The Positivity of Ageing

From AMY JAMES

Image courtesy of Gerd Altmann at Pixabay

We have been socially programmed over many years to view ageing as a negative thing – with each year passing, providing us a convenient excuse to flex our moaning muscle on the things that we can no longer do as easily, or that creeping comparison to how things once were.

I recently asked myself: “What is age, exactly?”

Is age something we’ve been taught? Does it really exist?

Everything, of course, is perspective. We know that we work within a man-made measure of time. Time dictates to us the parameters of how we section our social constructs. Humans have used different forms of time over thousands of years, from the use of sundials and water clocks through to mechanical clocks that we use today. All of which is based around the positioning of the sun and the moon. And of course, we use this 24/7, 365-days-a-year framework to calculate our age.

But how did time and its movement become such a negative influence on age?

It struck me that as “time” has “progressed” (and I use those terms loosely), we seem to have increasingly detached ourselves from who we are, as individual human beings. From early school years, we are told to “act our age”, “grow up” or behave accordingly if you want to be treated as an adult. Then once we have aged to adulthood, we spend a considerable amount of that time longing to be back in a time that once was.

As a digital migrant, I still recall a time without the internet, so those ageist influences were all provided by other humans, and I’m pretty confident that this type of behavioural control has been enforced for a few hundred years or so. A mere speck of time of course, but enough to affect the masses and our continued generations. However, with the dawning of the internet, our perspective of age has shifted and perhaps accelerated into overdrive. We are presented with imagery that is deemed aspirational (nearly always unobtainable) and more so, given targeted algorhythms to tailor-make our experience, geared towards our age. Case in point – I am constantly sent targeted ads telling me that I can freeze my eggs. What a glorious reminder, that I am teetering towards the edge of my ability to procreate at the age of 42. Cheers!

Whether helpful to some or not, such an assumption gives yet another negative perspective of the age we find ourselves.

Is there never a time we can enjoy our age?

Perhaps if we started looking at ageing as a positive factor in our life process, maybe our whole life outlook would change. What comes with age is experience, compassion, empathy, knowledge, resilience, perspective, tolerance and life appreciation. And guess what? When you’re in your younger years and don’t possess all of these skills, then you have the absolute pleasure of learning them as you experience life over time.

Anatomically, it is inevitable that the biggest feat of engineering that carries our soul will begin to dwindle over time. But that is the effect of Earth’s gravity on biological science as we know it. It’s not man-made and is completely natural. So, should we really be using it as the main pillar of age expression?

When someone asks me my age, I’m increasingly answering with: “I’m getting there.” I’ve still got masses of experiences ahead of me and I’m using the ones past, to make them better.

Remembering who we are as individual human beings can simply mean living our experiences and, by doing that, our age becomes just another way of expressing what we’ve learnt.

So forget the numbers, live only by the experiences, and embrace every single one.

Amy James

Go to Amy’s website for more information about her holistic practice :https://becomewellness.co.uk/

Amy James has always been inspired by meditation and yoga. She says that her journey from ill health to self-realisation brought her to her work, guiding others into wellness. Her business BecOMe Wellness is the product of many years of learning, experience and practice including yoga, reiki and reflexology, in order to support others on their own individual journeys.