Life after…

It occurs to me that we relate to our chronological age as something that we don’t control. And we spend an enormous amount of time and energy resisting this lack of control. A friend of mine overheard a 40-something woman recently tell a colleague, “Oh, I figure that I will be pretty well finished by the time I am 60, so I need to make hay while the sun shines”. She was talking about her love life, but it brought home the notion of how we all create expectations about the future and what we can or can’t do at a certain age. Our beliefs about the future all too often can become self-fulfilling prophecies.

The comment had me thinking about how people put predefined limits on what they’ll be capable of doing in later life…the gist of her comment was directed towards “I have to get everything fun and active done by 60, because after that there is no life”. Entire industries profit from this belief … Most people build aging as ‘limited possibilities’ or ‘no possibilities’ right into their ‘life plan’ through ‘retirement planning’…now there’s a whole arena open for discussion. Even the word ‘retirement’ itself includes the sense of being ‘tired’ in it…

© 2006 Jim Selman. All rights reserved.