Ageing Gracefully: Beyond the Cult of Youth
We live in a society which is still in thrall to the cult of youth – linking youth and beauty, as Annie Lennox sang in her rather tongue-in-cheek rendering of the 1930s song by Dubin & Warren, while also linking youth with a whole host of other attributes: energy, sexiness, success, potential, originality, attractiveness and so on.
In short, we are told again and again that being young is how we are meant to be, and therefore that ageing is somehow a tactless falling-away from this perfection. Whole industries exist solely to shore up this illusion, and even when the elderly are recognised, almost invariably they are celebrated for bucking the trend: they’ve run a marathon, modelled for Vogue, done a parachute jump, walked a hundred laps of the garden … as if they were young.
“Keep young and beautiful
It’s your duty to be beautiful
Keep young and beautiful
If you want to be loved”
– Annie Lennox
These achievements are worth admiring – but they are not the norm. So how does this feel as we ourselves make our way onwards through life, with our personal youth now simply a memory? How much have older people internalised societal norms, and how does that impact on our sense of self? How should we value ourselves in these later years too?
Growing older
Children really do think they’re immortal – or rather, the concept of mortality is simply beyond them to begin with. The idea that lives have a span and can come to an end is not something we’re born with, however much philosophers may see it as an essentially human capability. We have to learn it. And even when a child has been introduced to the shortness of some lives by the deaths of their guinea-pigs and hamsters, the reality of dying as ‘something that will happen to me’ can remain entirely hypothetical for many years, as any parent trying to reason their teenager out of reckless activities would agree.
Ironically, even though death may seem unreal to the young, life itself is seen as ultimately precious, and the most heroic act one can do, it is agreed, is to ‘save’ someone’s life. But as we grow older, questions of life and death become more nuanced and subtle, and questions of meaning, purpose and quality of life may become more foreground, so that simply surviving is not necessarily seen as the only good. Medical advances are undoubtedly among the blessings of our age, but the discipline of medicine itself is now grappling with some of these subtleties, which the Covid pandemic has only served to highlight still further.
The Passage of Life
As time passes – and especially after the middle years, however this may be defined, – we become increasingly aware of the limits to life, including the extent of life itself. The cumulative experiences we amass through the years gradually alter our perspectives, so that the sense of limitless possibility that can characterise youth develops into a different view. We all pass through periods in our lives which are painful and problematical, and others that undoubtedly enrich us – and sometimes the same experience does both. Through the passage through these times we learn about the possibilities and realities of life, and we are irreversibly shaped by this.
One powerful factor for many of us is the sense of the speeding up of time. It has been argued that we experience the speed of the present by measuring it against our personal past: so when I was five another year was a fifth of my lifetime – no wonder birthdays and summer holidays simply crawled towards us like snails. But at fifty a year is a fiftieth of how long I’ve lived – a very different proportion – and this gives a sense of acceleration to our experience that is as challenging for the middle-aged to adjust to as adolescence can be for the teens.
How is this to be experienced? – as a roller-coaster ride? as a helpless drifting towards the brink of a Niagara? as the expert coasting between the remaining obstacles in our path towards a golden sunset?
Come and join us at our workshop as we explore “The Passage of Life”
In this course we will make space for exploring the actual experience of growing older and seek to look afresh at the achievements we ourselves regard as important in our lives.
We hope to create a space where we can explore from within our own subjective experience what elements within our life journeys have shaped us and contributed to the sense of who we are as an older person: how it is to be me, at my age, in a society such as this; what values have come to predominate in my priorities these days; and how past present and future may look to me now.
One thing is clear: there is no single right way to live a life – we all are unique and different individuals, with our own destinies to fulfil, and our own personalities and histories to contribute. We hope that through sharing these on this course, with the help of a psychosynthesis framework, we can also reconnect to some ageless truths that truly are immortal, and which belong to us all.
We look forward to seeing you on Friday 14th and Saturday 15th May!
Find out more and book tickets
Written by Polly Plowman & Keith Silvester
30 March 2021