I think about getting old all the time.
Not in a panic-y, anti-aging cream way. In a “what do I want life to feel like when I’m 80?” kind of way.
Crochet club? Mahjong mafia? Commune with the girls? I have some wild thoughts about aging, and I’m starting the work now.
Amongst Friends
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I feel like I’ve come so far in terms of undimming my light and stepping more into my power, but it’s the voices around me that encourage and remind me that keep me going.
If you’ve had a similar experience, I’d love to hear your thoughts and perspective.
Question for you: My retirement commune would have all the spa, sauna, and red light therapy gadgets; a room for pottery; and an epic mixologist.
What activity would be essential for you in the women’s commune?
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Transcript: Sign Up Now: Women’s Commune (Kidding, Not Kidding)
Someday, I think I'm going to write a book called How I Chose to Grow Old. Maybe I'll write that towards the end of my life, or maybe I'll write it now and call it How I Choose to Grow Old. I'm not sure anybody really cares what my specific choices are, but the point of the book is going to be that, as we get older, our choices narrow, right?
Our choices narrow in terms of what our body can do, and our choices narrow, or can narrow, in terms of the things we have access to, right? So when we're young, we have work, and we have kids, and we have lots of connections, and as we grow old, a lot of these fall away. And I think that is a source of a lot of kinds of loneliness and lack of purpose for older people.
And so the point of this book is going to be that if we want to have choice when we're older about how we're living our life and how we're feeling in our life, we have to fight tooth and nail now to start to expand choice for ourselves and make conscious, intentional choices for how we want to live our life now and set ourselves up for living our life later.
So, what does expanding our choice now look like?
First of all, choice, I think, implies preference. So we have to start getting in touch with what we like, what lights us up, what feels good to us, what we prefer, what feels meaningful, and what feels purposeful to us. This seems so simple, and yet the hundreds of women, I mean, honestly, thousands of women I’ve worked with, so many cannot identify what they like or what they prefer, or what feels good, because they've been so busy taking care of other people and figuring out what other people like and prefer and what they need that they have never built the practice or the muscle or the awareness to figure out what they like.
And so you end up serving other people, serving your family, serving your workplace. And then you get to a place where you're older and you don't necessarily have the avenues that you had when you were younger to have a life that feels, frankly, alive, that feels like you've got joy and adventure and learning and connection in it.
And so I think there are two aspects of it, right? There's the aliveness, the doing things you love. And then there's the connection, the doing those things with people you love.
And if you're like me, in your 40s, you have so much ability and opportunity right now to build scaffolding for those things: developing interests, finding other people who like those interests, whether it's, you know, playing golf or playing mahjong or crocheting or hiking or, I don't know, cooking or painting or learning, going to school, taking a course, learning a language, having a beginner's mind. Those things are so available to us right now.
And particularly when we are still, despite the brain fog of menopause, still in our cognitive prime, we're so primed to do all those things. And then, if we do them now, and we develop circles of people to do them with, and we develop places that we can do them, as it becomes harder when we're older…
I see this with my mom, who, gosh, she's fighting tooth and nail to have community and to have activity, but, you know, the body makes it harder and the brain makes it harder as you get older, and so she's got such a fight. But I think that setting yourself up for having those sorts of structures in place for yourself means everything.
And then, of course, there's the interests and the hobbies and the learning, but mostly, mostly it's the people. It's the people. Who do you choose to live out your life with?
And I’ve been talking with my girlfriends forever about the commune and building the commune and taking care of each other when we're older. And it's funny, every single woman I ask, you know, or I tell about this, this commune idea, every woman’s like, "I'm in. I'm in." Because we choose. Choose to be supported and in community. But we gotta put the work in to get there.
So if the title of my book is How I Choose to Grow Old, the tagline for my book is: I am going to set myself up to do what I love, surrounded by the people I love, and that work starts now. It starts today.
And that's kind of how I go about my life and making my choices now. I think a lot about growing older, which is kind of weird. I mean, maybe other people do at 47, midlife, it's an inflection point, maybe, but I think a lot about growing older and how I choose to grow older and how I choose to set myself up for that time in my life, starting right now.
I wonder whether you think about this. I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Thanks for listening. All my love to you.
