Aging With Grace

In this blog post I will share my perspective on aging and question societal beliefs pertaining to the matter.

As time progresses, it’s only natural that the human body is going to experience wear and tear. Everything in life has its cycles. We see it in the trees we see surrounding us whenever we go outside for a breath of fresh air. To the beautiful birds that chirp every morning. Even in the squirrels we see running up and down the powerlines, to us humans despite how desperately we attempt to fight nature. As a matter of fact, even the material objects we have a tendency of obsessing over come to deteriorate with time.

Everything inevitably ceases to be eventually, but it doesn’t have to be as bad as people make it seem. Society has conditioned us to believe that aging is a sign of lifelessness. That when one ages, they are no longer valuable, beautiful, creative, etc. Society has convinced us that showing signs of aging is distasteful, as a matter of fact, it’s the worst thing ever! How dare you develop wrinkles, stretch marks, gray hair, or even have changes in your body! How dare you be human!

We know that aging gracefully can be achieved through incorporating strategies proven to increase quality of life as you grow older. Amongst these strategies are: a healthy diet, exercising regularly, getting an adequate amount of sleep, managing stress, cultivating healthy harmonious supportive connections, and continuing to learn and expand the mind so as to keep it stimulated. Aging cannot be avoided, however, there are measures you can take to ensure you age with grace. For some, this means skincare and exercising holistic practices to slow down the process of aging. To others, this can mean getting Botox and fillers to hide wrinkles and other signs of aging. Which ever way you choose to embrace aging is up to you. Beauty is a state of being that’s fostered from within and is reflected outwardly, so nurturing your inner world is obviously just as important.

Refining, Evolving, Embracing

Aging and more specifically showing signs of aging, can be something that is very much frowned upon within our society. Aging has been deemed something so monstrous, a sign of decay if you will. However, this is far from the truth. In fact, aging is a beautiful process that every human will, hopefully, experience within their lifetime. Aging is a gift that allows us to experience more life. With every passing minute we are inevitably aging, only adding more to the collection of wrinkles, wisdom, beauty, and refinement. Aging signifies that you are experiencing more and more and more of life. With each passing experience comes a blessing and a lesson. With each blessing and lesson that we are gifted with, we gain more wisdom on how to move forward with our life journey. As time progresses, we become better equipped with how we want our lives to unfold. We nit pick at the stuff we want to completely eliminate from our lives and we make the necessary changes because life is ever evolving. We see it in nature, animals evolve to become the version of themselves to be able to thrive within their environmental factors. Human genes are under constant change, plants are also ever evolving. We see evidence of evolution in so many aspects of our natural world. Life is about evolving because change is the only constant in life. When evolving through the experiences we’ve had in life, we are able to implement lessons we’ve learned through past experiences which bring to fruition more blessings into our lives, or repeated lessons if one chooses to continue doing the same action with no effort to change. Aging allows us to refine our lives. There is so much beauty in growth. There is beauty in change. There is beauty in refinement. There is beauty in embracing.

With more life, we come to learn more. We learn that being consistent is the way to attain your goal. That you can achieve anything you want so long as you actually believe it and put the effort into it, even if it takes some time. With age, you learn to deal with your problems, as opposed to escaping them. Trying to escape your life is a form of self sabotage. When you experience more life, you realize that the problems are always gonna be there so when you choose to escape you’re only going to end up causing more problems that will pile onto the list of problems you already had. As life progresses you’ll realize that life has a rather funny way of humbling you so you learn to not judge others for what you perceive them to be doing “wrong” because you never truly know what someone is going through, and how easily you could be in that same situation. With age, you learn the importance of being kind to yourself. Even if you’ve made a lot of mistakes or have done things in the past that you aren’t proud of. When we make decisions that don’t align with our morals or we aren’t proud of, we sometimes form beliefs of unworthiness, because we think we are bad people at our core and this leads to self sabotage. When you choose to be kind to yourself, and to forgive yourself, you are rewriting these subconscious beliefs. You are changing the narrative to say that you are worthy even though you’ve made mistakes in your past, and then you start taking aligned action, which leads to the bounce back. Which is why most of us naturally learn that being kind to ourselves is conducive to a happy future. Of course, can’t forget about one of the most valuable lessons you learn with age, which is the power of friendship and community. Finding a community, friends, family…people that are good for your soul that make life feel a bit brighter on cloudy days. You really come to find with time just how truly important that is. 

Aging is a beautiful process that each and everyone of us is going to experience. Aging entails that we’ve been roaming this earthly plane for quite some time. That we’ve had more opportunities to laugh, to enjoy delicious foods, to immerse ourselves in romantic love affairs. With more life comes more experiences and with more experiences we obtain more blessings, lessons, and as a result more wisdom. This allows you the ability to move differently when you move forward. You won’t be making the same mistakes in your 20’s as you did in your teens, because you’ve learned from that. You won’t be making the same mistakes in your 50/ 60’s as you did in your 30/40’s, because you’ve learned from that. With age comes refinement. With refinement, we grow more in alignment with the ideal version of ourselves, the higher version of ourselves. The version of ourselves that meditates, and takes others into consideration, and learns from their mistakes and puts forth effort into being better daily. 

Writing Your Story

When time comes to pass and several experiences have been had, one grows to understand themselves better. It’s inevitable. After going through a series of events in life and spending so much time… just being you… you will inevitably come to learn quite a lot about yourself. How you feel about your life often comes down to how you perceive your experiences. Our perception of life is often affected by the stories we tell ourselves. See, the thing is that a lot of the time we’re taking in other people’s stories instead of writing our own. This sometimes happens unintentionally, we don’t live in a little bubble filled with only our beliefs after all…

The reason that I bring other people’s stories being taken in as your own, is to bring to your awareness that this is something that naturally occurs within our connections. In life, you’ll most likely experience people projecting their beliefs, ideas, and opinions onto you so it is important that you know yourself. Funny thing is, as you age, this tends to happen naturally. As you age, you come to realize that the best thing you can be, is unapologetically yourself. To form positive beliefs, especially in regards to aging because if you fall under the indoctrination of societal beliefs, it will limit you into believing that aging is something to be feared and not celebrated. 

“Life is what you make of it”

Eleanor Roosevelt

Life is a beautiful journey that ultimately leads to the same destination for us all. The joy always lies in the journey, in our experiences. Although life can sometimes feel heavy, we may all at one point in our lives go through a difficult time. Aging teaches you that.. It’s all going to be okay because life has a funny way of aligning things in favor of the existence you are intrinsically creating. After all, what we feel within is always reflected in our reality.

Age with grace and embrace the beauty in the experiences you’ve had the privilege to indulge in because if you aren’t aging, you’re probably dead. Eat healthy, workout, care for your body and mental health. Make sure you’re still having new experiences, after all, you’re aging but that doesn’t mean you’re dead yet! Go into new experiences with excitement and vigor. We age and life eventually ceases to be, as is inevitably in our nature, this should only act as a precursor to the celebration of the culmination of all the blessings and lessons that you have been lucky enough to experience. Celebrate life while you can and take joy in the privilege that it is to experience the beautiful lightness of our being. Memento Mori.