It's All in How You Define it - by Nancy Reed

I don’t believe in kowtowing to the years I’ve accumulated in my life, and I refuse to estimate or be fearful of the number of years remaining. Whether or not those attitudes fit with the common use of the term “aging gracefully” I don’t know. I believe too many folks are concerned with how they appear to others to be aging rather than how they personally feel about the process and its effects on their health and life activities. 

For years, I worked with a woman who dealt with life so gracefully it depressed me to be around her. I felt sadness at my own lack of the quality until I observed her more closely. She never attempted anything new, refused to recall or relate any negative experiences in her life, didn’t take personal or professional risks, and reacted to stressful situations by pretending they didn’t exist. I never saw her revel in Eureka! moments. At that point, in my forties, I experienced an epiphany. Gracefulness with life, if that’s what she was displaying, was not for me.

I’m a bumbler. I trip over life, smack face-first into it, and get bruised by it. Occasionally, it slaps me down. But, since that revelation, I have endeavored not to be embarrassed or discouraged by my pratfalls along the way. Instead, I strive to learn new things, meet new people, and challenge my own attitudes and opinions. I don’t always succeed, but I have learned that my critics have to carry the weight of their negativity – I don’t have to. Aging gracefully? Depends on the definition. What comprises aging? What denotes graceful?

As the years of my life have increased, so have the opportunities and joys I’ve garnered. I adopted my adult daughter, my only child, as a single woman at the age of sixty-nine, and we’re greatly blessed to share our lives. At seventy-one, I became a grandmother for the first time and have been awed to see my wee imp grow in body, mind, and spirit. At age seventy-four, in addition to my short fiction and poetry in local anthologies, I published my first book and now have six to my credit with more to come. 

The inevitable culmination of aging is, of course, dying. Will I do that gracefully? I declare – people think I’m joking, but I’m not – that I don’t believe in dying; it’s a waste of time. It had better catch me by surprise between one step and the next, because I still have so much living to do that I’ll fight it if I can. In my mind, I add days to my life for all the things I still look forward to – a fantastical grace period I gift myself. It works much better than ruing time’s passage and counting down to The End

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Nancy L. (Nan) Reed's love of words inspired her to write from an early age: short stories, novels, memory snippets, scripts, and poetry. Her latest book is Conversations Between Two Great Friends, 2017. She calls Colorado the perfect place to live and is Musing at nancylreed.com about writing, designing a tiny house specifically for a wordsmith, and other subjects bizarre and intriguing. She encourages everyone with words to share to put pen to paper.