Becoming Ageless

Someone important to me told me today that I have a "classic beauty." Asking him what he meant by that, thinking that perhaps he meant I was getting older and he‘d noticed the difference, he instead explained that I "have a beauty that never ages." And that was enough for me to start thinking about so many things. First of all, thank you, dear. You made my day. I came to the conclusion that I should feel flattered. A general and common thought goes with what Suzanne Somers teaches worldwide, about how menopausal symptoms such as weight gain, diminished sex drive, hot flashes, and difficulty sleeping had turned her formerly happy life into a misery, leaving her feeling cranky, tired, and irritable around the clock. Her efforts to regain her mind, body, and quality of life led her to discover bioidentical hormones—natural hormones that mimic the hormones produced in our bodies—which are almost completely lost with aging. The world knows how to be cruel. We assume that an old person is tired and a young person unreliable. Generally our assumptions are followed by actions. If we treat young people as being irresponsible, they may tend to act that way. People are prone to act as they are expected to act. Robert Butler said, “Ageism can be seen as a process of systematic stereotyping of and discrimination against people because they are old, just as racism and sexism accomplish this with skin color and gender.” On the other hand, growing older is not necessarily the negative side of aging; it is the accompanying degeneration of the body that we must try to negate to make aging more acceptable. That means physical aging comes to us all, and antioxidants, free radicals, baggy eyes, herbs, drug interactions, etc., can make us crazy if we worry too much about it. Today’s world, in the battle against instant gratification, the most potent skill of all is also the simplest: patience. Patience is a virtue of maintaining a balanced emotional control, without losing calm over time. It consists basically of tolerance for errors or unwanted events. It is the ability to endure discomfort and difficulties of every kind, any time or anywhere. It is the ability to persist in a difficult activity, keeping our self-control and believing that you will get what you want in the end. It is to be steadfast, waiting for the right time for certain actions, to wait on the understanding that peace has not yet been obtained. It is the ability to hear someone, calmly, carefully, without haste; or the ability to get rid of anxiety. Tolerance and patience are safe sources of support that we can use and trust in any situation. Being patient is to be polite, be humanized, and to know how to act calmly and with tolerance. Patience is also a charity when practiced in interpersonal relationships. Now I have a question: If we strive so hard to develop patience toward others, why don’t we see that we need that for ourselves as well? Patience is a challenge to master because at first it feels as if it’s going against our nature, but the opposite is closer to the truth. Patience, when mastered, is one of the skills most conducive to fulfilling our nature. Our nature as human beings is to create our way of life. There is no more powerful tool for that job than patience. Our greatest achievements are accomplished over time, with considerable dedication and perseverance. Neither of these qualities would be possible without it. Patience is a virtue. Having a positive attitude toward life requires patience, more than anything else. But, it is also a skill, a learnable skill that can be mastered by anyone. It’s fulfilling, once it allows us to relax, to regain self-control, to restore our sense of well being and balance in the middle of chaos, allowing us to rise above and understand the forces that, in the first instance, look like they want to destroy us, but, with patience, can be made to work for us. We learn patience exactly the same way we learned every other skill we now possess, through practice. Oh well…what has this to do with becoming ageless? I answer. It has to do with a Positive Attitude to see life as a succession of learning opportunities, whether good or bad experiences, instead of a war against our figures. Animals spend their lives locked in a cycle of instinct. When they are hungry, they eat. When they hear a loud noise, they run. When they are attacked, they fight. When they come into season, they mate. They live the way their genes and their environment have programmed them to live because they have no choice. But we do. We can think that we too are programmed by our genes and by our environment. But we can transcend our programming. We have been given the awesome power not just to respond to what the world throws at us, but to choose our response. We can break the chain of events that has shaped us and learn to shape ourselves. We have been given the God-like power to participate in our own fate. The challenge is to wake up for our own strength, to the role we play in our own destiny. We control our environments. If our current environment is causing entropy, then we can change it. Each person needs to discover what guidelines work best for him. Each one of us has a unique set of experiences and only we can know when we feel most at ease and confident in our environments. Being content with our environments also influences our health. Even if our genetics and experiences have carved us into what we currently are, we can self-direct our existence and redesign ourselves. Age is another mechanism of control that society likes to perpetuate. I love agency in everything and I love my Lord and Savior to have shown that I could keep it in this life and forever. I can choose what I think, do, and say. The moment we understand that our life is whatever we make of it by choice, we will awake to an astonishing new world. First, we feel humble. After, empowered. Humble because life is a gift, powerful because I’ve been given the most potent gift of all - the power to choose. And we can only exercise this power if we are awake. To be awake means to grow up. All of this is exactly what I need this year to make the changes I need, physically, mentally, professionally, personally, and spiritually. Once we realize that we can give ourselves what we want, we’re no longer content to rely on others to get it for us. Nor are we willing to accept only what the world feels like giving us. The moment we realize all that we can give ourselves, we refuse to settle for less. We feel a greater sense of freedom, possibility. Our limitations are limitations no more. We become realistic, and seeing the big picture is easier. The bad dreams of the past lose their power over us, in the exact moment we awake. After I heard today that my beauty is ageless, I thought about the knowledge I have of eternity. Believing that I will live forever helps me not to believe in aging. People who are young at heart tend to look younger, whereas those who are very conscious of their age and who comply with its doctrines tend to look it, as if the thoughts and feeling of aging are the very cause of its physical signs, rather than the conventional view, which says that it’s the other way around. Our thoughts do affect our physical well-being. The higher self, the eternal being that we all are. It’s not just our bodies; it’s us. Life is just a temporary focus to experience life through a body, and in this are included our relationships, finances, everything. This perspective gives us back all our power. This perspective keeps life energy flowing through us without the resistance of a belief that life is happening to us. We create our life. We are making it happen. That means that, when our time comes, we don’t die. We just change focus. We just stop looking through this body’s senses. And we do it all the time, I guarantee. We are eternal in nature. We are manifesting this life as well as all the other physical and non-physical parts that are not focused in this life. We focus on living our life, not on how old we are. Announce our age and be proud of it; embracing all stages of life is healthy. The external appearance of our physical body may be determined by the amount of light developed by us, with patience, recognizing we are eternal beings, in our actions. Educating our personality, accepting and allowing ourselves to change our attitude for the better, will bring the feeling that aging is a gift as well. Only an attitude of pure thoughts, and a high degree of unconditional love for oneself and others, will maintain our light in our being. “Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” (Matthew 19:19) As visionaries in our own rights stretching beyond the constraints of yesterday’s and today’s limitations, we are on the journey to forever life, adding the quality of life. It’s a future where we can grow healthier and more youthful as long as we wish, reinventing ourselves to be whatever and whomever we desire, and He teaches us to be. He is ageless. And that is true perfection.