Independently Aging

Wild Rose Near Fish Creek - June 2025

​Independence, noun: the ability to live your life without being helped or influenced by other people. (Cambridge Dictionary)

Tomorrow is Independence Day in the U.S. Flags, parades, hot dogs, hot weather. Summer’s climax. 

But on this morning’s hike, straps biting into my shoulders with 20 lbs of dumbbells in my daypack, I have another sort of independence on my mind: independently aging. To me that means aging capably, cultivating resilience in both body and mind as the years go by.

Surely this starts with mindset. Because, things happen as we age. Unexpected things like a chronic pain or illness, a cardiac event, an injury that takes five times longer to heal than it used to. Things that start to make us reluctant to venture out. Things that make the chair in the summer shade or the soft warm winter couch alluring for too many days or hours. Those cozy spots are siren calls, and we might then find ourselves wrecked on the rocks of stiffness, immobility, enervation and ennui. 

Sometimes mindset needs a little work. Those mornings when I dread getting out of bed to go run up a hill, I think into the near future, when I’m back from that run. I know I’ll feel energized, clear-headed, and fully alive. I know that the sooner I get out the door, the sooner I’ll be drinking coffee and eating my yummy breakfast. Cultivating this discipline helps my mind stay resilient in the face of discomfort and challenge.

Physical challenges are sometimes a matter of the patience to build up to something. Doing fingertip pushups to make my hands stronger for my massage work has been a game-changer. Several years ago, I could have quit and chalked it up to my hands being too old and too tired. I decided instead to get stronger. At first I could just do two or three fingertip pushups. I’m now doing 60 (to be clear, I’m on my knees). Building the strength in my hands and arms means that I continue to do the work I love, and the sense of capability plays out in other areas of my life as well - like paddleboarding Pearl Lake!

Independently aging also means having the perspective of the long game. Things might take longer to do than they used to. Healing time might be longer, recovery and rest are more of a priority, new goals need a longer timeline. I so often hear from folks older than me their seeming amazement that they haven’t recovered from this injury or that joint replacement within the tiny window of time they allotted. I wish they’d tune in to what their body requires, work together with their own body as a team, and I think the recovery would be much more successful despite the time necessary. This too speaks to cultivating resilience. 

Years ago, I had a client named Sylvia. Sylvia was a feisty Italian woman who’d run a grocery in New York City with her husband while they raised their family. Due to an aneurysm decades before, Sylvia had progressive neurological issues. The warm pool at the retirement campus where I worked was important therapy for her, and she’d get a massage afterward. 
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She’d come down the hall to my office, first with a cane and later in an electric wheelchair, her white hair elegantly styled, make-up and dress impeccable. This took a painstaking amount of time, but Sylvia would not walk out unless her appearance was just so. She did everything this way. 

Getting ready took longer and longer as she moved more slowly. She shared how it might take her two hours to get a simple meal together at her home, where she lived alone. There came a day when she hired someone to clean, and then someone to take her to the grocery store. I asked her about that. She said, “I hope that I’m never too stupid to ask for help when I truly need it.” 

Her words have stayed with me. Sylvia was independently aging. She had the discipline, the mindset, and the courage to live her life on her terms. When challenges came, she figured them out. Even when it meant being smart enough to ask for help when she was ready.