Aging well

I recently read that in the U.S., 10,000 people daily will reach age 65 (retirement age). This begs the question: How prepared am ‘I’ to accept aging? 

It’s common in our culture to comment on another person as to whether they have “aged well”. It means that someone over age 60 looks young for their age and/or has kept their health and physical abilities. 

But aging well is more than skin-deep. Cosmetic surgery and implants don’t last forever. Our self-perception, how others perceive us, and how we think they perceive us, drives us to focus on appearances. We battle with ourselves attempting to prevent the inevitable: aging. In these mortal bodies, it is a losing battle. 

With age, people also battle with their desires and appetites. The comfortable American lifestyle permits us to satiate our desires for food prepared just as we want it, wine from specific vineyards or specialty beer from certain microbreweries. People have sex on-demand with their spouse or ‘partner’. Not only are their appetites met, these are met to their preferences. 

Which leads to the deeper battle, the interior one: we battle with ourselves. Ultimately, we are in a life-long battle with our own will. When the active season of our adult life is lived building attachments (and from those, expectations) to having what we want, when we want it, and how we want it, we set ourselves up for a tremendous interior battle in the later years of life. 

Conversely, the sooner we overcome our attachments, the sooner we experience interior freedom and the peace it brings forth. 

With age comes less ability to control emotions, especially anger. We lose self-possession and are less able to maintain control over our thoughts which spew out the mouth. After a life time of self-protection habits, one’s world seems to crash in on them as they lose ability to control people and orchestrate outcomes. Anxiety heightens. The awareness of one’s own mental changes taking place, like forgetfulness and confusion, brings depression. The neural pathways in the brain become chiseled by negativity, making it more difficult each day to pull out of the bad mood, cease angry blow-ups, or stop complaining. 

This severely affects one’s faith. How unfortunately common it is to see a faithful Catholic, once an active contributor to the vibrancy of their parish, weaken in their belief and their practice of it. They even cease going to mass, saying “I can pray at home”. They fall prey to sloth, self-pity and self-absorption; fear and anger overcome them. Seeds of shame and scruples once hidden deep in their woundedness sprout and quickly grow. All of these result in risking the loss of their final perseverance in faith to their eternal reward because: people attempt to make God comply to their own terms rather than cooperating with His grace according to His instructions. 

The people who truly age well are the ones who maintain peace while enduring the struggles of aging. Although the people around them marvel at their strength, few will take time to reflect upon how that strength was acquired. It is an interior strength acquired by truly living the faith. Walking the talk goes beyond the external practices, although these are certainly important. It requires an interior transformation: giving up opinions, attitudes, preferences, fears, and wounds to our Heavenly Father. Building this intimate relationship takes time but, from it, real trust in the Lord ensues.  No longer wrestling with their own will, their hands are open to receive His grace. They become a vessel of grace to those around them too. With interior strength that comes from Him alone, they not only persevere through the challenges of aging. They grow closer to God in the process of it. 

Those are the people who have peace in the worst strife. Meanwhile, the longer we grasp onto our opinions, attitudes, preferences, fears and wounds, the more harm these do us. They become instruments of our own destruction, beating us down. We each have the choice: to treasure our attachment to these so much that in our final season in life we become our family and caretakers’ nightmare? Or are we willing to begin letting go of them little-by-little starting now? 

Do not delay to turn to the Lord,

nor postpone it from day to day;

for suddenly the wrath of the Lord will go forth,

and at the time of punishment you will perish. (Sirach 5:7)

An old Jewish proverb states that a [burial] shroud has no pockets. We cannot take our attachments with us to Heaven. In fact, the horrible suffering of purgatory is the ridding of these internal attachments. It is a moral cleansing. And while still alive on earth, these attachments carry the risk of leading us away from the faith, giving up on God altogether, and possibly eternal damnation. The reverse is also true: overcoming attachments now, by the increase in Divine Intimacy this brings, leads to peace and foretastes of Heaven in this life. 

Aging well doesn’t start in the final season of life. Rather, it starts now by living in the grace of the present moment. 

He that shall persevere unto the end, he shall be saved. (Matthew 10:22)

Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam 😊

(Image by Pixabay)