What age would you be if you didn't know how old you are?

Looking in the mirror a few years ago, I saw that, apparently overnight, loads of wrinkles had appeared on my cheeks. How on earth had that happened? And come to think about it, could that occasional twinge of pain in my thumb be like my Mum’s arthritis? Could it even BE arthritis? But if my body had arthritis in it and was showing wrinkles, that surely meant I was ageing, didn’t it?

I found this idea very sobering. I remembered my granny being aged 65, and I thought she was definitely old. I was over that age. So according to that, it meant I, too, was definitely old. Wow. I didn’t FEEL old. But - what did feeling old feel like?

Words I had first heard from Wayne Dyer came to mind:

What age would you be if you didn’t know how old you are?

As I pondered it, I realised this question is one of liberation. Because when you take away the judgments associated with age at any level, whether you be 5, 25, 65 or any other number, all that is left is how you feel in your body that day, that hour, that moment.

Sometimes I feel sprightly and full of energy, like a young lamb frolicking in the spring fields. And other times I feel achy, tired and short-tempered, longing for bed and to enter the oblivion of sleep. Those are the two extremes of ageing, with of course many other levels in between.

When it comes to embracing ageing - this is a great question to start with - as it brings the kind of freedom that is needed to take a peek at ageing in a different way. A way that is distanced from how most in Western society look at it, which is as something to be put off and run away from for as long as possible.

Jane’s grandparents

With this question and answer supporting me from behind, I began to think of this last quarter of my life as an adventure. That turned out to be a good thing, as having let go of the company I founded in 2016, this last year has meant being able to lessen the amount of work I have been doing.

And doing less, of all things, not just work, has most certainly been an adventure! So far, it has mostly been to do with lack of identity. In the early part of the year, upon meeting someone new, and being asked what I did, I floundered and found it impossibly hard not to devalue how I was spending my time, which was mostly relaxing, gardening, baking and sewing. Nothing that, according to me, was of value to society in the way I had been used to. I was slightly distressed that I wasn’t writing, as that’s what I thought I would be doing, having had little time to create in this way in the previous two years in particular.

But I didn’t feel moved to write, and I had promised myself that I would not be going back to work, or even doing anything that I didn’t have a full ‘yes’ for. I’ve learnt to trust that if I don’t feel a full yes in my body, mind and soul, then it’s a ‘no’.

This apparently applied to writing too, even though I love writing. The end result of all this is that most of 2024 has been spent waiting to see what wants to happen next through my body, as opposed to deciding from my mind what IS going to happen next, and then doing it. Quite different.

It's taken a while to understand that embracing was the right word for this ageing adventure, which has been brought on by the fact of my age. Last year I started to receive my state pension, which kicked in when I was 66. This went a considerable way to allowing me to do less (although I now appreciate what a sensible idea it would have been to be saving into a private pension from day one of self-employment!)

But there you go, I have been able to take some down time and realise that if I really was going to age (yes, it was going to happen to me too, as well as everyone else!) then
I might as well go wholeheartedly on this journey, rather than reluctantly.

Jane and her first husband, Philip

That word wholehearted was one that was familiar to me. After my first husband died in 2011, while coming to terms with that death, I had recognised that in our twenty-year marriage, I had not always had an open heart. In fact, I don’t think it was ever fully open. I promised myself that if I was ever lucky enough to meet another man, I would keep my heart open, and in that way atone, at least to some degree, for the holding back in my first marriage. I couldn’t imagine meeting another man with whom I would have such a good connection, but I also couldn’t quite imagine being alone for the rest of my days either.

In 2015, I was very fortunate, and extremely grateful, to meet the man who is now my second husband, just after I had published my memoir, Gifted By Grief. The writing of this had gone some considerable way to allowing me to appreciate still being alive and what that meant.

Jane and her second husband, Ian

In the early days of a new relationship, with someone who had also been widowed, I reminded myself of my promise to keep an open heart. There were many days in the early years when I had to take myself off out for a walk and ‘give myself a kind, but clear, talking to’ about that promise.

The notion of wholeheartedness has become something very familiar to me; and now I am getting a chance to apply it to ageing.

Hence the name Embracing Ageing, the weekly newsletter I publish on the Substack platform.

Embracing, according to the Cambridge Dictionary means ‘to accept something with great interest or enthusiasm’. I would say that includes wholeheartedness too. Great interest I find easy; some aspects of ageing I might find more challenging to accept at all, let alone enthusiastically!

But accepting is essential if you want to live your final quarter of life with grace, gratitude and knowing it is a gift. Even if your physical body is in pain, limited, and/or your circumstances have changed or are changing.

It’s like that old saying ‘what you resist, persists’. It’s not that what is there stops being there if you don’t resist it; it’s just that when you accept it, the enormity of its presence can be allowed in, at which point, paradoxically, it is much less enormous. However, you can’t pretend to accept in order to lessen the enormity of age; it doesn’t work that way round, although the ego would like to have us think it does.

Let me end with a lovely story of two of my colleagues, a bit older than me, who are bringing humour to their own ageing adventure.

One has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s, the other is having cancer treatment, and both are being affected by their ability to walk easily. In a situation where both could be complaining, commiserating, or just feeling plain awful, in fact they are often overcome with giggles and fits of laughter. Why? Because it’s a regular occurrence for them to dare each other to ‘to race you to the end of the driveway’, ‘hop up the pavement’ or ‘use your sticks to scamper ahead like a dog’. What many would find a huge challenge, (which they do too, understandably) they can allow a lightening of an apparently endlessly dark situation by inviting black humour to accompany them.

We come back to how we think about what ageing means. And what choice we make on a daily, hourly, minute-by-minute basis as regards our own situation.

It’s not that we should disregard or dismiss the uncomfortable feelings, thoughts or physical pain. It’s just that we relate to it differently. We do that by accepting what is happening; from there you get the opportunity to embrace the situation. And it’s from this place that you can look over the shoulder of what you are embracing and choose to see what might be on the horizon from a wholehearted place of love.

Jane’s substack is embracingage@substack.com