People view their lives in fragments. As you notice your mind racing, you may feel perceived phases enable you to focus or, feel less overwhelmed with all that appears to unfold for you.
Whether or not you realize it, you schedule and set deadlines as if everything is a race with the invisible clock. You imagine life as symbolic sand in an hour glass where time is running out. What if this is an inaccurate assumption? What if time is a dream and getting younger is not? What it is all your choice?
Bob Proctor is a motivational speaker and teacher from The Secret who shares a view on aging. During a recording he made in 2006, he remarked people assume getting older means getting tired, weak, sickly and increasingly inactive. He also stated that at seventy-three, he felt he had more energy than many people he had met who were twenty three. He said, when people tell him old people should slow down, he said that is a pile of crap. He believes you should speed up.
Have you ever asked why people of similar ages can appear and act so different? Why does a retired colleague of my dad's make it to base camp at Mount Everest even though he has a brain tumor that surgery did not cure? Why do other retirees without such health problems have less will, stamina and drive? Why do some seniors take far younger spouses? Could it be a tireless libido? Heredity is part of it, but there's more.
Some people are grateful to develop gray hair and wrinkles while others engage in a constant battle with time. What does it really mean to go against your nature? People undergo botox, cosmetic surgery and procedures to preserve or prolong an appearance that is impermanent. Why focus on the physical?
Consider people with serious illness which confines them to bed and may adds years to their external appearance. Happiness comes to represent the simple fact of being alive. The evolution they are invited to undergo inside heals years of bitterness, anger, pride and destructive thinking. They come to feel happier and more at peace than ever before. Are we each not choosing to redefine our own fountain of youth?
Society teaches aging is a choice. You can take this literally or figuratively. You can decide to age gracefully in your heart, mind and spirit, regardless of what other people expect to observe in your physical body. Committing to a certain mindset can feel a bit limiting. Despite this, how you think actually determines your joie de vivre and vision of freedom.
If you are aware of aging relatives, you may also begin to view aging differently, even if you feel youthful. To align ourselves with our most precious values is what empowers us to refine a changing sense of purpose. The idea of youth or aging becomes less important than learning to let go of everything but life itself. Every moment, we redefine survival. Where we are, our state of mind and physical form matter less than how we feel. Freedom from aging can come anytime we choose to evolve with the events of our own lives. We can cherish memories, but release the past and ideas that do not serve us.