My Son and Daughter-in-Law are bemoaning and feeling their age it seems. They are 45 and 44 respectively. Here I am at 65, and they're worrying in their 40s! I don't remember being too concerned at being in my 40s. I remember turning 30 and being glad that I was finally old enough to be taken seriously. I never worried too much about birthdays until the big 5 0. I think that turning 50 was traumatic because I was newly single, going through a divorce. It was scary. Fortunately, I had a considerate male friend who brought me roses, took me to dinner and a movie, and helped me realise that my life wasn't over.
I read an article recently about going through life without being overly concerned about age. The trick seems to be to find ways to continue through life with the state of youth available to us if we don't lock ourselves down with beliefs that hold us in place. I had a friend who became a grandmother at about age 38. She was very glad to have a grandchild, but, somehow, she seemed to believe that her life was now defined by being a grandmother. She saw herself as someone who tended the baby and stayed at home in her rocker.Can you beleive that? At age 38! Just unreal. Fortunately, she eased off on the rocking chair, went to work and started the next half of her life. At least she didn't totally let steriotypical beliefs ruin her life.
We come to life in a state of youth, with all it's flowering before us.We can continue through life with the state of youth available to us if we don't lock ourselves down with beliefs that hold us in place. It's fine to be stable, but it's not fun to stagnate.
The author of the article, Margaret Stortz, is a minister. She gives 3 attitudes to help you keep living youthfully. Make no comparisons, Make no judgements, and delete your need to understand. When we make comparisons between ourselves and others, we are held in place by them. The ideas of "better than" or "less than" bind us and limit our views of ourselves. We get stuck, and that leads to feeling less young. When we make judgemants of ourselves or others, they are often censorious. They have a negative bite. This tends to take the life out of healthy, flowing thinking. We can always assess our actions, seeing what works and what doesn't, but judging things either good or bad, tends to put us and others into boxes and limits our feelings and actions.
The third idea, not needing to understand, can be harder for some than for others, but the need to understand can cause problems. It's normal to want to understand why something is taking place. But what if whatever is happening is beyond our understanding? By insisting on knowing why, we can sidetrack ourselves into dead end conditions. We can over anaylise and get obssessive about our problems. This can distract us from looking at life as an adventure, full of wonder and not really knowing where it will lead. We can ask, who am I?and where am I going, what will I be next month or next year? These questions can't really be answered. We can say what we intend for our futures, what we want to experience, but we need to keep an open mind, because sometimes, God has a much better experience for us than we hope for. We all want the best for ourselves and our loved ones. That is good, we need to expect the best. Still, we need to keep open to the possibilities that God wants us to experience, He can think much bigger than we can, and as a loving Father, he wants us to have the very best.
I know that to someone who feels like they are hanging on to life by their fingernails, looking at life as an adventure is difficult. Life can be a great trial, but sometimes, just the idea that life can be different may, at times be an incentive. The idea that there are people "out there" living with adventure and possibilities, may help them to believe sometimes, that someday they will get to that place as well.
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