Recently, I had a great conversation with my friend and colleague Gaea Yudron, just back from an extended trip to Mexico. She was trying on the ex-pat lifestyle, drawn to Mexico in part because of its more respectful attitude towards aging. For many reasons, which you can best discover by following Gaea’s blog, she’s back in the US—Oregon, actually—to stay.
It was something that Gaea said in passing that sparked me to write this blog. She mentioned that returning after her extended absence, she felt that attitudes towards aging in the US had undergone a noticeable shift.
Is this true? Is all the hard work by so many of us, whether private or public, to defy the stereotypes paying off? As I look around my world, the answer is a definitive YES. Whereas I was once terrified of the prospect of aging (as captured in the early chapters of my book Fierce with Age: Chasing God and Squirrels in Brooklyn), I now embrace aging as a wild but fulfilling ride. I once thought of spirituality as a way to make aging more acceptable. Now I see aging as the heart, essence and vehicle of spiritual transformation. Aging, in and of itself, is a mystical practice.
As followers of Fierce with Age, the Digest of Boomer Wisdom, Inspiration and Spirituality, know, I’m far from alone in this. Lately, there’s been a quickening of tele-summits, conferences and blogs about spirituality and aging. There is surely something new afoot.
Of course, we still live in an unabashedly ageist society. There is discrimination coming at older people from virtually all sectors of society. Older people are laid off first and hired last; we are thought of by many as a burden to society and a political liability; images of youth as beauty continue to abound. But thank God there are a growing cadre of elder warriors, many of them members of the Conscious Aging Alliance, who are keeping these issues front and center.
That said, nothing combats ageism better than seeing older men and women who role model all the qualities and potentialties of what it means to not only grow old, but whole. So thank you Gaea, for not only noticing the change, but being the change.
