“One day you will look back and see that all along you were blooming.”
~ Morgan Harper Nichols
“Wrinkles will only go where the smiles have been.”
~ Jimmy Buffet
“Aging is not ‘lost youth’ but a new stage of opportunity and strength.”
~ Betty Friedan
“The secret of a good old age is simply an honorable pact with solitude.”
~ Gabriel García Márquez
Aging is related to the graceful acknowledgement and acceptance of our physical, emotional, and mental being! Aging is the purposeful act of gaining wisdom, achieving contentment, gathering acceptance, and finding joy in all we are and all we have become! Aging is growing from the inside out! Aging is acknowledging the changes of a life lived and a learned capacity to celebrate the gifts of those changes. Is any of this possible?
If we all had the right to age with financial wellness, full mobility and movement, stable connections, brain health, appropriate and timely care and to choose our end-of-life journey, aging would be welcomed. Unfortunately, any or all of that, seems to be out of reach for most people. The reality is that the quality of aging is uncertain! When a system is inequitable and built on outdated assumptions or doesn’t reflect the community it needs to serve the quality of aging is, at best, negligent and unreliable.
Written by Deborah Lavender, BMG Senior Consultant
Image Copyright: CC0, www.rawpixel.com
