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.
Resilience is like a muscle. We have to feed it, care for it, and nurture it to build it up and keep it strong.
When we add stressors, when we don’t pay attention to our body’s needs, physically, emotionally, mentally, and spiritually, our resilience wanes.
Aging happens to the whole body. Every day, aging is changing us. From the moment we’re born to our last breath.
When we pay attention to our personal aging process, when we invest in ourselves, no matter our age, we create better for ourselves, and our world.
Now, I would love to say that I have done everything right for my body. But that would simply not be true. Fact is, I’m carrying extra weight. I eat unhealthy foods. I sometimes drink too much wine. I douse my mind in garbage TV. I don’t always get enough sleep. And I don’t always get enough exercise.
So… knowing what I know now about aging and how strengthening my resilience is a vital component of aging well, what am I willing to change? What am I willing to do differently?
Am I willing to, as the saying goes, put my money where my mouth is?
Perhaps that is the point of this exploration – for me. To awaken me to my responsibility and accountability in taking better care of this priceless vehicle I walk around within, breathe with, think with, move with, create with, love with, be with, every single day, every single minute of my life.
There’s something… heady… about that thought on this beautiful first morning of autumn. As we enter the season of letting go in preparation of winter’s arrival, I sit at the cusp of my own season of release.
It’s not ‘release’ as in the form of youth or ‘the things I used to do’ or even ‘life as I know it’, it is a release of the things I’m doing that do not nurture, care for, nor support me on this life journey that is so precious to me.
It’s the release of the thought that what I do to my body doesn’t matter.
It matters. Big time.
As the golden autumn leaves that hang suspended from the poplars outside my window become bathed in the warm golden glow of morning light breaking through the dark, perhaps this moment is my moment of awakening too.
Perhaps these past 6 weeks of writing and thinking and talking about and sharing in this ageless story of life have brought me to my own, personal autumnal moment.
And I smile.
I like the feeling of that. I like how that thought settles into my body with a warm and welcoming hello.
Am I willing on this autumn morning to walk fearlessly into the knowing that in this, my one life to live, I have the power to live every day my personal practices of ageless aging?
Am I willing to embrace the truth? have the power to be the change I want to be in my own life.
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.
When I worked in an adult homeless shelter, people always commented on how it must be a very depressing place to work.
I always replied, “It’s one of the most inspiring places I’ve ever worked.”
Every day I experienced a thousand people awakening in the morning to take another step. Their lives may have been in disarray, they may have lost everything and carried only the heaviness and indignity of the label, ‘homeless’, but they kept going.
That was inspiring.
I learned a lot about resilience at the homeless shelter. I saw it every day. From the young 18-year-old who was determined to finish his high school education to the 60-year-old woman who met her 20-something daughter, whom she hadn’t seen in several years, on the elevator one day. In that one meeting the mother made the decision to get help with her mental health issues so she could move out of the shelter and be a mother that could guide her daughter away from street life.
Resilience was everywhere at the shelter.
I remember Colin. An indigenous man who had left his family and community behind when the load of his past became too much to bear. When we met, Colin had been on the streets for many years and hadn’t seen his adult sons since they were school-aged children. “I want to be a man they’d be proud of,” he told me in the self-esteem-building class I was teaching.
In an environment where being sober was the anomaly, Colin was very proud of his three-month-old sobriety. Determined to see his sons again, he kept taking steps in the right direction.
I was in awe of Colin’s commitment and resilience. Life kept knocking him down and he kept standing back up and moving forward.
Six months after we met, a massive heart attack took away any chance Colin had of meeting his sons again. And though he lost that final battle, he died exactly as the kind of man he told me wanted to be, “A proud man.”
Colin, and so many others I met at the shelter, displayed the characteristics of resilience every day. Courage. Strength. A willingness to face life’s challenges without giving up, and a deep awareness that to take a different path they had to change the things that brought them to the shelter door.
Resilience can come in many forms. There’s physical resilience, mental resilience, emotional resilience, and social resilience.
At the shelter, resilience came wrapped up in a community that held each other up and gave what they could to one another, no matter how little they had. And, it came in the hope and belief tomorrow would be a better day as long as they made it through today, together.
Colin never got to that tomorrow where he met his sons and heard them say, “We’re proud of you, dad”. But, in getting up again and again and continuing to fight for his sobriety, he taught many others the value of holding true to yourself and your dreams.
It is a lesson that continues to inspire me today.
Episode 26 – Resilience week – Dare Boldly: No matter your age
Take the “What’s the Big Deal about Aging?” questionnaire!
I’m really interested in a) writing and talking about aging, and I’m really interested in your feedback so if you don’t mind taking a few moments, I’d love to get your feedback – it’s my very first survey so I’m learning as I go! (in other words, it’s not the best designed survey but it’s my first! 🙂 )
The smoke, while bothersome, doesn’t cause me discomfort. It hasn’t affected my walks with Beaumont nor my enjoyment of being in nature.
For my beloved, it’s a different story.
It’s been a long week. Confined almost continuously to the house, he still coughts and struggles at times to breathe. And, because he’s in a clinical trial, he can’t take any oxygen or drugs, other than his normal inhalers, to help alleviate the angst.
I am grateful for this clinical trial which may result in relief of his symptoms.
But, as medical science searches for ways to alleviate asthma and lung disease, it is uncomfortable for him, and I know, at times, terrifying. To struggle for breath. To feel always as if you are gasping for air.
I am grateful this week that I had chosen to write about gratitude. Grateful that in keeping my focus on its many graces, I have been constantly reminded to breathe into its healing powers.
It doesn’t mean I don’t struggle. I do. I worry. I fixate on wanting him to get up and get moving. On thinking there’s something else, he, or I, can do to make it better.
I get out of sorts. Short tempered.
And then, I come back to gratitude.
I am grateful for this practice. Grateful to have this safe space to return to centre, to find, as Val Boyko calls it, my middle ground.
I can’t ‘fix’ any of this. I can’t, as he asked me the other day, get him a new lung. What I can do is get him a cup of tea. Bake him my chocolate chip cookies he loves so much, even though I worry about their impact on my hips. He was once a professional football player. Weight is still not is issue, other than the need to put it on! Other than when I was pregnant, I have never had a problem putting on weight! 🙂
And, I can change how I respond when I’m feeling frustrated and worried.
I can stop thinking about how ‘this isn’t what I expected’ and turn instead into the love that brought us together, the shared joy in each other’s company.
I can stop wallowing in self-pity and awaken my desire to be playful, joyful, and heartful in our relationship.
I can stop being driven by fear and allow courage to draw me back into Love, peace, and joy.
Rather than thinking about the things we can’t do together, I can lean into the things we enjoy doing together. Play games. Read to each other out loud. Watch a movie together. Cook a meal together. And so much more.
I am grateful that we get to be together. That we get to share each day, together. And, that in being together, we get to support one another in living life to the fullest of our abilities and capacities, always giving the best of what we have to one another. Always keeping our vows in the forefront of our life together.
I am grateful that in writing about gratitude, I am reminded to put my own words into action.
After five years of enduring a relationship that almost killed me, freedom tastes so sweet. In the aftermath of being freed from that living hell, when anyone asked me, “How are you?” my first response was, “I’m alive!”
Being alive, after feeling like I was the living dead, and believing (and hoping) the reality of death was waiting just beyond my next breath, being able to say, “I’m alive” and mean it was pure joy.
Sitting here, almost 20 years away from that moment of release, it’s hard to remember how lost and alone, terrified and depressed I was.
What I can and do still feel, is the elation I felt, and still feel, with being alive.
And, while I haven’t quite mastered the art of being grateful for the things he did that brought me to the point of trying to unhook gravity’s hold on my body so I could simply fall into the ocean and be washed out to sea forever, I am grateful for the realization I carry with me today. A realization that came from having walked that path of abuse and self-annihilation so long ago. Life is a precious gift. It asks only that we fall in love with ourselves and all of life moment by precious moment.
There is not one moment of the past that I can change. Regretting that relationship and all the pain and harm it caused those I love is a journey of futility.
In living my realization that life is precious, I fall in love with the woman I was then, and the woman I am today and every day when I hold firmly to my belief in the precious nature of life and celebrate every breath as an act of freedom.
And in that realization, I embrace the deep knowing that I don’t need to be nor become grateful for the things he did. To live in freedom, I only need to live with a grateful heart full of love for this beautiful, fulfilling, love-filled life I live today.
My gratitude I know today is not based on what he did back then. It’s founded in knowing that what he did is nothing compared to what I do, every day, when I embrace everything in my life, the good, the bad, and the ugly, with arms, heart, and all my being wide open in gratitude and love.
Long ago, I fell into the trap of believing someone else held the answers to my life and could give me a shortcut to happiness. I am grateful that through that journey, I have learned the truth.
I am 100% accountable for my own happiness. In claiming my responsibility for my life, all of it, I set myself free of regretting things I did and that happened in the past as I say, “Thank you” for the good, the bad and the ugly. IT is all a beautiful gift opening up to the gift of becoming, me.”
And in that gift, I lean, with anticipation and joy, into all life has to teach me on how to live without regret so I can experience the wonder, beauty, and awe of all the world unfolding in its mystery and magic all around me.
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.
I love rituals.. Ritual activates my gratitude muscles.
This morning, while lying in the bath (one of my favourite morning rituals) I was reflecting on gratitude, and how I have gotten out of the habit of writing my gratitude list every day.
I smiled and shook my head in loving consternation at my humanness – it can be so easy to forget to do the things I know are healthy, healing and nurturing.
As I looked around to see if I’d remembered to put my journal on the little stool beside my bathtub, (and realized I hadn’t) I decided the time to act was now.
No pen. No papaer. Easy peasy. I always have my phone on the counter beside the tub — it controls my music.
Why not download a gratitude app?
Over the weekend I’d been researching gratitude and come across several apps during my search. One that looked interesting and got good reviews is, Gratitude.
Being a ‘when I have an idea I like to get to it!’ kind of gal, I picked up my phone (careful not to drop it in the sudsy water) and checked out the App Store.
Sure enough, Gratitude is the first app to appear in the long list. I did a quick peruse of other apps and decided I’d give it a try.
And so, while I soaked in the warm soothing waters of the bath, I created my first Gratitude List on my phone. In the process, I smiled. And laughed at myself. I mean really Louise – I’m grateful for morning poops? Well that’s not very sophisticated now is it? I let it stand. Some mornings, I am just that – grateful.
The app also has a section for building a vision board.
I checked it out.
And that’s where I came up against the big, bad, ugly, feelings of symbolic annihilation.
The Vision Board section allows you to post photos for different areas of your life that reflect what you are seeking to manifest.
Problem is, of the many, many, many photos for each section — Family, Friends, Health, Travel… etc….. there are relatively few, and I mean few, photos that I can relate to.
As an example, in the ‘success’ section I found a handful of photos out of many, many, many, that depicted an older adult — and they were all the same 3 different men, all in business attire, all white. (add some racial disparity to the mix too!)
I wasn’t deterred – the app does allow you to pull photos from your own phone — and I have lots of those I can include.
But what struck me was how subtle ageism can be – even when the app builders were trying to build an app that would allow people to strengthen their gratitude muscles, they (I’m hoping unintentionally) practiced symbolic annihilation (one of the challenges THIRD ACTion Film Festival is combatting through its amazing line-up of films and events – full disclosure, I sit on their board)..
See, ageism is subtle. I probably would not have noticed it if I hadn’t been scrolling through their photos before realizing I could add my own! It wasn’t until I realized I’d been scrolling and scrolling before finding one or two that fit my ‘mindspace’ that I realized what the issue was.
I’d say –Hey! Anyone want to build an app just for older people? but… that would actually defeat the purpose of this journey into how to age with grace and be grateful for it all.
Because a separate app, just for baby boomers for example, would actually be saying, we’re special and separate from all of you. And we want to keep ourselves that way ’cause you don’t understand!
At least I think that’s what it would say — please share your thoughts! I’d love to know what it says to you.
In the meantime, I’m adding this one to my list of gratitudes this morning – I am grateful for this app that will send me reminders to practice gratitude, and that reminds me, to not think of myself as invisible and powerless. To not sit back and allow synbolic annihilation to erase my presence because I tell myself, there’s nothing I can do, it’s just the way it is. I must use my voice, my words, my actions to stay relevant, present and above all, true to myself, doing the things I believe will create better in this world for all.
In other words, I gotta wear my age like a crown of precious jewels! Shining bright for all the world to see… Age matters! So does Gratitude!
Sparkle. Sparkle. Sparkle!
Namaste.
PS – I’m off to my physio appt this morning. If you’d like to listen to the video, please do come back later and I’ll have posted it!
I AM many things. A wife, mother, grandmother, sister, aunt, friend. Artist, writer, poet, story-teller. I love fiercely, care deeply, act with intention. No matter what my role, no matter how I am in this world, none of who I am is diminished by the label, senior citizen.
Sometimes, we wear a label as if it makes a difference to who we are and how we are in this world. A label is not our identity. It is not a reflection of our worth. It simply is what it is, a label of no value to the quality of our life. It’s only value is it works as a road marker to help us see where we are on the road of life.
A label sometimes serves to put us in a box. Sometimes, we call the box our comfort zone. Our familiar ground. Our ‘special place’.
What if there is no box?
What if we LIVE as if there is no box?
What if we choose to view our lives as limitless fields of possibility that greet us every morning with their invitation to run, wild and free, amongst the wildflowers blowing in the winds of change and opportunity, through the trees whose leaves are unfolding and dropping, unfolding and dropped in a continuous circle of renewal?
What if… There is no box!
It’s been an amazing week of fullsome conversation, sharing and for me, a lot of internal exploration, growth and learning.
Thank you. I am so very grateful for each of you. For this beautiful opportunity to keep growing and becoming more of me.
Have a beautiful, sunny-shiney bright kind of weekend!
We have those who fit the label ‘Senior’. We have, young adults, millenials, GenXers – GenYers – GenAnthingGoes.
That last one is a label of my own making.
It feels right for this age I find myself embodying with mind, heart, body and soul – I’m ok with who I am and how I am because I choose to love who I am and how I am becoming completely.
And in that statement, recognize that no matter my age, I am always becoming – more of who I am, less of who I don’t want to be, all of me – beauty and the beast, yin and yang, darkness and light, imperfectly perfect in all my human imperfections – with or without a label.
Year ago, when I was preparing for my first talk at a major conference about how I learned to live with joy and love after an abusive relationship, the organizers, after reading my talk outline said, “Okay. You fit into the “Victim Stories” category.”
No I don’t, I quickly replied. I am not a victim. I am a victor.
That distinction was extremely important to me. The label ‘victim’ is an emotionally charged one that says to me, I am weak. I am beaten. I am the underdog. I DO NOT want to be a victim. I AM NOT a victim. (and yes, I am sure there is a whole lot of unconscious bias going on in my head around that word!)
To be a victor is, for me, empowering. I can handle carrying that label. It feels expansive. Empowered. Strong.
Just as being labelled a baby-boomer feels open-ended. It says, I am of the generation who marched for women’s rights and burned bras. Who stood up to authority to ensure, ‘anything goes’ became a reality for gays and lesbians and so much more. It is full of limitless possibilities and as long as my ‘anything goes’ creates better in the world, is fair, kind and does no harm, then my anything goes is powerful!
The label ‘senior’ on the other hand… that is an emotionally charged one for me too. I don’t think I was ever a ‘junior’ human so why am I suddenly a ‘senior’ one?
It’s a challenging realization for me – perhaps my unconscious biases are preventing me from living into the possibilities of ‘seniordom’ whatever those possibilities are.
Or, perhaps, my resistance to living into the label ‘senior’ is actually my rebellion against doing ‘the safe thing/right thing/expected thing’.
I’m not sure.
What I am sure about is, I do not want to live up to nor down to an arbitrarily applied label of ‘their’ construction (whoever ‘they’ are.)
I don’t want to live ‘the label’. I want to live my life.
I want to live free to be, to express, to become all of me – consciously aware that my becoming is an evolutionary process full of possibilities.
Labels are handy for prescription drugs and supermarket shelves.
For we humans… labels can act as limitations to how deep, wide, wild and free we live our lives. And, until we confront the unconscious or conscious labels we carry, collectively or singularly, we will not see beyond the limts of that label all the beauty, mystery, magic and wonder life has to offer.
So here’s to the GenAnythingGoes – no matter your age!
Dare Boldly 