The Basic 3-Step Process of Life — Appear, Live, Depart
From out of nowhere, you suddenly appear in this world. Birth is followed by expansion. There is physical growth and increased knowledge, activities, possessions, and experiences. Your sphere of influence enlarges, and life becomes increasingly complex.
This is a time when you are primarily concerned with finding or pursuing your outer purpose. Usually, there is also a corresponding growth of the ego. And so, the identity of your human form becomes increasingly defined by what you have and what you know.
But then, at some point — when you thought you made it or that you belong here — the return movement begins. Perhaps people close to you start to die — people who were a part of your world. Then your physical body begins to diminish — and your sphere of influence shrinks. And instead of becoming more, you now become less.
Your world begins to contract, and you may find you are not in control anymore. Instead of acting upon life, life now acts upon you by slowly reducing your body, brain, and world. And the world out there now seems to consider you irrelevant and obsolete. Your consciousness that identified with your human form is now experiencing the dissolution of that form.
And then, one day, your human form ceases to exist. Your rocking chair and teacup on the small table by the window are all still there. But you are not. You have departed and gone back to where you came from before your time in this 3D physical reality. Such is aging and life.
In the remainder of this article, I’m not addressing the wonderous aspects of ‘appearing in’ or ‘departing from’ this 3D reality. I will get to those spectacular subjects in other articles. For now, I will remain focused on ‘aging.’
Biological Aging
While chronological age is the number of years a person has been alive, someone’s biological age is how old the person feels and acts. Everyone ages differently. In general, we are genetic duplicates of one another at birth but entirely one of a kind at the moment of physical death.
It’s hard to have a vision of life that defies aging. For untold generations, humans have looked around, and what do they see? They see that all life forms appear to age and die.
However, this observation is not entirely accurate. In a genuine sense, cells are immortal or as close to immortal as living organisms can be. The natural life span of many cells is unlimited. Only when they gather into complex life forms do cells face the prospect of death.
We humans don’t necessarily get old and then die
There is a critical fact you need to keep in mind. Aging in humans is inevitable, but it is biologically programmed to be a slow process. And this slowness prevents us from observing a cell as it ages.
We see the effects only after years have passed. The aspects of growing old that you see in the mirror — gray hair, wrinkles, sagging skin — indicate that something is happening at the cellular level. But cells are immensely complicated, undergoing thousands of chemical reactions per second.
For us non-scientists, we assume there is an inflexible biology to aging. And we can’t do anything about it. When it comes to aging, we think that we will simply get old and then die one day.
We believe that when we do get old and infirm, we will die soon after. As a result, we don’t necessarily plan properly for the possibility of a time when there might be a long, deteriorating period of life.
That is a deeply mistaken and dangerous premise for the winter of your life. In fact, you will probably get old and live. You can get frail, bent over, feeble, and in pain. But you are not likely to die. You are likely to live in a weak, bent-over, and decrepit state for a long time unless you take proper action.
Think about the following numbers for a minute. Research and studies show that over 50% of all illnesses and injuries in the last third of life can be eliminated by changing your lifestyle, as I will discuss in other articles.
And not delayed until you’re a little older. I’m talking Eliminated! along with all the misery, expense, and lost joy that goes with being seriously sick or badly hurt. You may also want to think about the fact that 70% of premature death is lifestyle-related. ‘Premature’, in this case, means before you’re deep in your eighties.
Even more important is the fact that some 70% of the ‘normal’ decay associated with aging — the weakness, the sore joints, the lousy balance, the feeling crappy — 70% of that horror can be forestalled almost until the end.
Think about being so puny that you have to rock just a little to get out of a standard armchair. That stuff happens. It could quickly happen to any one of us. And it doesn’t have to. All this sounds extreme, but it is not.
Rethinking Old Age
The social norm for the elderly used to be passive and grim. Consigned to rocking chairs, older people were expected to enter physical and mental decline. Now the reverse is proving to be true.
For more than two decades, the image of old age has been shifting dramatically. No older person expects anymore to be put out to pasture at age 65.
A large segment of the baby boomer generation is pushing retirement further into the future. Older people have higher expectations that they will remain active and vital, so the definition of old age has shifted. A survey asked a sample of baby boomers, “When does old age begin?” The average answer was 85.
We haven’t figured out a way to last forever, but aging can be a slow, minimal, and surprisingly graceful process. And even on the appearances front, there is a vast difference between a great-looking, healthy older person versus one who has let themself go.
Beginning at age 60, it’s important to ponder what the aging process might feel like if you continue with the wrong fitness level, energy level, lifestyle, and mindset. You turn 60, and you realize your feet are suddenly on a slippery slope.
You find yourself on the long slide into decrepit old age and the burial plot your kids purchased for you. Every year, you get a little fatter, more bent over, slower, weaker, and more pain-racked.
Your hips go, and your knees are already gone. Your conversation goes stupid. Your teeth are yellowish, and your breath is worse than that of your dog. The hair left on your head is gray. Gravity takes its toll, and your muscles have given way to blubber. Your skin degenerates, too, regardless of lifestyle. So, you will look old, no matter what. You give up.
You sit there in your rocking chair next to the window and wait — next stop: nursing home or the funeral home. That can certainly be your future — in America, it often is. But it’s a choice, not a life prison sentence.
You can just as easily make up your mind and tell your body to live as if you were fifty, maybe even younger, for most of the rest of your life.
So, here’s the primary message of this article: You do not have to get old the way you think. You can still do all the same things, almost in the same way—bike, ski, hike, golf, travel. You can have roughly the same energy and pleasure. You will be roughly the same person.
In fact, if you’re currently a little messed up, and if you put your mind to it, you can still become healthier over the next few years and then level off.
It is even better than that. Beginning at age 60 or so, most of us can be functionally younger every year for the next five or even ten years. That sounds like cruel nonsense or hype, but it’s true. The potential rewards here — the potential positive changes in the rest of your life — are enormous.
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This article is compiled from chapter 4 of my first book in the series titled: “So, here’s some of what I know so far regarding Brain, Body, Budget, Being.”
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