The idealism of youth is still active in seniors

It is amazing when the young find that the old still have deep yearnings and ambitions and some of us are still filled with the energy and idealism of youth. The recent stories of the grandfather who had climbed up a tree to stop a pipeline recently springs to mind. The press played the story about the age of the person, not the idealism which shaped his decision to act.  Youth may believe that we become more stoic and sage-like over time, which may be true for some, but most of us still have hopes, dreams and desire.

My generation is not becoming slowly disillusioned by life, we are holding on to our sense of the wonder of life and we hold on to the vibrancy and vitality we had when we were young. We all have joys, hopes, fears, and longings that never go away no matter how old we get.

I have been fortunate as I see a lot of seniors when I am giving the workshops on Health and Wellness. Some of them assume I am an expert or an authority (which I am not) and they talk to me about life. Sometimes they talk about regrets, sometimes they talk about love, sometimes they talk about success. Most of the thoughts about regrets revolved around families. The main regret appears to be that the relationships, either with their children or between their children, turned out differently than they hoped.

When people talk to me about happiness and successes they talk about times when they were young and raising their families when their children were younger and living at home. I remember these times as very stressful, but they, of course, have no doubt that those days were also the happiest.

Happiness is more complex than we thought when we were younger. Our understanding of what makes us happy changes as we age. When we’re younger, perhaps we imagine happiness as a feeling instead of a state of fulfillment, meaning, or abundance.

Being old brought a lot of advantages: more time, more perspective, less hustling to be the best and most successful, and an urgency to strengthen the important relationships in your life. Many of my friends and the people I talk to, talk about death, but none of us are afraid of death but we are afraid of dying and when we are dying becoming a burden on the ones we love.

I know young people and some older people who have an intense fear of growing old. They assume that as we get older, we lose our vibrancy and thirst for life. In my experience talking with my friends and through my interactions with the few thousand people I meet through the lectures I give; this couldn’t be further from the truth. The people I know and meet, still laugh like crazy, fall in love like mad and pursue happiness fiercely. Put simply, one person I talked to asked me, “Do you wish you accomplished more?” Before I could respond he answered his own question by stating sadly, “No, I wished I loved more.”