Are you Making or Breaking your Life?
If you’ve achieved all that you’ve ever wanted to, you’ve absolutely no right to be reading this article.
(You’ll, um…, wear it out for those of us who’ve arrived at the so-called half-way mark without achieving that superior status in life that you’ve achieved.)
Besides, you’re one of the lucky ones, the true winners in this world , a world overflowing with souls who haven’t quite made it to the apex of life, (myself included).
(And, before I finish my rant, you’ve no right being found here on groeVolve, lapping up more of the kind of quality thinking that got you to the top of your heap.)
But while I flatter you, I must also be frank, and tell you this:
Having achieved all you want to, it’s time to begin again.
Now that you're "older", it’s time to begin again.
You need to find an area of life where you’ve desired strongly to make a mark, even, to win, and you’ve lost (maybe badly).
You’ve got to find that, and beat the be-jeezus out of it, teaching yourself how to win.
Again.
Because laying down your weapons is the one way to break your life.
Losing your hunger is the key to losing it all.
Old age is not debilitating and down-heartening just because of the numbers.
50. 60. 70. 80, 90, even 100. What are they?
You’ve heard it before: just numbers in the sands of time.
But it’s having no soul-purpose, no heady drive, that's what kills us years before our last day. And the days in between today and drop-dead-day are, generally, “not fun”.
As we trudge forward into our older years (especially if we had a job we’ve not been passionate about,) it seems oh-so-natural to want to call “time-out”, find a spot on the sidelines of life to lay ourselves down and smell the roses.
Or enjoy/jeer@ the sweat of the other players still battling for the ball.
But if you do so, you’re doing yourself a disservice.
You’re setting yourself up for a hard life ahead, however much moolah you might have accumulated, and however many lackeys you can afford around you to cotton-wool your latter years.
For one, you simply cannot give up on keeping yourself strong -I say “extremely strong”, - pushing the boundaries on the seemingly impossible envelope of weariness closing in on you.
Whatever your gender, you need muscle -and a system that helps you increase your musculature- while strengthening those motor-neurons in parallel.
For another, you simply must realize that the essence of being human is the struggle: to make a living, to improve, to get ahead in every possible field of endeavor. This is what I choose to call “The essence of our human spirit”.
And if you’re not striving to push forward, to do better, you are out of the game, and more importantly, you have nothing in common with the rest of humanity (who, of course, are in the thick of the struggle to make progress in one domain of their life or another).
The struggle for acknowledgement & recognition:
Too many older people feel that the younger people around them, even their own children, have no time for them, ignore them, overlook them and don’t really have a conversation with them.
And they’re right.
What have the young(er) ones to gain by talking with them? Advice? Experience? Or stories from a mind that has stopped looking forward, and is only about-turned with it’s vision obsessed with the past?
Advice? That’s what Quora and a host of forums exist for. And that advice comes from a powerful collection of bigger and brighter minds than the choice-of-one-mind sitting in front of them.
Experience? Stories of the past? Nah. For younger humans who are facing and racing forwards, that’s deadly-boring stuff.
If you want people to be interested in you, you’ve got to be interesting. Moreover, you’ve got to be relevant: to today and to the future.
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You don’t become relevant by getting out of the game. Mel Drego |
Photo by Luis Quintero on Pexels.com
The worst part of sitting on the sidelines, though, is that you lose your internal spirit. There’s nothing more to look forward to: no hills to conquer, no worlds to discover, no heart to enamor.
And hence, the downward spiral towards the end. Which is the worst thing you can do for yourself.
Truth be told (and trolls be warned: I generally generalize), we choose when we go, and how we go.
There’s a better way forward: Aim for a Version 2.0 of yourself (and no, it’s a wonderful time of life to start striving for a better Future You). And create -yes, design, mould, lovingly make- that version of yourself come true.
Especially if you’ve always wanted to achieve something that you’ve never had the time for.
Tell the universe what you want to achieve in the next 3, 5, 10 years and more: Physically, Mentally, Spiritually.
Then make it come true.
