Impossible!
That was my mother's age before she got old.
But the fact remains that I must accept that I am getting slightly older (the key word here is slightly)!
I notice it in my greying hair which I have decided to let go natural and that will be the topic of another discussion. I notice it in my body strength as I try to do the heavy garden and yard work. It can be frustrating and scary and yet it makes me smile. I was so innocent and I thought for sure that I would never get older... not me... I was supposed to be forever young. Another life lesson that we all learn the hard way if we are lucky enough to live this long.
There is also the fact that I think that I am finally getting to where I wanted to be, not that my life is smooth, easy and carefree. I still have a trunkful of worries and what ifs. The one good thing about aging well is that we learn to better accept the challenges, struggles, disappointments, losses, failures, judgements and use our experiences to finally understand what is important to us. It means we let go of the drama and the need to be enough. It is about finding our way back to our true self, the one we started out with as an innocent baby before we got caught up into everyone one else's patterns of living. Everyone else told us how to think and what to do and we did it because we were told it was the right way, even if it didn't feel right to us.
The price for getting to this calmer place in life requires a lot of patience and acceptance of ourselves. Our body has lost some of its youthful appearance and strength. It now requires more of an effort to look after ourselves by getting active again after our many pitfalls. It means we have to get serious about what we put in our bodies and we can no longer make excuses like someday we will eat better. We cannot continue to eat junk and think that a doctor will heal us if we get sick. He or she will give us a band aide to take away our pain but a real cure requires a lifestyle change.
This is a magical age that gives us back our personal freedom despite our life circumstances for we have learned enough to know that everything is based on our thoughts. We can choose to see life as the glass is half full or half empty. We can let go of the drama, fill up on kindness for ourselves and others, get creative even if we think that we are not, and learn to play again. We have learned enough to know that no matter what is going on, storms never last. We have learned enough to know, that we can try again tomorrow.
This is an age where we get back to being REAL and if we dare, we can finally like ourselves again, just like when we were infants and thought that the world was simply about having fun and being happy even if all we had was an empty cardboard box to play with and pretend it was a castle. We trusted our imagination back then to fill our world with what we wanted. We can do it again.
To get older is a gift that many have missed out on and that is priceless.
Age is really just a number for which we can be grateful because you have another year to live your best life!
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