From Anti-Aging to Conscious Aging
For most of my life, I didn't give much thought to aging.
Like many of us, I absorbed the messages around me without really questioning them. Aging was something to manage. Gray hair was something to cover. Wrinkles were something to minimize. Or, if I did picture it, it looked like those insurance ads—the beautiful, perfectly coiffed gray-haired couple holding hands on a beach. Staying active and healthy was good—not only because it felt good, but because it seemed to offer some protection from becoming old.
And then, somewhere along the way, I realized I was aging. Not theoretically, not someday—now.
I'm 63, and I find myself far more interested in the inner experience of aging than I ever expected to be. What does it mean to grow older in a culture that places so much value on youth? What happens to our sense of identity as our bodies change, our roles change, and the future gets a little shorter than the past? These questions have pulled me away from the idea of anti-aging and toward something I find much more interesting: conscious aging.
What are we actually fighting?
The anti-aging message is everywhere—some of it subtle, some of it not. We're encouraged to look younger, move younger, dress younger, think younger, and above all, not to look our age.
There's nothing wrong with wanting to feel good in our bodies or take care of ourselves. But I wonder what happens when aging itself becomes something we believe we should overcome. Maybe the goal isn't to look as though we haven't aged. Maybe it's to become more at home with the person we're becoming.
The parts of us that don’t want to grow older
My work with Internal Family Systems has given me another way to think about this.
IFS suggests we all have different parts of ourselves—a part that's confident and another that doubts itself, a part that wants adventure and another that wants to stay safe. Aging stirs up some particular ones: the part that doesn't want to look old, the part that's frightened about losing independence, the part that measures this body against the one we had twenty years ago.
One of my most vocal parts shows up when I catch my reflection unexpectedly and, for a split second, see my mother looking back at me. There's a jolt in that moment—something between recognition and alarm. But IFS doesn't ask me to push that part away—just to get curious about what it's afraid of. What is it trying to protect me from? That feels very different from telling myself I shouldn't feel the way I do.
Not all of my parts are quite so tied to aging itself. Some are just old patterns aging has brought back into sharper focus—like the part that pipes up every time I reach for a chocolatey treat: "Don't eat that, you fatty." That voice has been around a lot longer than my gray hair. But the same question applies: what is it so afraid of?
From resistance to relationship
Conscious aging doesn't mean pretending aging is easy. It doesn't mean being grateful for every wrinkle, or accepting every loss, or adopting a relentlessly positive attitude.
There's grief in aging. There can be fear, anger, relief, freedom, vulnerability, unexpected joy—sometimes several of these at once. I've come to think it's less about having the "right" attitude and more about staying curious about our own experience: What am I learning about myself right now? What am I ready to let go of? What still matters deeply to me? What parts of me need more compassion?
Those questions move us away from trying to preserve who we were, and toward discovering who we are now.
There is still becoming
One of the things I appreciate most about this stage of life is that it invites a different kind of attention. We've lived long enough to have some perspective. We've made mistakes, loved people, lost people, changed our minds, survived things we once thought we couldn't. That's a kind of knowledge you can't get any other way.
But simply having lived a long time doesn't automatically make us wise. Wisdom comes, I think, from being willing to look back, listen deeply, make meaning of what we've been through, and decide what we want to carry forward. This is part of what draws me to the Sage-ing tradition and to the idea of elderhood—not as a title or a particular age, but as a way of being in the world.
Anti-aging asks how we can stay the same. Conscious aging asks who we're becoming. I find myself far more interested in the second question these days—not because I've figured aging out. I haven't. I'm 63, and I'm still meeting the parts of myself that have their own ideas about getting older. I'm still noticing where I resist, where I grieve, where I feel curious, and where I simply don't know what comes next.
Maybe that's the point. We don't have to figure aging out. We can befriend it—and in doing so, become a little more at home in the life we're actually living.
If you’re curious about your own relationship with aging, you may be interested in a Befriend Aging workshop. Together, we make room for the questions, emotions and possibilities that come with growing older—without pretending there is one right way to do it.