Tag Archives: aging is a lifelong journey

How to reach the stars.

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On Friday’s post, a commenter mentioned how wanting something too much affects their balance.

I share that feeling.

Except for me, it isn’t so much about balance as it is about fear. I have long known that I have difficulties with ‘trust’. The biggest piece being ‘trusting the universe’ It’s as if within me is this critter voice hissing “don’t tell the world your dreams or even put them down on paper and whatever you do, don’t wish for something too hard! The universe will do its best to push you down if you do.”

I didn’t say it was rational. It just is what it is.

The trick is to be conscious of its irrational and non-supportive nature. In my awareness, I breathe through the fear of being pummeled by the universe so that I am free to do what needs to be done to create a world of beauty, joy, love and laughter all around me.

Again, not trusting the universe ain’t rational. It is a learned behavioral response/thought that does not serve me well. Its genesis is buried deep in my psyche, formed when I was a child trying to cope with a world I did not understand, and a religious upbringing that had me fearing ‘god’ as an angry deity seeking to smoke and destroy those who disobeyed him.

Which is why I write about it.

In writing about it I get to see it, acknowledge it and laugh about it.

I mean, seriously? I think I’m so important to the universe that my wanting to reach the stars of my own dreams would cause it to direct the furies against me?

LOL — I am not that important nor powerful for the universe to change course.

What is important is that I play the leading character at centre stage of my own life – something I’ve struggled with for eons!

This is why it’s so important for me to care deeply about my limiting beliefs that have the capacity to keep me playing small in my own life.

None of us can afford to play small in our own lives.

The universe is going to keep doing what it does to keep the planets in orbit. We each need to do whatever we can to keep our lives growing and evolving and becoming our own special version of life on planet earth.

We need to play as large and loud and joyously as we can. We need to reach for the stars within our own dreams. Topple mountains standing in our way and soar above petty fears seeking to keep us playing safe in mediocrity.

To reach the stars of our own dreams, we must let go of the fears that keep us stuck in believing we don’t deserve to shine bright.

To let go of the fears, we must give ourselves permission to acknowledge our fears and breathe through them.

To breathe through our fears, we must be willing to both laugh at ourselves and be our own biggest cheerleaders.

And, to shine bright, we must never stop believing in ourselves, our dreams, and our right to reach for the stars, no matter our age!

Never stop growing and exploring

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Episode 36 – Dare Boldly: No matter your age

On Sunday night, we were 13 gathered around our dining room table for a late Thanksgiving dinner.

I’d spent three days immersed in prep. From creating the menu, painting name cards for everyone, and baking two different cakes, setting the table, and preparing all the fixings. I had fun!

For me, the kitchen is one of my happy zones. People often laugh at me when I tell them this is the first time I’ve made the dish I’ve made that I am setting before them.

“Isn’t that risky? What if it fails?” is often the response.

Fact is, I love experimenting with new recipes (I quickly grow bored of making the same thing again and again) and… most recipes can be saved before hitting the failure button.

This weekend, both cakes I made, along with two different veggie dishes, were new to me. All four came out well — though I did have to rescue the cauliflower from blah to ensure it pleased the palate of all our guests.

In my book, stretching out of my comfort zone, experimenting with new ideas, learning new things is critical to living a rich and full life, no matter my age.

For example, recently, I started learning new video editing software. Ouch! It’s professional software versus the semi-professional one I am accustomed to. My mind is boggled with all the options, processes, and opportunities to create film magic. It is a slow, arduous process of reading directions, following along in videos, figuring out what works and doesn’t work, making mistakes, losing my edits, and starting all over again.

It’s frustrating and invigorating.

It takes me an inordinately long time to do something I could easily do on my old software in a quarter of the time.

But, every moment I spend learning the new software is time spent stretching my brain, my thinking capacities, my memory muscles, my ability to learn and grow.

And all of that is healthy for me.

I think it’s one of the big takeaways for me in having spent the past month writing and thinking about aging well. We can’t stop doing, thinking, creating, being all of who we are.

We all have many gifts, talents, and unexplored creative terrain. The key to getting older without getting old is to always keep pushing into the unknown territory of our limitless capacity to continually be creating better with everything we think, do, and say as we become ‘the more’ of who we are becoming.

Namaste

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Why Change Now?

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I think one of the most challenging aspects of aging is the growing awareness that our one last breath is drawing nearer with every breath we take. By perforce, that awareness embodies the realization that time is fleeting. It passes quickly – and there’s less time to do the things we want to accomplish, to achieve our dreams, to heal relationships, to change directions – to step joyfully into whatever we see before us.

That pressure of time passing can act as both a deterrent or motivator to making change happen in our lives.

Sometimes, we can fall into the habit of acting out on our belief there’s no point in doing anything. We don’t have enough time to make change happen and we’re too old anyway. Our acting out looks like inaction — but the act of thinking about doing nothing is action in and of itself.

When we choose to believe every breath matters and every breath is an opening into wonder and awe, the possibility of our taking active, committed and passionate steps towards whatever it is we want to achieve or do overrides time’s insistence we keep watch of each passing minute, without doing anything else.

I like to multi-task. Keeping watch of time motivates me to keep doing the things I want to do to add richness, variety, excitement, joy, mystery, wonder and awe into my life.

I’ve lived most of my life like that. Why change now?

Don’t look back now.

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When I taught skiing, I would tell students that the whole process began with their feet. They needed to ground into their feet, feel the soles of their feet inside their socks and their boots and then move up through their body — always remembering to be grounded into their feet.

When moving, the objective was to not watch the tips of their skis but to be scanning the route – 3 turns ahead (particularly when going fast through the moguls)

The reason for scanning ahead was to be constantly assessing the terrain, where to turn, where to adapt, where to make adjustments for changes in snow, steepness etc.

If you want to look backwards, I’d tell them. Learn to ski backwards. 🙂

What made me think of this yesterday as I was walking with Beau along the river was the fact I was navigating the rocky shore and noticed my eyes were on my feet and the very next rock in front of me. Remember my ‘3 turn’ teaching, I lifted my eyes a bit and scanned the rocks in front of me, constantly looking out for the best path through.

It worked. Rather than being slow, cumbersome and uber cautious, I moved wiht more agility and grace across the rocks.

Like life.

If we spend too much time looking behind, we get stuck in yesterday.

If we forget to scan the terrain around us, we lose our agility because we’re so focussed on each step we miss how each step is connected to the next and risk being taken by surprise by obstacles along our way.

If we look too far into future, we don’t see the beauty along our way.

The older we get, the closer the end of our story draws near. The secret to living each moment fully is to not focus on the ending but the beauty, love, wonder and awe along our way, keeping ourselves grounded always in the beautiful friendships, connections, memories we’ve made on our journey.

That’s the beauty of memories. We carry them with us. And those that do not add joy, harmony, love and peace to our lives, we are free to let go and move on free of their burden.

Fear or Courage – Which will you choose?

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A question often asked in many personal development courses is, “What is your greatest fear?”

I don’t know what mine is. I can imagine it. Like I fear losing my loved ones. I fear losing the use of my limbs, not being able to type, not being able to read.”

For a few tenuous moments this morning, that particular fear of not being able to read felt a little more real than usual. I woke up, put on my glasses, picked up my phone to do WORDLE and it all look a tad blurry.

What?

And then I checked my glasses.

They were a very old pair. Far to weak for my eyes today.

Ahhhh….. Whew! No wonder everything was blurry.

My eyesight was quickly remedied and I carried on.

But it got me thinking about how fear limits my experience of what is real and true and beautiful in my life in this moment. Fear traps me in darkness.

So, how do we avoid letting fear drive us into our limiting beliefs that end up liminting our full joyful appreciation of life?

We let courage draw us out and into living on the wild side, living as if time is not ‘the enemy’ but our co-conspirator in creating the life we dream of, the life we want, the life we deserve.

That’s my plan.

To be drawn by courage into complete, wild self-expression of my true self coming alive, becoming all of me with every breath I take.

What about you? Do you have a plan? Do you have a clear intention of how you want to, will, age?

I hope so.

And I hope you share your thoughts. You inspire me!

A good night’s rest

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Episode 32

In the homeless serving sector where I used to work, people would often ask things like, “Why can’t they just take a shower, cut their hair, put on some decent clothes and get a job?’ Or, “Why do they keep making such bad decisions?” (The ‘they’ being individuals experiencing homelessness.)

My answer was generally focused on helping ‘the housed’ understand the challenges and stressors of homelessness.

Making a ‘good’ decision when constantly worrying about where you will sleep that night, or whether or not you’ll survive the night, or even when you’ll get your next fix when the fix is the only thing that eases the pain and fear and trauma of your life, is relative.

A good decision when housed is ensuring you’ve got money in the bank to pay your rent or mortgage, put food on the table, fill your car, what movie to go see, what pair of shoes to wear, what to order at a restaurant.

Decisions when ‘housed’ are based on the choices we have to create change.

In homelessness, the lack of choice impacts every decision.

A good decision in homelessness could be deciding to eat pork, which is contrary to your religious beliefs, because it’s the only thing the shelter kitchen is serving that night and you are hungry.

A good decision in homelessness could be deciding to sleep in the shelter when it’s -30C outside even though the last time you did someone stole your backpack which had the photos of your family in it, the family you haven’t seen in six years but whose photos you couldn’t stop looking at.

A good decision could be deciding to go to the supervised consumption site because you truly do not want to die. Being somewhere safe when you put the needle into your arm could be the difference between life and death. And you choosse life.

And, a good decision could be deciding to get in that pick-up truck with the guy who says he’s got a job for the day at 10 bucks an hour. You know it’s not fair pay but you’re trying to save up to buy a safety helmet, work gloves, and steel-toed boots to get one on the big job sites that pay $25+ an hour.

By the very nature of having to choose between one course of action or the other, every time we make a decision, we encounter stress.

For each of us that level of stress is determined by our environment, circumstances, age, experiences, nature and ability to adapt depending upon the outcome of our decision.

Yesterday, because of my interrupted sleep the night before, I was really, really tired all day. I had a project I needed to get done for work and, even though I don’t work Mondays, I chose to do it yesterday rather than leaving it for today. That decision meant when I went to bed last night I wasn’t stressed about ‘the deadline’ today and had a really good night’s sleep.

This morning I feel rested and refreshed. Eager to meet the day and create something meaningful.

I’ve learned, with age, that putting off until tomorrow something I can do today only adds to my stress load. And, when I’m stressed, I do not sleep well.

Sleep isn’t just important. It’s vital.

In the homeless-serving sector, it’s often said that homelessness ages an individual 10 years. Life expectancy is shorter – not because of the dangers of homelessness. It’s shorter because of the stress load people carry and its impact on their physiological well-being. It’s also shorter because of poor diet, poor health care, uncertainty, stress and so many other factors including… a lack of good sleep.

Want to live well, healthy and vibrant? Get a good night’s rest.

It’s the right thing to do.

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Resilience is in all of us. It’s just, for some, access is blocked by life circumstances and events that lead to choices that undermine resiliency’s ability to play a part in creating a life of grace and ease.

And living a life of grace and ease, at any age, is, at least to me, a wonderful way to live.

When I make choices that undermine my body, when I think thoughts that disrupt my peace of mind and break down my confidence and belief in myself, I am not only weakening my resiliency, I am hurting the person I need the most in this life — me.

I need me to be strong, healthy, confident and full of grace to move through this world, creating better in my wake.

And to do that, I must take care of all of me — my whole body – head, heart, belly, torso, limbs, eyes, ears, mouth, skin, skeleton, arteries…. All of me.

And not just all of me – but all of the world around me for we are all connected. We are all part of this one planet. This one giant ball of matter spinning around the sun, giving birth, dying, regenerating, renewing, evolving.

We are all connected to everything. Part of the same matter, lifeforce, world.

And in this world, me, the individual, is a microcosm of the whole earth. When I stress my resiliency, I am stressing the resiliency of all the world around me.

Taking care of me, no matter my age, takes care of all the world around me, decreasing the stress I place on the world.

And that’s why taking care of myself as I age, being conscious of the choices I make is so important.

When I don’t, I put more stress on my body, the people who love me, the people and systems that are there to care for me when I’m not well or capable of taking care of myself, the world all around.

Limiting stress is good for me – it’s good for everyone.

And that’s what I’ve realized this week as we’ve explored ‘Resiliency’. If I want it to be strong and capable of supporting me when I really need it, I need to take good care of me in the here and now.

namaste

I Can’t Believe…. Believe it. It Happened.

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Some time ago, I met a woman who was struggling to end a relationship that was causing her emotional harm. “I can’t leave him,” she said. “He needs me.”

How does he need you? I asked.

She paused. “How?” She seemed surprised by the question. Flummoxed. Her eyes shifted to the left, the right, up, down. She fluttered her hands in the air around her face. “I don’t know… he just does.”

And what do you need? I probed.

She sighed. Shrugged her shoulders. “I don’t know… for him to love me like he did when we first met?”

What else do you need? I asked again.

She held her breath as she thought about the question. “I…. I need him to change.”

On a scale of 1 to 10, 10 being ‘he absolutely will’, how likely is that to happen? I asked.

She smiled sadly. “Zero”.

And is that what you want for the rest of your life and for your children? To be with a man who cannot change the things he’s doing that hurt you and, also them?

Recently, I met that woman again. Once she faced the truth that to create change in her life she had to change what she was doing, she left him. It wasn’t easy, she said, but she did it with the support of caring people in her life.

Once out of the darkness, she went back to school. Got a certificate in HR and was working hard to create a life of stability, joy and love for herself and her two children.

“I can’t believe I stayed with that creep for so long,” she said after telling me all the amazing things that were happening in her life.

Believe it. You did. I said. But, in believing it, don’t compare it by measuring the length of time. You stayed as long as you stayed, It was neither long nor short. It is simply the length of time you stayed. A moment in your life. Not your whole life.

That woman reminded me of me.

When I first got out of a relationship from hell, ‘couldn’t believe’ was one of the phrases I had to eradicate from my vocabulary.

Saying, “I couldn’t believe” was the gateway to the disbelief of something that had happened that I had participated in. It disempowered me. To build my resiliency, I had to acknowledge it, learn from it, grow through that learning and triumph over it, not ignore it or my role in it.

Saying, I can’t believe’ blocked all access to healing and resiliency.

For that woman, resiliency didn’t help her survive that relationship. Her inherent desire to LIVE did that. Where resiliency became her constant companion was in doing the things she needed to do to build her life after the abuse. With each step into living free of abuse, her resiliency strengthened her resolve to keep creating her own happiness, her own dreams, her own path.

We all come upon sticky moments in our lives, sometimes many sticky moments. Some big. Some small. Some short. Some long. Size and time are not the issue. Believing it happened is.

When we stop saying, “I can’t believe….” we open the door to possibility. We allow our resiliency to step in and strengthen our ability and resolve to grow, prosper, thrive and triumph over adversity.

In that resolve, we grow stronger.

Namaste.

Is it easier to be thankful as we age?

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The stillness of morning envelopes me like a warm blanket on a cool winter’s day. Outside, the sky is dark in the early misty gloom of dawn not yet risen. Inside, the glow of my desk lamp casts a halo over my fingers typing on my keyboard. Piano music plays softly. Beaumont the Sheepadoodle lies under my desk, his head resting on my feet. The gentleness of his snores warms my heart.

I am grateful for this morning.

Gratitude, the experts say, is good for your body. Your whole body of which the mind is part of the whole.

We, westerners, tend to separate body and mind as if the two are connected yet separate entities with one having the upper hand over the other whose purpose is to be the vehicle that carries it around.

They are interconnected. One brain. One body. One person. One. Whole. Being.

This is why gratitude is so important. Our thoughts are our body’s thoughts, not just our minds. Our thoughts become our reality. Our thoughts impact the entirety of our being — including our health. And, when we practice gratitude, we ignite endorphins that happily dance through our veins and arteries, filling our nervous system with feelings of joy. (At least that’s how I like to imagine them.)

There’s good news about aging and positive thinking!

According to this article in the Globe and Mail from October, 2015, “Neuroscientists have suggested older people have a sunnier outlook because the limbic system, particularly the amygdala, an area of the brain involved in emotional attention and memory, becomes less active in response to negative information. At the same time, older individuals maintain or even increase their reactivity to positive information.”

Yesterday morning, walking back from the park with Beaumont, I watched two city workers clean up the garbage left behind by the weekend visitors to the park. There was a lot of it.

As they worked they chatted. As they worked, they created inviting islands of green space free of garbage.

I watched and was grateful they were out so early in the morning making the park whole again.

I decided to share my gratitude.

I walked towards them. As they noticed my approach they both stopped working and watched me.

“I just wanted to thank you for making the park so inviting and clean!” I called out.

Suddenly, both their faces broke out in smiles. “You’re welcome,” one of them called out.

“Thanks for all you do to keep our city beautiful,” I said before moving on with Beaumont.

As I left, I heard one of them say to the other. “D’ya hear that? Someone appreciates what we do.”

I was smiling as I walked away. It felt good to give a gratitude bouquet to strangers. Especially as I truly am grateful for the work they do.

Their work is important. It matters.

I am grateful for my mind’s ability to remind me to not just think thoughts of gratitude, but to share them freely wherever I can.

Spreading gratitude is important. It matters.

I am grateful that with aging, I am becoming… more at ease with my power to spread gratitude.

I am grateful that with aging, I am becoming… more accepting of life’s gifts. More thankful for life’s beautiful moments. More capable of letting the not-so-nice moments fade as I pour love and joy into each moment I experience the gift of my life on this earth.

And I am grateful that there are people like University of Oregon neuroscientist and research associate Christina Karns, studying the impact of gratitude on aging. In the same G&M article (above), Karns is quoted as saying, “It’s [Gratitude] different than those sort of basic emotions, like happy, sad, fear, anger. So there isn’t going to be just one system in the brain that is implicated in gratitude.”

While happiness occurs in the brain’s immediate reward systems, gratitude is believed to also involve the cortical structures associated with higher order cognition and social reasoning, she says.

Gratitude is a whole-brain undertaking. And, as the brain is as integral to our well-being as the heart and belly, veins and arteries, limbs and skeleton, being grateful pays dividends throughout our body creating well-being and lightened spirits where ever it flows.

As we age, numerous studies have shown, we become happier. Apparently, we are, on average, at our most positive in our senior years.

I am making a conscious decision to flow in gratitude. Choosing to express it whenever I can, where ever I am.

I am grateful for all of you. Grateful for your presence. Your words of encouragement. Your sharing of your insights and thoughts. Your light. Our shared connection.

Namaste.