Are You Aging Way Too Fast?

How your language can dig you into an early grave

A few months back I was in a local chapter meeting of the National Speaker’s Association here in Denver. We have the largest chapter in the nation, and from this chapter we have regularly seeded the national leadership of NSA with presidents. Lots of talent here, people making high six or seven figures, experienced authors.

So when one particularly prominent woman was asked to speak about her success, she had a rapt audience.

At one point she made this breathtaking statement:

“As you know, we ALL slow down past fifty.”

Well, sister, you clearly don’t get out much.

For all the traveling this person does, she lives in a bubble. An opaque one at that. As someone who considers herself a thought leader (a term I find utterly hilarious, considering that at least 87% of all the people on Linked In claim that they are thought leaders and Ninjas and really believe they’re being original) she is seriously out of touch not only with reality, but with her responsibility as said “thought leader” to not try to speak with authority for nearly eight billion people.

That, and her responsibility to not spout ageist, foolish comments that every single badass past-fifty friend of mine could poke Delaware-sized holes in. Colorado is full of such folks, as is the world at large. Including every culture where physical labor is a regular part of daily life.

Language demonstrates where we leak. We leak our prejudices and our fears. As we speak, we also cast our futures.

When you and I worry incessantly about aging, we are accelerating our aging process.

When you and I make or write such ageist and patently wrong comments about the process of evolving into our later years, not only do we cripple those around us with prejudice, but we hamstring ourselves. To wit:

The other day, my buddy Helen Cassidy Page penned this piece which absolutely nails this kind of dishonesty right on the button nose:

I was going to build on it but I can’t. She says it all.

I have no problem making fun of myself, my dentures, my sore right hip, my various injuries, whatever. My body is aging.

But I am not, by any stretch of the imagination, old.

I am in fact far younger, as is Helen, than the hordes of people who have bought in hook line and sinker to the absolutely brutal lies that after fifty you just slow down.

A few years ago I was heading up the side of a steep hill in Myanmar with a panting, overheated guide half the mountain below me struggling to keep up. I was in my early sixties. Slow down? He was 30, and terribly concerned that I might not be able to keep up. I had to stop and wait for him in the 115 degree heat and 98% humidity.

Not luck. Not genetics. Just hard work. And no, there’s nothing easy about it. Being healthy and vibrant late in life, ensuring that you and I have options, takes work.

Worrying about aging is a useless anxiety, which adds a horrible layer of equally useless terror on top of everything else in life. What’s worse, since there is nothing you can do to stop aging, the feelings of hopelessness make that worry even worse. These things tend to feed on one another. And with all due respect for our universal desire to be young, look young forever, the sooner you and I can let go of that pipe dream the better.

Lisa Wathen wrote about saying hello to her belly recently. What. Does the appearance of a baby muffin top suddenly drop her brains and abilities to instant decrepitude? Suddenly she’s useless to all of us cuz she doesn’t have the perfect waistline?

If you and I wouldn’t throw her to the wolves simply for having a bit of a muffin top, then why on earth are we doing that to ourselves? Why would we punish ourselves, hate ourselves for what we cannot possibly help?

Part of how you change the conversation is to find role models. People who are living out loud, living the way you would love to be living later in life. You’ll realize those people are everyday, normal people who simply make different choices, that they aren’t “amazing” at all- at least in that way that those people are necessarily super geezers or outliers. And there are lots of them-us- around. Older women in particular are invisible in our culture, unless you’re a movie star. These active, engaged, smart, interesting, healthy people are everywhere. We just don’t tend to sell anti-aging products as well as fear does.

Just different choices, which creates options. You can too.

However it’s incredibly hard to see yourself as vibrant and strong and active and powerful if you have no role models.

Mine died at 91 a few years ago. Meg was my mentor for 33 years, a lifelong athlete. She fundamentally changed my understanding of what it means to age. She was working out with a trainer several times a week until shortly before she died. And she was heading up and actively engaged in multiple companies that were dealing with clean water issues. AND she was traveling. AND she was reading three newspapers a day and consuming books (I bought plenty for her). Talk about a role model. Dear god.

If you don’t have that reference point, and media will not give it to you, you have to find them.

Right now Helen is working a new challenge for core work: holding a plank longer and longer. Last I heard she was up to two minutes. As I write this, I take breaks every 20 minutes to do kickboxing, pull-ups, weight work and pushups. Not a goddamned thing that’s amazing about either of us. We’re just taking care of business. Our bodies happen to be older, but we are simply Taking.Care.Of.Business.

I think nothing of putting a ladder against my roof and cleaning the gutters. I think nothing of picking up a damned heavy couch and moving it around the house. That’s nothing. I’m barking at 70. I am not an outlier. I expect my body to perform and I by god put in the work, as does Helen, to keep me in shape.

There’s nothing lucky about it, a word that is hurled at me quite often. It’s been my longstanding experience as a journalist that when I do profiles of those who are living full-on, out-loud lives, they put a great deal of hard work into it. Nothing lucky about sweat, effort, and not giving up or in.

My body does what I expect it to do, because I train it accordingly.

We are working on our bodies like responsible human beings. Being old doesn’t have a damned thing to do with it. We do these things because they are hard. Not because we’re old. But because doing the hard things keeps us in life at an extremely high level. Because taking care of our bodies allows us to take care of our minds, our emotions, our souls.

Because if we want to come into the fullness of our being it is going to take damned hard work. That hard work requires functional fitness. If we are beset by illness, this or that disease or irritation, it gets hard to focus on the incredibly difficult work of the soul. Because ultimately when we can let go of the sick attachments to fleeting youth we can spend time on what really does matter: Character. Competence. Mastery. Giving back. Mentoring. Just for starters.

We hardly have earned the right to advise the next generation if you and I don’t set an example worth emulating.

Because when accidents or illnesses do happen, and of course they do, we are far better equipped to navigate them. Look, there are people for whom this does not apply. If someone is already in the grips of an awful disease or is seriously disabled, of course this isn’t relevant. I’m talking to those of us who can indeed do something, and that is most of us, at most any age.

As I get ready to sell my house and look at a property or two in Oregon, I am also researching kick boxing and martial arts courses near me. Kindly, why the fuck NOT? I have new interests all the time. New classes, new physical challenges, new everything.To not do so is to age rapidly and badly. I work on my balance all the time. Because it’s hard. Because it pays off. Not to show off but because when I fall down I like being able to bounce back up. I did that with a broken back in Kazakhstan in 2017. I earned that. You can earn that. But only if you consistently do the hard things. The uncomfortable things.

Never once in my entire long life did I expect to deteriorate, slow down or lose strength. I have always and forever operated under the idea that you adapt as necessary for injury, but you keep on training for an Olympic-quality life.

Why is it such a huge deal that people- men, women, anyone- later in life are marathoners? My new Medium buddy Rosennab, a PhD, is 57, a marathoner and a fourth-degree black belt in Taekwondo. Why should this be such a big deal? Why should this be so amazing? She and Helen and most of my other very interesting and smart and capable friends who are later in life are doing much the same.

That we are doing it past 55 does not by itself make us “amazing.”

Rosenna didn’t even start running until she hit forty:

Plenty of my Medium peeps punch weights, do yoga, run distances. Plenty of them are fully engaged. Many of us have spent decades battling eating disorders and anxiety about a quarter of an ounce, counting almonds out like gold nuggets onto a plate. They pepper my comments with stories about what they have overcome and what that hard work won for them:

OPTIONS.

When you use language like, well, I’m just getting older. Or, people past sixty are vulnerable. Or, I hope I can do that at your age. Or, any sentence that starts with “the older we get, the less we can…..” who says? All due respect to all my fellow writers who are funny and smart and interesting, this is a gauntlet. Are you spreading ageist propaganda simply because it’s said so often we take it as fact? Because media does nothing to help, for good luck finding photos of uber-active, healthy, powerful older women (in particular, but it’s not much kinder to men).

When you and I write these things we are effectively planning an early demise. I understand where this horse pucky comes from. But you and I don’t need to spread it any further to fertilize the ageism that’s already SO attacking young people that they fear turning twenty.

Gerascophobia is a very real thing. It is being fed by all this ageist crap.

What struck me the most about Helen’s comments was this message (which I have here adapted for my own selfish purposes):

If you think that simply being upright for a few moments and being coherent enough to text or talk on the phone or hit the floor and do a few yoga poses post sixty is amazing, you are in effect already digging your grave. For your expectations about what it means to age are horrific indeed. You’ve already bought the farm, drunk the Koolaid and been brainwashed that aging is totally fucked up. Your options narrow to a pinprick: the rocking chair and the TV remote. Gee. That sounds exciting.

If that works for you, go for it. That will completely, utterly and totally fuck up the remainder of your life. Because every second of every day of every week and month and every year you are aging. So if getting old is just totally fucked up….well then.

You’ve fucked yourself up RIGHT NOW.

Which kindly, and with all due respect, is precisely what all the massive conglomerates behind the so -called wellness industrial complex, cosmetic industries, the medical and pharmaceutical folks and all the rest of them count on you to believe.

Because you will, and too many do, spend untold treasure doing the one thing you can’t do: turn back the clock. Your desperation to chase what can’t be captured will cost you the rest of your life, your retirement, and your sanity along the way.

You are aging. But you can age well, age smart, and stay youthful.

There are four things you and I can do to stay amazing at ANY age. You don’t have to do them. But if you do, you will, like those I’ve listed here, find yourself exploding later in life.

1.Get off your ass and move and move and move and move and move. Disabled? So am I. So is Terri DelCampo-Nelson, who is chair-bound. She exercises. Doesn’t stop her. She’s lost weight, too. Be fit. Not thin. Exercise for functional fitness. To wit:

2. Eat intelligently for your body, your age, your activity level. Mostly plants. Stop with the dieting bullshit and Just Eat Well. Diets don’t work. Stop with this thin insanity. Eat to be fit. Eat for functional fitness.

3.Have a purpose. Not getting thin. Thin is meaningless. Have a life purpose. Something that gives you meaning. Helen at 80 writes and edits. Rosenna, at 57 coaches and changes lives that have been damaged by sexual abuse. At 67, I do adventure travel and write and massage huge animals. My buddy Margaret Kruger flies airplanes and scuba dives and writes. Expert at all three. She’s 67. This is a fraction of what each of us does. Nothing amazing about any of it. We are just fully in life, and we don’t drink the corporate Koolaid.

4. Have friends. People who love you as you are, not as they would have you be. People who have your back and love you enough to call you on your bullshit. We all have bullshit. No way around it. Friends can smell it a mile away while we spritz perfume on our piles of manure.

If you would like to live a long time (most of us do) but you don’t want to age badly (ditto) then ditch the bullshit about how aging is fucked up.

Because by the time you’ve read this far you’ve already aged that much closer to being old.

If you’re lucky, your body will get old. But you don’t have to be elderly.

Want to be amazing at my age? Helen’s age? Any age? Do the work. Put in the time. You’ll be aging as you do. Maybe, just maybe, you’ll be able to walk and chew gum by the time you get to our age.

If you’re really lucky, you might just be able to keep up with the rest of us helpless, aged, ancient, creaky cranky old farts who climb mountains, fly airplanes, kayak oceans, raft white water, ride horses all over the world, rescue large men from the ocean, hold a plank for more than two minutes….

Yep. Doddering old ancients. Vulnerable, pitiable. All. Fucked. Up. Indeed.