TRUE ELDER-NESS

Getting OLD…… hmmm.  Sometimes you encounter a sense that it is all hard: Creaking stiff limbs and failing health, loss of our more vital lives and identities, financial worries, and the parade of deaths of our friends and family.

I recently came upon some quotes that might lead us to alter that impression.  There are many reasons that the last third of our lives can be quite stellar.  If we are doing the work of growing our emotional and spiritual lives, there can be such reward during this period.

In our youth and mid lives we can explore the outer world and learn about ourselves by traveling and challenging our careers, our minds, our bodies and it is wonderfully fulfilling, life altering, satisfying, and defining.   This next part of our lives truly asks for a more internal journey. The tasks that can help us achieve this as outlined in “Analysis with the Aged”, in the book Jungian Analysis by Murray Stein are as follows:

1)      Face the realities of aging and you eventual death.  Our awareness of the limited time left to us allows for a deeper, more meaningful engagement with our world, activities and people.

2)    Take some time to remember your life, write a memoir, talk to people about your experiences, write in a journal, make letters to leave after your death.  These things all allow us to be seen, and this allows us to move forward and be more present.

3)    Do some evaluation of where our time and energies are spent.  Reset limits.  As we let go of old obligations and aspirations, we can use our attention and energy on what is now our real focus and what is actually achievable.

4)   Work through the parts of us needing to impress others.  Letting go of the exhausting job of creating a persona for others.  Becoming more visible as we are and being less bound by ego.

5)    Listening in a deeper way to what I have talked about as the “call”.  It is the still small voice.  Seeking wholeness, blending our understanding of our conscious and our unconscious presence, being receptive to our own mysteries and those of our world.

6)    See your own patterns, make efforts to step outside them, seek understand of your true path and your particular reason for living, and then step onto that path.

7)    Tap your creative energies.  Explore ways to express your experience of living.  Is who you have been in your life, i.e. the mask you have been wearing a good fit?  If not how can you express yourself differently and with more resonance to your late-in-life self.  Explore the arts, and begin to see your own life as a painting, a novel, a dance.  Allowing the living itself to becomes an art, not a business.  The unexpected can be the material of exploration.

I have gathered some quotes regarding Aging that I thought you might enjoy:

There’s many a good tune played on an old fiddle.   Samuel Butler

We grow neither better nor worse as we get old, but more like ourselves.  Mary Lamberton Becker

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.  Kafka

The advice of the aged will not mislead you.  Welsh Proverb

For let me tell you, that the more the pleasures of the body fade away, the greater to me is the pleasure and charm of conversation.  Plato

Old age is ripeness.  American Proverb

It takes a long time to become young.  Pablo Picasso

It is only when we truly know and understand that we have a limited time on earth==and that we have no way of knowing when our time is up==that we will begin to live each day to the fullest, as if it were the only one we had.  Elizabeth Kubler-Ross

Every age has it’s beautiful moments.  Albert Einstein

I enjoy my wrinkles and regard them as badges of distinction-I have worked hard to get them.  Maggie Kuhn

I could be well content/ To entertain the lag-end of my life/ With quiet hours.

William Shakespeare

There is a fountain of youth:  it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love.  When you learn to tap this source, you will have truly defeated age.  Sophia Loren

It is wrong to think of old age as a downward slope.  One the contrary, one climbs higher and higher with the advancing years, and that, too, with surprising strides.  Brainwork comes as easily to the old as physical exertion to the child. One is moving, it is true towards the end of life, but that end is now a goal, and not a reef in which the vessel may be dashed.  George Sand

The closing years of life are like the end of a masquerade party, when he masks are dropped.  Arthur Schopenhauer

One should never count the years—one shold instead count one’s interests.  I have kept young trying never to lose my childhood sense of wonderment.  I am glad I still have a vivid curiosity about the world I live in.  Helen Keller

To know how to grow old is the master work of wisdom, and one of the most difficult  chapters in the great art of living.  Henri Frederick Amiel

Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity or gistering wrong.  Charlotte Bronte

Life is half spent before one knows what is it.  French Proverb

Old places and old persons in their turn, when spirit dwells in them, have an intrinsic vitality of which youth is incapable precisely, the balance and wisdom that comes from long perspectives and broad foundations.  George Santayana

For the unlearned, old age is winter; for the learned it is the season of the harvest.  The Talmud

Expressing your enthusiasms can add years of creative life to your time on earth.  Benard Baruch

One has only to grow old to become more tolerant.  I see no fault that I might not have committed myself.  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

One should be explorers, be curious, risk transgression, explore oldness itself.  T.S. Eliot

Life does not accommodate you.  It shatters you.  It is meant to, and it couldn’t do it better.  Every seeds destroys it’s container or else there would be no fruition.  Florida Scott-Maxwell

Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away.   Maya Angelou 

Whatever your age, may you celebrate your OLDNESS today and be in it!  

                        Blessings to you all, Misty June 13, 2014