So much for checking in regularly on my adventures with sageing this year! It’s the end of September, and whilst I have been steadily reading and working through the books I laid out to guide me on this path, much of what I have been unearthing is too personal to share in such a public forum. Combined with having Mr Collier home for a solid year and my desire to spend a lot of face time with him and settle into this life rhythm with him, I haven’t made the time to write much for either the blog or my newsletter.
However, I have started synthesising my expedition into some shareable points.
For many months, I felt I wasn’t progressing with this whole sageing thing. I was none-the-wiser, or so I thought. I questioned whether it was hubris on my part to seek wisdom. And what did it mean anyway?
I believe now that I am in the preparatory phase for entering into sagehood to become the wise older woman I seek to be. You see, I am not quite old enough to walk those hallowed halls, but at the same time, I am too old to be firmly situated in the first half of my life, where the focus was on establishing a family and a home. I am past that.
I wrote last year about feeling like I was stuck in liminal space. In the transition between worlds. I was frustrated. Now, though, I can see that I need to put the demons of my first half to rest and take from them the things that can serve me now and take back the power that they sucked from me. I must dig deep and examine myself in the deepest, darkest areas, which you can imagine is not an easy task, but it must be done if I am to harvest the lessons learned and make the necessary changes. I have been feeling ALL of the feelings, which is still a surprisingly tricky thing to do, given that I left high-control religion more than a decade ago. For those unaware, high-control religion denies and suppresses emotions and feelings, so I must continue to learn to identify those feelings that have been previously deemed bad, to name them and to work through them.
You cannot separate knowledge from contact with the ground. Actually, you cannot separate anything from contact with the ground. And the contact with the real world is done via skin in the game—having an exposure to the real world, and paying a price for its consequences, good or bad. The abrasions on your skin guide your learning and discovery.
— Nassim Nicholas Tassib
So, the happy news is that I can recognise that I have been on this path and doing the work for longer than this year’s structured push. I have been defanging my past for years, but I hadn’t been assimilating the good things that had also been buried with the bad and using them as impetus for growth.
All of this is part of a broader healing journey that allows me to recognise my shadow self, forgive myself and others, and root out residual hurts and bitterness. We cannot move forward and have a fulfilling elderhood with all that still festering in our subconscious. And so the work must be done.
Maybe the journey isn’t so much about becoming anything. Maybe it’s about un-becoming everything that isn’t really you, so you can be who you were meant to be in the first place.
— Paul Coelho
Another side-effect of this adventure is that I can more recognise the ageism rampant in our Western society. Everything from condescending comments to institutional biases to the billions of dollars poured into the beauty industry for both men and women to deny ageing and stay forever young (productive and worthwhile) breeds a horrible attitude within us all, one that can significantly decrease our lifespan. Positive ageing can add as much as seven years to a person’s life. Why deny myself that?
Women have another option. They can aspire to be wise, not merely nice; to be competent, not merely helpful; to be strong, not merely graceful; to be ambitious for themselves, not merely for themselves in relation to men and children. They can let themselves age naturally and without embarrassment, actively protesting and disobeying the conventions that stem from this society’s double standard about aging. Instead of being girls, girls as long as possible, who then age humiliatingly into middle-aged women, they can become women much earlier — and remain active adults, enjoying the long, erotic career of which women are capable, far longer. Women should allow their faces to show the lives they have lived. Women should tell the truth.
— Susan Sontag
The more I read about sageing, the more excited I am about the next part of life. I see that I have been transitioning into this next phase for a couple of years already, and I am feeling confirmed and vindicated in spending the time gazing at my navel, as it were.
I am in a time of preparation. It is a time of situating myself on a timeless continuum with the perspective that comes with that. I have arrived at an understanding that cultivating strength, serenity, equanimity, and transcendence of self is a life-long task. I will not hit the Beatles-esque age of 64 and suddenly be the wizened elder of fable.
I conceive of it in the same way music has developed over the centuries; it morphs and changes and draws in influences along the way, leaving audible hints of what came before, showing the influences of my forebears as the new shows itself.
I think of ageing as an act of rebellion — something no one wants us to do. Soon, I will arrive at the age of influence where I join the consortium of elders and am free to share the lessons learned with those coming after us rather than being pushed to the back and buried as useless, outdated, and, frankly, a pain in the bum. And so my life is to be an act of continuous improvement so that I can continue to serve, nurture, educate and show others the unique possibilities of what this one precious life can be, particularly in concert with nature, with which we are all integrated.
Gathering in the threads of life and the world around me will be a task for the ages. It’s pulling together all of those disparate strings generated by the first half of life and weaving them into a whole, a new tapestry that is strong, steady, and beautiful and tells the story of a coherent and vibrant whole. We can show those who follow what the amazing possibilities of this life are so that they don’t have to dread ageing.
My role now is to regulate myself in a way that allows me to grow, focus, practice kind intentions and experience life with wide-eyed wonder at every turn. That smacks of hope and joy to me, and I cannot wait!
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself. — Rumi
By the way, I have added a Now page to my blogs; this provides a snapshot of what I am up to in day-to-day life without having to trawl social media. I’ll be updating it regularly.
Main header photo: Photo by LOGAN WEAVER | @LGNWVR on Unsplash
