructed from the myriad experiences and decisions melded into the complexities of what we are.
No one has asked me what it is like to be crippled or unable to communicate as a facile conversationalist. No one has inquired into what it is like to live with the threat that another complicating ailment or accident taking me over the edge to complete disablement. Perhaps that is because people truly want happy endings. I believe in endings, all manner of endings, but a happy ending is only one of an almost endless number of possible endings. Yet, in even the most buoyant personality, there is a haunting awareness that endings do not mean completeness. Life cycles are most often truncated and tragic. Endings happen, but their times and circumstances are, at best, approximate guesses. That is what makes life both an adventure and a terror.
Nature is like that. In order to ?nd the best solution to the problem of both survival and the best route to evolving complexity, she will simultaneously attempt variations on a solution until she comes up with the best answer. Success equals survival and failure amounts to fading and death. Such extravagance strikes the human mind as wasteful and demeaning. No person wants to think that one?s life is simply nature?s throw of the dice. We want to tie our individual history up into a neat little package that is stamped “complete.” It takes courage to look incompleteness in the eye and say “yes” to what is of what we are before that ?nal expiration.
“The Way We Were” is locked The Way We Were
The secret to aging gracefully
Are these words familiar to you?
“Memories, light the corners of my mind
Misty watercolor memories of the way we were.
Scattered pictures of the smiles we left behind
smiles we give to one another
for the way we were.
Can it be that it was all so simple then
or has time rewritten every line?
If we had the chance to do it all again
tell me would we? Could we?”
They are words from the romantic Barbra Streisand song from “The Way We Were.” They strike a chord in all our hearts as we move pass midlife and into our senior years. We all have memories that we tend to romanticize and often wish things could be just the way they were. Yet this should not prevent us from aging gracefully.
Holding on to the past can block us
Actually, holding on to past memories can be the very thing that blocks us from aging gracefully. The saddest people I know are those that keep remembering when and regretting that things are no longer the same. As we age, there ARE some things we can’t do as well as we could when we were younger, and some things we can no longer do at all.
Living our present experiences can free us
What I have come to realize, and what has been most helpful to my friends and clients, is to recognize that while we may not be DOING the same things, we can still have the same experiences – at least internally. For example, I can no longer dance the way I used to when I was young – the legs and the breath just won’t go that far anymore. I loved to dance, but what I loved about dancing was the freedom of expression that I felt when I did it. That freedom is something that I can still experience in many different ways – and I do!
Discovering new ways for aging gracefully can liberate us
What have you ‘given up’ as you have aged? Can you find the essence of the experience and then discover new ways to fulfill that same desire? I know you can, and when you do, you will find yourself living more and more in the present rather than wishing things were “the way they were.” That’s the secret to aging gracefully.
