I was at the doctor’s office with a form asking me to rate my health from poor to excellent. That’s always a tricky one.
The obvious choice to me is excellent. But then I wonder what the doctor would think. I have a couple of “conditions” which might suggest otherwise.
High blood pressure since I was pregnant with Hunter, my fifth born son who turns 30 this year
High cholesterol and a scan confirming I have a bit of arterial build up
Ten years of living with rheumatoid arthritis, a disease involving a lot of pain and a long healing process. And many life changes.
Osteoporosis, which the doctor said requires drugs. “You’re a small framed older white woman. It is inevitable,” she said.
Three melanoma moles, gratefully discovered early and removed. Thank you New Jersey shore and baby oil.
Knowing those conditions would be revealed on the form, I still checked “excellent.”
When I check excellent, I do it because I am the one that gets to decide what my health looks like. Not the doctors, not the labs, not the test results. I get to decide.
I definitely have not ignored doctors, labs, or test results. On the contrary, I have taken each one very seriously. But I recognize the responsibility I have to be involved in my healing process.
It’s certainly not the case I have it all figured out. Or that I won’t be affected by any of them. Or that I’m never in fear about them. I just want to be assured that I have done the best I could with the one body I have been given.
Getting older takes a lot of work. It might be “easier” if we just let life happen and accept aches and pains and conditions as part of it all. But my philosophy is to believe we don’t just get older, we also get wiser.
I’m going to be looking at what I’ve learned from each condition, beginning with bone health and muscle loss. If there is one person that can benefit from this, it’s worth putting it out there. There are principles that apply to more than just a diagnosis. They apply to life.
Older and wiser. That’s our portion. Let’s lean into it.
As we grow older, we are hopefully becoming stronger— physically, emotionally, and mentally. While we likely have glitches in all three, it’s possible to become stronger in big and small ways.
On I can hear everyone arguing about the aches in joints, the constant trying to remember where we put our phones, the fatigue brought on by loss and pain.
I have the same arguments. But I’m challenging the notion that it all points to getting weaker. I think most of us would acknowledge we have made much progress in our thinking. Maybe we have set boundaries where there used to be none. Perhaps we refuse to beg for acceptance when we feel unwanted. We have learned when to say yes. And no.
Our thoughts about growing older matter and sometimes we have to push past someone else’s ideas. When I was diagnosed with osteoporosis, I was immediately prescribed medication. “You’re a female with a smaller frame. It’s inevitable.” Just the medical community’s long arm reaching for prescription drugs. Is that really the only answer?
So I did some research on how to build stronger bones. “Lift heavy things” was the biggest takeaway. So I bought a couple sets of dumbbells and started lifting. While I had to start at relatively light weight, I’ve gradually been able to lift heavier. I still haven’t had another dexa scan, which I believe will show change, but even if it doesn’t and I wind up needing to consider medication, I’m not going down without a fight. I’m getting stronger in the process.
All our collective experience, especially the hard things, has brought us wisdom so we can confront challenges differently. I had previously allowed someone to treat me poorly because of their need for power. Nope. Wisdom says never again.
And there’s so many ways to learn and grow. I love finding books that challenge my thinking. Not just clicking and scrolling my way to discouragement and even despair. But intentionally choosing what crosses my eyes.
It takes little strength to lift people along the way. Just a decision to be the reason someone feels seen. It can be a smile or a kind word to someone we encounter in our day. Or reaching out to someone we know is going through a challenge. It’s asking the question: How can I get out of my own small world?
I’m older than I’ve ever been. And I’m also stronger. I made a decision to lift: lift weights, lift thoughts, lift people along the way. One tiny degree more than yesterday. Older and wiser. Older and more emotionally stable. Older and stronger.
Let’s not allow others to define our season. What we think about our aging process matters.
As we get older, we acquire experience and, hopefully with it, we gain wisdom. We are filled up by the lives we live. But muddled in with experience and wisdom, we have loss and pain and struggle. Sometimes that causes cataracts in our vision. We long for a fresh way to see things we might already “know.”
A band I have been enjoying, Bleachers, covers a song called “Whole of the Moon.” I love the line:
“I saw the crescent; you saw the whole of the moon.”
We usually see in part, and there’s times when someone else sees more. When we connect with someone’s writing, whether in song, prose or poetry, it’s often something that we intuitively know but didn’t have words for. Ah, that’s it! And we get to see beyond the crescent.
Creative people don’t take us to new places. They find new pathways to places and ideas we have visited before. They take us on a “scenic route.” It’s one of the reasons we need to seek out stories, poems, essays, good fiction, and new music. So often we come across something and have that “aha” moment, not because we never knew it, but because we never saw it in that way.
A fact will burst into our lives. “I never knew that,” we say when presented with a new fact. But truth unfolds. “I see that more clearly now,” we say when presented with a new perspective. Although facts can be useful, we are all really after truth. The older we get, the more we try to whittle away the superfluous.
As we read quality books, we pick up insights that the author has gained in ways we likely have never heard before. We each carry a light within us that illuminates wisdom and guides us to truth. But reading can increase that, giving us bits that make us think and process what we already know. I love when I have to stop and think about something I have just read.
Below are some books I have read this year, with a quote from each that caused me to pause. The list is not complete and some of them have multiple quotes I could have used. And there’s not the space to mention all the poems, songs, essays, and non-fiction. Maybe another time.
If any books have impacted you in some way, made you think, or simply inspired you, please mention in the comments. We can share the ways that perhaps we got a glimpse at the “whole of the moon.”
**********
Maggie Smith, You Could Make This Place Beautiful “How I picture it: We are all nesting dolls, carrying the earlier iterations of ourselves inside. We carry the past inside us. We take ourselves—all of our selves—wherever we go.”
Gabrielle Zevin, Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow “Time travel is looking at a person, and seeing them in the present and the past, concurrently. And that mode of transport only worked with those one had known a significant time.”
Steven King, 11/22/63 “We did not ask for this room or this music. We were invited in. Therefore, because the dark surrounds us, let us turn our faces to the light. Let us endure hardship to be grateful for plenty. We have been given pain to be astounded by joy. We have been given life to deny death. We did not ask for this room or this music. But because we are here, let us dance.”
Hernan Diaz, Trust “For I’ve come to think one is truly married only when one is more committed to one’s vows than the person they refer to.”
Ann Patchett, Tom Lake “It’s not that I’m unaware of the suffering and the soon-to-be-more suffering in the world, it’s that I know the suffering exists beside wet grass and a bright blue sky recently scrubbed by rain. The beauty and the suffering are equally true.”
Shelby Van Pelt, Remarkably Bright Creatures “In the vastness of the universe, each remarkably bright creature has a unique purpose and contribution.”
Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns “And yet she was leaving the world as a woman who had loved and been loved back. She was leaving it as a friend, a companion, a guardian. a mother. A person of consequence at last.”
Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing “We believe the one who has power. He is the one who gets to write the story. So when you study history, you must ask yourself, Whose story am I missing? Whose voice was suppressed so that this voice could come forth? Once you have figured that out, you must find that story too. From there you get a clearer, yet still imperfect, picture.”
Jessica Knoll, Bright Young Women “…women who wish to advance in their career face an insidious kind of discrimination…no response at all. It was subtle discouragement by neglect, what the author called “motivational malnutrition.”
John O’Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us “There is a light that shines in every heart….it is what illuminates our minds to see beauty, our desire to seek possibility, and our hearts to love life.”
I also read a number of page turners that were just fun. A few of those include First Lie Wins, Guest List, None of This is True. Because sometimes we just like a good story!
On the surface, vulnerability seems paradoxical. As we get brave enough to share our innermost thoughts and emotions, we often expose the weakness we have tried to hide.
When we’re younger, we usually protect ourselves with some kind of “armor.” As we’re building relationships, careers, and personalities, we are careful about what we allow others to see. We’re building our lives and protecting our foundations.
But as we get older, we find armor gets heavy. So we begin leaning into vulnerability, which exposes those parts of ourselves that we have protected. Vulnerability takes our weakness, infuses it with courage, and ultimately reveals strength. It’s not always easy to do.
Whether it’s in conversation or on social media, sometimes our picture needs to show the rain, not just the rainbow. No one wants to see the rain day after day, but only showing rainbows is pretentious. The fullness of beauty is about the many facets of life bumping up against each other continually. The good, the bad, and the ugly all at the same time.
Vulnerability lets people know they are not alone, particularly in their bad and ugly. We can all fall victim to comparison, and when others are continually showing the good, we often fall short. We know our lives contain so much more. And by more, we generally mean less. Less rainbow, less sunshine, less charm. What is wrong with my life?
But when someone offers a glimpse into their struggle, we find a sigh. I am not alone. I’m not the only one with a bit of a mess in a world filled with perfect images. I think we’ve all experienced times when we learned we were not the only ones experiencing a particular situation or fear or sadness. And how we came away just little lighter.
The rain and the rainbow both exist in our lives. Wisdom dictates which one gets highlighted at a particular time. Only as we’re sensitive to the needs of others can we make that call. We are most alive when we take this simple act of vulnerability, wrapped in an unseen layer of courage and strength, and help others feel seen and not alone.
I was out walking and “Wake Me Up,” by Avicii, started playing. The song is about waking up when everything is over, “when I’m wiser and I’m older…” And it got me thinking about that phrase “wiser and older.” Because simply growing older, and not wiser, would be a sad conclusion to life.
Right after that, a dear friend gave me a Glassy Baby. Those familiar with that amazing company know that each “baby” has a name, and the one she gave me was “WISE.” It seemed like wisdom was trying to get my attention.
So, I ‘ve been thinking a lot about that lately. Being wise includes having experience, knowledge, and sound judgment. But another, maybe equally important quality, is an awareness of life’s paradoxical nature and all its ambiguities.
The reason that people “down the road” a bit have more opportunity to grow in wisdom is because we most likely have had our habitual and familiar lives uprooted. We’ve had to make sense of life at other levels. “Business as usual” doesn’t work when life feels more “unusual” than anything else.
I used to live a very black and white life, which I think is indicative of younger generations. I mean, the TikTok generation has declared that side parts, skinny jeans, and the laughing emoji are out. And that’s ok. When I think back honestly, I probably would have cancelled anything that wasn’t bell bottoms and frosted white lipstick. We just didn’t have any way to cancel things back then. We perfected the eye roll.
I had so many opinions about so many things. Right and wrong, black and white. I was forming the container that would hold my life, and it had to make sense. But the funny thing is that as we grow older, life seems to makes less sense. Our minds realize that nothing is as it seems, people are complicated, and simple answers don’t often meet all life’s complexities. It’s more gray than we realized. Judgment is hard in a gray world.
The paradoxical nature of life requires that we know how to hold everything without needing to judge it all. It’s loving those wearing a side part AND those who see the middle part as the only way. Wisdom is really about our lens, and how we interpret the world. I think wisdom looks a lot like love.
“Wisdom is clearly more than intelligence, knowledge of facts, or information. Wisdom is more synthesis than analysis, more paradoxical than linear, more a dance than a march.”
Richard Rohr
Thoughts on what wisdom looks like in everyday life?
Wide Angle Lens 