When death finds you, let it find you alive.
African proverb
Conscious Aging is about living well, about being alive and resilient in our last third of life. It is about getting closer to being the person we want to be.
A necessary part of this process is that we actually think and talk about what constitutes the person we want to be — what qualities of being we want to grow, develop, strengthen and cultivate. In other words, our intention, i.e. the conscious choices we make about where to place our awareness and attention.
Dr. Tom Pinkson writes, “When I go out into the ocean in a sailboat, I can’t control the currents, I can’t control the winds, I can’t control the waves. But with my intention, with a clarity of where I want to go, I can create a relationship with the waves, the currents, the larger forces of our lives that we don’t have control over. When we have clear intention, we’re able to create a relationship with those forces, however they manifest in our lives, so that we can use them to help go where we want to go. Instead of being victim to them, we can learn how to use them and thereby make our lives and our aging fruitful.”
In our culture’s standard model of aging, there is precious little room for this kind of thinking and feeling. Out of habit, we are inundated by the role models of decline and by the pessimism of fear.
In a University of Warwick study on two million people from 80 nations, the consistent pattern worldwide shows that people are most miserable in middle age and happiest in childhood and at the end of their lives. This u-pattern transcends economic, marital or parental status. (Science Daily, Jan. 30, 2008)
Compared to middle-age, people feel happier in their last third of life, yet we allow ourselves to buy into the declinist view of aging, the view that says “old people” are not productive, passionate or worthwhile. Our consciousness determines the quality of our aging. If we think that our life peaks in middle-age and that it’s all downhill after that, then that’s what we get.
How about the next time you get together with good friends, your contemporaries, you plan to talk about crafting an intention statement for how you wish to age? Not your first choice for a night out, huh? You’re probably right — it takes a bit more self-reflection. But you might be surprised. Recently I co-facilitated a nine-session Wise-Aging Workshop series (12 participants in their 60s, 70s and 80s) and nobody wanted it to end, so the group is still meeting on its own. Living well can be liberating.
Living well through the last third of our lives is a win-win. It allows us to experience that life gets better and better, our losses notwithstanding. It also allows us to live our legacies, not just leave our legacies.
And as it helps us to be the folks people want to visit, not should visit, living well not only gives us the joys, pleasures, satisfactions and perspectives that contribute to our happiness, it also allows us to actually be alive until death finds us.