Ron SmithPublished on A Gift of Time
A gift of time – the gift of time is very real. Life expectancy has increased dramatically. In addition, we are in much better overall health than prior generations. For example, in 1950 when you reached the age of 65 you were expected to live about another14 years. You could expect about half of that to be in good health. Today you are looking at about 19 years on the average with two-thirds of that in good health. Healthier life spans should only increase in the future. But the question is: are we to look at these added years as a gift or a burden?
The author Joan Chittister says:
It is a time for us to let go of both our fantasies of eternal youth and our fears of getting older, and to find the beauty of what it means to age well. It is time to understand that the last phase of life is not non-life; it is a new stage of life. These older years – reasonably active, mentally alert, experienced and curious, socially important and spiritually significant – are meant to be good years. (Chittister, 2008, p. xi)
These are the capstone years in which we get to bring to bear all of the experience, wisdom and desires that we have to make a whole new life. The gift of these years is not simply being alive, it is an opportunity to become more fully alive. How we manage and master this gift of time will determine the success, satisfaction and the rewards that we enjoy during this stage of our lives. Carl Sandberg said “Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent.”
Do you have the understanding and tools necessary to address this phase of your life? When we were children our parents, our family and our teachers helped us understand how to navigate in life. Later in life we had the structure of our careers, education and continuing support from our families. There were many support systems or examples to help guide us. Learning from experience was normal because we had time to adapt or recover from bad decisions in most cases. Many people approach retirement with a general understanding of how to plan for their eventual financial, housing and lifestyle needs. They remember how their parents or grandparents seemed to do these things. But very few people receive any specific assistance in how they are going to successfully navigate this next phase of their lives. There is nobody to train us in how to enjoy or even survive this phase. We are generally on our own!
Without any structure, some retirees will start thinking about their regrets – those things that they wished they had done. Or they may start thinking about what they don’t have. They may very well start preparing for their next phase of life simply by dwelling on their past. Without tools to explore where we are going and how we will get there, we are likely to be ill prepared to address upcoming life events and opportunities that will possibly shape our lives. We may be moving into this phase of our life having lost a significant other. Some of us may try to escape frozen winters by moving to warmer climates only to miss our friends so much that we choose to return home in a few years. There are a lot of potential pitfalls and/or new challenges that we do not know how to handle or necessarily anticipate. As a result, the gift of time can become more of a burden than an opportunity to blossom. Focus groups conducted by the National Council on Aging (NCOA), report that most retirees favor the quality of life over the potential longevity. In order to improve the quality of life it may be necessary to break out of some old habits from our pre-retirement years and explore new directions to utilize the opportunities now available to us. In doing so, we will need to form new habits to successfully navigate our “senior” years.
Your proficiency in using your gift of time will depend on how well prepared you are and how willing you are to investigate the necessary actions and techniques needed to best utilize this time. We need to understand the talents that we possess and how we might want to share them with others. What are our perceptions of what we can possibly accomplish in this phase of our life? How will we tackle barriers that might confront us? Do we understand our purpose in this phase of our lives? Some needed actions may be very practical in nature to help sustain our lives. Other actions may be necessary to expand and explore our potential as we approach this phase of our lives. It can and should be a fulfilling adventure.
Chittister, J. (2008), The Gift of Years: Growing Older Gracefully. BlueBridge
Ron Smith is a Maricopa resident and an aging-in-place advocate. He is a member of the Age-Friendly Maricopa Advisory Committee, a member of the Maricopa Senior Coalition and a certified Aging-in-Place specialist (CAPS).
This article appeared in the March 2021 issue of InMaricopa Magazine.
