Being with my Aging

It is a poignant time of year and a poignant time of life.

Conscious Aging from the Heart can give us an opportunity to be aware of what we may have previously taken for granted. It can give us an opportunity to be more of a human being versus a human who is just doing. For me, moving into this new year has highlighted relationships, helped make me more aware of the possibility of connection and allowed me to just “be” with my aging.

Two weeks ago our family celebrated my wife’s birthday. After dinner, sitting in front of the winter fire, I was reflecting on the recent New Year’s road trip that I took with my wife and daughter. Driving over six days and through five cities, we visited family and friends, siblings and niblings (nieces and nephews) and contemporaries. We took meticulous COVID precautions with each new gathering, every step of the way.

Within each family group, I felt and appreciated the years I’ve known them, the changes we’ve been through and the dependability, if not the consistency, of our relationship. Seeing several of them for the first time in years, physical changes were immediately apparent. As we shared time together, various non-physical changes became evident as well. I soaked up the changes and I was just being with our collective aging, not judging it.

I experience aging as an expected and important part of life. While I can’t always completely embrace it, I have learned how to get past the fear and denial.

Observing friends and family, as well as myself, as we are aging makes me smile. Often an appreciative, wide smile, sometimes a knowing, poignant smile, but a smile nonetheless.

During the road trip, I noticed I was usually the oldest person in the room, numerically. As I am aging, I haven’t thought of myself very differently, no matter what number of years I’ve been alive. Indeed, our collective idea of what “old” means seems to keep shifting as we keep aging.

My road trip highlighted stiffness in my body and difficulty bending over — indeed, it highlighted my mortality. Somehow, at the very same time, I still feel all the ages I’ve been. During a driving break, sitting in the back seat for hours, browsing my cell phone, I came across a picture that I took on January 3, 2020. That was about one-month pre-COVID, back when I worked out daily at the local fitness center, back when I traveled around the country more. When I snapped that picture, I had no idea of how things were about to change.

Every day, we have no idea of how things are about to change. We make assumptions based upon the appearance of things and how things used to be. On my road trip, I wasn’t “acting my age,” I was being with my aging. I glimpsed that my aging is both wholeness and brokenness, both opportunity and loss. It is a poignant and unfolding re-balancing. Those of us in our third third of life have an opportunity to re-calibrate, both as individuals and as responsible members of society, and, in so being, step toward becoming much-needed role models.

Join me for a special interactive two-session online workshop on March 7 and March 9 when we’ll dive deeply into the theme “Perceiving Possibility.” Together, we will explore the differences between “surviving” aging and trusting ourselves in the natural flow toward well-being.

About the Author

Marc Blesoff used to know everything and trust nothing. Now, Marc says he knows nothing and has glimpsed trust. He used to believe in coincidence, but he doesn’t anymore. For over 30 years, Marc was a criminal defense attorney, then a mediator. Seven years ago, he began facilitating the IONS Conscious Aging Workshops and he hasn’t stopped. It has helped him melt the armor that he’d built up. It has helped him get a clue about who he would like to be. Marc is an IONS Conscious Aging Facilitator and a founding member of CourAGEus (formerly A Tribe Called Aging). www.courageus.org