Age doesn’t get a good press. As you will have noticed, no one is very happy at the idea of getting old. However, I don’t find age to be a burden.
Age doesn’t get a good press. As you will have noticed, no one is very happy at the idea of getting old. However, I don’t find age to be a burden. I rather consider it as a gift of life that I want to celebrate, cherish, develop, inhabit, enchant and make fruitful.. It is wrongly stigmatized and associated with old age. However, these are two very different things, age and old age, which are not necessarily correlated. And for a fairly simple reason, 80% of our aging is due to our lifestyle. We therefore have control over our biological age through the proactive management of our health, our well-being and our mind.
Youth is not a state but rather a way of behaving
To be young is to have energy and the physical capacity to do what we want with enthusiasm. This does not mean keeping your youthful body. But that does not mean either to deteriorate and be limited. You can grow old and stay young, it is not contradictory as they would like us to believe.
The corset of age is above all in our heads. It is the fruit of the image that society sends back to us. But society is really us. So we have the power to refuse this image, to deconstruct it. We have the power to look, think and feel age as we wish, without giving in to the negative perception conveyed by ageism. To grow old is not to be suspended from youth or youth. Because age is neither a limit nor an obstacle to curiosity, to the gluttony of life, to optimism. Only our limiting thoughts prevent us and they often have their source in the archetypes conveyed on the age of which ageism is the standard bearer.
Ageism, the ideology to fight
I am convinced that this anti-aging ideology is devastating. She takes a negative look at the age that hurts us. This feeling of “being out” makes us sick. Ageism creates frustration and lack of self-confidence, it creates bodily and emotional insecurity. It makes us think that time is a peril that makes us perishable. However, what I observe around me when I look at us is that with the lengthening of the lifespan, all ages are getting younger in their representation and expression.
It is with age that we can decide to abandon who we believe we must be to become who we really are.
Age is a wonderful pivot occasion
Aging for me means moving forward in life, accumulating experiences, maturing. It is an opportunity to lighten up, to get rid of all the pretenses with which we have lived for a long time, whatever the reasons. It’s accepting to step out of your comfort zone to move towards change. It is developing flexibility, letting go of erroneous beliefs, letting go of our old structures, creating openness, giving ourselves space and preparing new ground. It is with age that we can decide to abandon who we believe we must be to become who we really are.
You can age without getting old
I have a deep conviction, which I wish to share with you to demystify age and above all to take it out of the negative and depressive image associated with it. I am convinced that we can age without growing old, that our civil age and our biological age are not necessarily correlated. We can act on our biological age thanks to our overall lifestyle and proactive management of our health. There is a great golden rule to remember always, and that is thatwe must help our body so that it helps us in return.
The best way for this is to become an expert in oneself, the co-author of her physical and emotional health and well-being. It works every time and both ways. If you don’t care about your bodily well-being, your health, then age is going to be harder to live with. In contrast, if you decide to make your health and well-being a real priority, then your body will give back to you a hundredfold. He will be your super ally forever. And there, age will no longer be a problem, a marker, or a fear. By deciding to live your age, you can then cultivate an informed, smiling and flexible attitude.
We lack a “role model”
… To live in it, to occupy it well, to decorate it, to maintain it, to take care of it, in short I like to think that being your age means owning it and above all loving it. It sends a powerful message to our cells that says our desire to cooperate with ourselves, to feel aligned, to love who we are and who we will be.
We’re doing pretty well, but we lack “role models”, i.e. women with visibility, who could help change the way people look at age. Yes, women and men are not equal in their relationship to age and especially in their view of this age. We women are more stigmatized on our physique. And sometimes, between us, we are not tender either.
So the time has come, I believe, to become ourselves the ambassadors of a new vision of the age, to be the heroines of our age, each in our own way. We are the first generation to be able to do this, to be able to claim that getting old is in no way a condemnation to invisibility, to planned obsolescence. No, we do not have an expiration date. Let’s be proactive, let’s dare to talk about age without complex, with an open heart, without pretense or jargon. Let’s share, help each other, each in our own way become the ambassadors of a new look at age.
Let us collectively make our age a right and above all a strength, that of leading our life proudly. Let’s imagine our life as a continuum and not as a succession of periods where there would be a (very short) golden age and multiple more or less unpleasant seasons.
Finally, age is life and the opportunity to write many new chapters.
Beautiful and well in her age, Natacha Dzikowski at Leduc editions.
author
Director of communication and image for major beauty and luxury brands, Natacha Dzikowski has developed a beauty, well-being and health expertise that she communicates through…