An Antidote to Ageism

by, Dr. Bill Thomas

I seem to be running in to quite a few anti-agers who are not, to put it mildly, on board with my ideas about valuing age and aging.  They, mainly, object that…

Life is so AWESOME I just want more its gooey goodness!

In other words, they are saying that they aren’t against aging— they just want more youth.  MUCH MORE youth.

I was thinking about how to respond to this point of view when I came across this incredible snapshot of one incredibly tiny slice of our universe.

Human life spans just the briefest of moments.  Human beings spend much of their brief existence, asleep, unaware or doing things they actually don’t want to do.  We all need sleep and biologists have never been able to eliminate or even change our need for sleep.  So.  If we want– as the anti-agers insist they want— more of the viva activa then we need to find ways to:

1) Be more aware.

2) Spend less time doing things we don’t want to do.

In other words we don’t need to live longer in order to have more life.  We can start right now (no skin creams required) by paying more attention to the world and our place in it.  We can have more life by living life more fully.

Part of living life more fully involves  being more selective about what we do.  Elders are mostly pretty good at this. They make excellent role models in this regard.

The dream of living to be 1,000 years loses something when you stack a millenium up against the photo above.  We are short lived creatures (in the grand scheme of things) and we will always  remain flickers of light in a vast emptiness. The key is not to make the flicker last longer, the key is to make it burn brighter.