Aging and Loss
I think that one of the reasons aging has such a negative connotation in our society is that, although we think about the negatives, we don’t talk about them. No matter how positive our attitudes, we all still have thoughts about aging that are not always positive; instead, they are often scary and sad. If I had to guess what bothers us the most about aging, I would have to say it’s probably loss. Maybe talking about and examining these thoughts can help us find ways to handle the feelings that they create.
As we age, we lose loved ones, spouses, and friends. But there is one thing that we never lose: our essence, our sense of self. Who we really are never changes, no matter what our chronological age. Most of our lives, everything is about gain; gaining our independence as we grow older, gaining our education, gaining our ideal lifestyle, gaining a family of our own, and finally, enough money to retire. Suddenly, it all begins to go in the other direction. It begins to feel like life is more about loss than any gain. There is no disputing that we lose spouses, friends, and relatives; we lose some of our abilities, we lose some physical strength. But there is one thing that we never lose. I often talk about our accumulated wisdom because it is our wisdom, our intelligence, our personality, and our character that never changes. As a matter of fact, that is always being enhanced and continues to grow no matter what our chronological age. We can continue to grow our intelligence; we can continue to grow in character; we continue to grow in wisdom, and now it’s our time, our chance, to use all of this to leave a better world than the one we came into.
Everything in our lives, every event, good or bad, has created a fiber, and these fibers are interconnected as we get older. Eventually, they create the fabric of our lives. This fabric is ever enduring. It will influence many people who come after us. It will influence our children and their children. Each one of us will have an ongoing influence in this world. Knowing this, we learn to accept the loss. Everything is intertwined, so although, as we age, we feel loss, it is only loss of the temporary things that have come and gone that we feel. Each one of us, just by living on this earth, contributes much more than any of the things that we have lost.
Our lives and encounters with others continue on after we are gone. We need to celebrate life every day because life is so much more than just our number of years here on this planet. We are all intertwined; we all come, and we all go, and we all contribute! So, when we are overwhelmed by the losses, we have two choices: we can dwell on them and let them affect our remaining days, or we can choose to focus not on the threads but on the fabric of our lives.