PEBBLE
We put all kinds of limitations on ourselves: sometimes the biggest one is we don’t get up and try it.
~Betty Kellenberger, 80-year-old who recently became the oldest woman to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail
BOULDER
Aging is not for the weak. One day you wake up and realize that your youth is gone, but along with it, so go insecurity, haste, and the need to please… You learn to walk more slowly, but with greater certainty. You say goodbye without fear, and you cherish those who stay. Aging means letting go, it means accepting, it means discovering that beauty was never in our skin… but in the story we carry inside us.
~attributed to Meryl Streep, shared by Joe in Woodinville, WA
PONDER
In a little over a year, I’ll be turning 60 years old. That isn’t “old old,” of course, but it is twice as old as 30 (the first age our society starts sending messages about being “over the hill”) and three times as long as the adolescent version of me once imagined I’d live.
There are many ways I don’t feel as old as I thought this age would feel. I still have lots of energy and can do pretty much all the activities I enjoy. At the same time, my body is changing: it takes a little longer to heal from minor scrapes and strains, and my skin is a bit more stretchy than it used to be.
My mind is changing, too. Years of meditation and other mindful practices have pointed me toward less reactivity and more savoring. And yes, I do feel a little wiser in certain ways. ALSO: it seems like I forget things more quickly and more often than I used to. There have been a couple of memory lapses and moments of word-finding trouble that I wanted to put on my doctor’s radar. Not stuff to freak out about—just stuff to take note of.
Lately, a few ideas and encounters have been reshaping how I think about aging. I’ve always liked how Richard Rohr frames the second half of life as an opportunity to loosen our grip on the ladders we climbed and learn to stand more firmly in love, humility, and truth—a little less striving, a little more surrender. This is helping me linger in Meandertime, a term my colleague-friend Diane and I use to describe a mindset shift favoring spaciousness and presence over measuring life by output.
Then there’s this wonderful Reflection of Life video where 95-year-old Dot shares a song she wrote to remind herself to “Go slow… then you’ll know… where to seek the truth… when to speak your truth… Go slow… then you’ll know… that the only way… to enjoy this day… is right now.”
And as if the Universe wanted to weigh in on these ponderations, I was attempting to make sense of all this when Leah Pearlman’s latest Welcoming Way newsletter landed in my inbox with a powerful closing line: “Reorienting from ‘striving’ to ‘experiencing’ is not itself another goal to achieve.”
I’m still letting all this wisdom simmer, and I don’t have any advice or prescription for how I think you should age. I just know that I want to age consciously—with as much patience, curiosity, and joy as I can possibly cram into the final third of my life.
Peace,
Paul
P.S. Just about every guest Julia Louis-Dreyfus chats with on Wiser Than Me has helped me age more consciously, as have conversations with a few wonderfully wise Ripplers, including Sophia of Cincinnati, Judy of Carbondale, Roberta of Cleveland, St. Joan of Albany, and Miriam of St. Louis.