Does ageing equal decline and degeneration or is it just a number?

These are the two common stories presented to us — it’s all downhill or it’s all a state of mind. How do we make sense of such different narratives?

On one side of the fence, ageing is real, the bodies we have today aren’t the ones we had a few decades back, and you know, no one gets out of here alive.

Plenty of philosophers have pointed out that if we can take that onboard, we’re better placed to make the most of the short lives we have.

Because no amount of good eating, sleeping, exercising, and stress reduction will alter the fact that life is finite.

On the other side though is perhaps the most critical factor of all: mindset.

Age isn’t just a number insofar as an 80-year-old body isn’t a 50-year-old body, but we’ve all come across narrow-minded young people and big-thinking older people, as well as the reverse.

I’m very aware that not a newsletter goes by without my saying something like ‘As we get older…’, and I’ll be talking about a change that occurs in our physical bodies.

But there are always things we can do to offset it, usually involving food, exercise, stress, and so forth.

So another key word is choice. We can choose to be mentally and physically fit. For some of us, it wouldn’t be too far-fetched that we could be fitter, in both ways, in our later decades than ever before.

We also have choice in what we read, watch or listen to, so opt for what lifts you up vs weighing you down.

For example, I’ve had covid three times. There’s a flurry of headlines around at the moment reporting that covid apparently ages a woman’s blood vessels by five years.

So mine have chalked up 15 years of ageing in the last three. Am I going to read that stuff? Not on your life. Nothing I can do about what’s past. I’d rather focus on what I can do for the future. Including don’t get covid so often.

We don’t have to buy into the negative language and stereotypes, complain about being old, or blame our age for the parts of our lives we’re less than enchanted with.

We can choose whether we’re deteriorating and going downhill or be our best version of the age we are. We can learn new things and grow as people.

And if we can’t remember what we came into the lounge room to get, so be it.

I’m not saying it’s easy to strike the ideal balance every day, all the time.

Truth is it’s a bit of a juggle. On one hand we might be reminding ourselves not to climb tall ladders, move the fridge or wear shoes that upset our feet, and on the other, ensuring we’re not burdened with doom-and-gloom conversations about dementia, stroke, incontinence, and so on.

So is 80 the new 50? In a way we get to decide.

The beauty of age is that we’ve had time to develop capacities we didn’t have when we were younger. And juggling is one we need to be good at.

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