Week 4 June: Spiritual Aging Study Guide
Aging Versus Old
Welcome to this week’s study guide. For more about our study and support group and the Spiritual Aging Study Guide, click HERE.
This Week’s Excerpt
This week, even as we transit through the Land of Old Souls, we confess we still do not particularly like aging. But we love being old and it isn’t possible to get here without all the nonsense that came before. Aging is the on-ramp but old is the arrival.
When it comes to aging, we double-up on our preventative measures—daily steps, diet, moisturizing rituals— and seek to reinvent ourselves. We try to tidy up all our loose ends, and they are legion. Aging is hard work. Doing everything we can to extend the illusion of mastery that defines midlife is bound to leave us cranky.
Eventually, however, there comes the day that you look in the mirror and realize that dyeing your hair purple didn’t make you look younger. It just made you look old but with purple hair. And then, when you finally get that time always wins in the end, that’s when aging ends and old begins…
So here’s to all of us who are aging, to those of us who are old, and especially to you who are just about to stop thinking about all this and at least for this week just live life without feeling the need to label yourself anything at all.
–Excerpt from Spiritual Aging: Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life
Questions for Journaling and Discussion
1.) How do you feel about aging?
2.) Have you experienced crossing the line into considering yourself old—or is this something you reject or dread, or don’t believe will ever apply to you? In what ways do you think admitting to being old is experienced as a defeat?
3.) In what ways is aging hard work? What do you think the work of aging was or is trying to accomplish?
4.) Consider the fact that aging is a verb while old is a noun. Can you describe something positive about referring to yourself as old that could be considered a culmination or arrival? To what?
5.) What are some of the freedoms associated with being old?
Spiritual Exercise
In this week’s reflection Carol concludes with a poem:
Old loves that when you trot around the living room in a dress that makes you look like a dancing bear, who cares?