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…