I think New Year's resolutions are a great idea because I am for the most part lazy and lacking in self discipline. If it were not for 1 January, I would float into the next 12 months of my life without direction or purpose but this year I am going in a different direction.
Since I began my study of ageing I have been immersed in life 50+, my own and others. I have interviewed women and more recently men, between the ages of 45 -102 from 8 countries. This project has changed the way I look at the passage of time. So this year instead of listing my resolutions I am going to risk beginning 2014 without the structure of promises made to myself. Instead, I will share the wisdom which has buoyed my life and lit my path since it was revealed to me because I have learned that there is an optional way to look at ageing. I have learned that the quality of my life over the next year will not be the product of my promised discipline but the natural consequence of my perspective and of how I greet whatever the universe sends me.
"Finding your way home begins with finally accepting first yourself and then the world around you."
"Life slows us down as we age, not to take the sprint from our last mile but to bring us back to wonder."
"The longer we live and the more we experience, the less able we are to fit things into neat packages, so eventually we live more comfortably with ambiguity."
"I feel this space starting to develop in my life. I find myself driven to arrange things so that there is more time between events, to give this space the room it may need to develop."
"I have found freedom in the failures of my life."
"Time makes better use of me."
"I don't have to be right all the time anymore . . . life is bigger now."
"I am old enough and wise enough to do dumb things"
"One does not close down as one gets older; instead aging for me is about the discovery of life that is not the fertile woman."
"As you lose things, physical things and roles in life, the essential person becomes more apparent."
"In growing older you grow from limited vision to limitless vision . . . so many boundaries disappear."
"Life is a journey from and to freedom"
I thought that I would make the best of getting older but I never dreamed getting older would make the best of me
Wishing you a happy, fabulous, fearless and free 2014
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