Last year, six months before my 60th birthday, I started asking myself what it meant to age through a series of journal entries that offered several insights. In one journal entry, I wrote,
Aging has always been something I celebrated and embraced. Perhaps it’s because I look younger than what my birth certificate and driver’s license say. Truth be told, that’s why I’ve always wanted to be older than I looked. The wisdom of my sheroes, like Dr. Maya Angelou, has also helped me embrace aging: “I love living. I love that I’m alive to love my age. Many people went to bed just as I did yesterday evening and didn’t wake up this morning. I love and feel very blessed that I did.” Dr. Angelou’s words taught me that I can choose how I relate to aging. I am choosing to befriend the aging process with support from a sacred circle of chosen family, creative and spiritual communities, health and wellness practitioners, financial professionals, tools, and resources. I am choosing to age with heart-centered awareness, grace, and ease. I am choosing to age with authenticity, growth, and expression. I am choosing to age with acceptance, gratitude, and enthusiasm. When it comes down to it, aging has always been a gift, a privilege, and a friend I have been blessed to receive since the day I was born.
Now that I have become a member of the 60-something club, I have decided to use my journal entries to write a work-in-process manifesto that expresses my relationship with aging. It will include my values and intentions for living authentically and with purpose.
What’s your relationship with aging?
What do you think and feel about it?
Are you afraid of it?
Do you deny it is happening or tolerate it as an inevitable inconvenience or disadvantage?
Whether we like it or not, we all relate to aging because we are alive and getting older daily. As the years go by, “minor forgetfulness and bouts of absent-mindedness can become a part of our daily lives,” says Jeanette Brown, the creator of Reset Your Life Compass and a seasoned Life Transition coach. “It might feel like these moments sneak up on us, subtly weaving into our routines. But the interesting part is they often come hand in hand with certain habits. Habits that we don’t even realize we’re nurturing.”
Brown names eight habits we must pay close attention to because they “often accompany an increase in forgetfulness and absent-mindedness as we age.”
They include:
- Resisting change can show up as our preference for familiar places, routines, and experiences.
- Losing sight of our core values that guide our actions and decisions
- Experiencing a lack of meaningful goals that keep us focused, engaged, and purposeful
- Having a shift in mindset that produces a passive approach to living where we relinquish control and feel that life is something that happens to us rather than something we actively participate in and direct
- Avoiding the mindful practice of journaling that offers self-reflection and an opportunity to understand ourselves better, set clear goals, and keep track of our progress
- Maintaining a pattern of old habits that no longer serve our highest good
- Facing a lack of purpose that gives meaning and motivation to our lives and supports an active and engaged mind
- Living inauthentically when we disconnect from our true selves and conform to societal expectations or play roles that are not aligned with our true values and beliefs
Brown recommends confronting and managing these habits better when we first recognize they exist.
Our ability to manage these habits starts with claiming and exercising our birthright of mindfulness, the ability, and practice of becoming aware of our aging process and our relationship with it. Use the steps below to dive deep into understanding and reimagining your aging process and relationship as a gateway to living authentically and purposefully.
1. Be Honest With Yourself
Engage in self-reflection by exploring what aging means to you and the impact aging is having in your life now. Allow yourself to be vulnerable. Write or type what you truly feel, think, and believe. Do not hold back. Share the subtle habits you may not have noticed that could increase your forgetfulness and absent-mindedness. Include any fears and judgments you may have. Speak your truth. All of it will help you identify the type of relationship you currently have with aging.
2. Adopt A Beginner’s Mindset
Define the relationship you want to have with aging (friendly and harmonious) and the person you want to be as you age. Include the qualities and values you want to incorporate into your being and your relationship with aging (mindfulness, curiosity, loving-kindness, compassion, nonjudgment, patience, forgiveness, or gratitude). Explore how you want to impact by serving others and sharing your gifts, talents, expertise, experience, resources, and time. Keep notes on paper, in a journal, or with your digital device.
3. Open Your Heart And Third Eye
Visualize how you want to age (spiritual, emotional, mental, physical, and financial well-being). Include the activities, communities, and organizations you want to participate in. Share the type of support and resources you want to have access to. Document your visualization by writing, typing, drawing, or creating a vision board.
4 Take Your Time
Don’t try to speed through the process of getting to know the REAL YOU and defining the type of relationship you want to have with aging.
5 Do A Self-Discovery Review
Use what you learned about yourself to create your work-in-process manifesto that expresses your values, intentions, and relationship with aging.
6 Embrace Your Journey
Use your work-in-progress manifesto to guide living authentically and purposefully as you age. Celebrate the small, medium, and significant steps you take daily, weekly, month, and year. Remember, as you change, your work-in-process manifesto may change. So be ready to reflect, review, and reimagine at any given time. Aging is a lifelong journey!
Ananda Leeke is a Thriving Mindfully Coach, artist, Human Design Doula, facilitator of Thriving Mindfully with Aging, Change, Grief, and Imperfection Retreats, and author of Love’s Troubadours, That Which Awakens Me, and Digital Sisterhood. Leeke also hosts the Thriving Mindfully Podcast
