BEING COMPLETE WITH GROWING OLD

Being complete with a person, issue, or situation gives you a deep sense of rest. As a contemporary elder, I consciously worked on my capacity to be complete with my past, my previous identities and roles, and my assessments and judgments of myself and others.

But where I wasn’t at rest, where I had insomnia, was the issue of growing old. I needed to get complete with “growing old” because the truth was, I was getting old.

When I am complete, I feel fulfilled, I experience harmony, and I feel satisfied with myself and my life. This encompasses emotional, mental, physical, and spiritual completeness. And I knew I wasn’t even close when it came to growing old.

I didn’t want to grow old in the direction and future of the cultural conversations, my family’s and friends' conversations, and my mind’s conversations about growing old. They all message that growing old is a curse.

As an elder, I knew getting complete with an issue would close off those derogatory and disempowering conversations. But it was obvious that my gate was fully open to these undermining, devaluing, debilitating, and depressing conversations about growing old.

So, the mission became clear: get complete about growing old.

Complete as a verb means “finish making or doing; make something whole or perfect.” When I can relate to something as complete, I can see ‘it’ as whole or perfect. This moves me from the subjective to the objective, from here to out there, personal to impartial, individual to unbiased. When I am complete, I become untethered, unstrapped, and unleashed from the issue.

No matter what ‘it’ is, the ‘it’ doesn’t go away. But when I’m complete with ‘it,’ the associated thoughts don’t grab and pull and push me around. The emotional charge discharges. The mountain becomes a molehill.  

Being complete allows me to consciously unhook from those thoughts and feelings that drag me around: anger, jealousy, revenge, sabotage, gossip, fear, and retaliation. I can now be with the ‘it,’ but when complete, I am free of “its” attractions and aversions. Suffering stops.

My method was to adhere to both parts of the definition of complete: "finish making or doing.” So, over time, I stopped acting. I stopped spending my time, money, and anxiety avoiding the issue of growing old. Completion begins with acceptance. The unavoidable truth, “I was getting old.”

To be complete with getting old, I had to shift my thoughts and emotions about growing old. But first, I had to observe these thoughts and emotions as they occurred. I had to focus my attention, intention, meditation, and reflection on recognizing my thoughts, emotions, and concepts about who I was, my unexamined but very present thoughts, and feelings about growing old.

The process of completion reorientated me to the inevitable physical and mental issues that happen as you get old, some beginning now for me. By being complete, I can now deal with these old-age issues in a very different manner. The issues are something I have, not something I am.

I followed the definition by making growing old appear “whole and perfect.” That was a most challenging hurdle. Stepping out of the box with its cacophony of cultural and family conversations, casting growing old as a problem and a disaster, and seeing it as “whole and perfect” was a steep and arduous climb.

I had to confront my fears of becoming frail, vulnerable, dependent, and less able. I had to face that’s precisely what will happen—unavoidable, irrevocable, unstoppable. Growing old wasn’t going to change. Being complete with growing would change me.

I couldn’t complete things outside myself until I completed them within myself—the good parts, the bad parts, the unfulfilled parts, the shame, blame, guilt parts, the stupid parts, the unacknowledged parts—they all had to go into this whole.

I had to acknowledge myself as the final package with total self-acceptance. To complete, I had to stand on the foundation of “this is it.” This is me, this is my life, and this is what happens as I grow old.

Being complete with growing old ended the resistance, avoidance, self-deception, and pretense about growing old. When I became complete with growing old, I saw a much more appealing and empowering future available for me in aging.  

This poem from T.S. Eliot’s poem “The Little Gidding: The Four Quartets” is what being complete offers:

“What we call the beginning is often the end.

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

The end is where we start from.” 

By becoming complete with growing old, I am now realizing some extraordinary benefits: wisdom, a sage perspective, emotional stability, self-acceptance, stronger relationships, increased gratitude, and ongoing personal and spiritual growth.

If you are lucky, you will grow old. Growing old leads to dying and ends in death. Being complete with growing old and its consequences generates immense freedom in the present. And ultimately, the present is all you really have.

INFORM & INVITATION