By Shulamit Sofia, MSW
At 88, I find myself still vital, happily mobile and still curious about what life has left to offer.
That exploration took on new urgency during the pandemic, when my active life, my engagement with other people and much of the outside world came to a sudden halt. Even though I was fortunate to be confined to pleasant surroundings, the isolation was painful and anxiety-provoking.
I began channeling my unspent energy into thoughts, and then putting those thoughts on paper. Eventually they became an unexpected book, From Oy to Joy, about approaching aging as an adventure rather than holding tightly to an uncertain future.
We are living longer than generations before us, and for many people that means years, even decades, beyond the roles and responsibilities that once organized daily life. Work ends. Families change. Bodies change. The ways we once defined ourselves may no longer fit quite as comfortably.
What do we do with the years that follow?
I have come to think of conscious aging as a continuing process of adjustment and accommodation. There is something about it that reminds me of adolescence. That earlier passage brought unfamiliar changes to our bodies, emotions, relationships and identities. We had to learn who we were becoming.
Aging asks something similar of us.
The changes are different, of course. Physical abilities may diminish. People we love may be lost. Roles that once gave our lives structure can disappear. Things that came easily may require accommodation, and some things eventually have to be relinquished altogether.
But loss is not the entire story.
Perspective can change with age. So can our understanding of our own lives — what mattered, what didn’t, what we learned and what we still hope to learn. Expectations of ourselves and others may loosen. We may discover interests that had little room to develop during busier years.
The challenge, as I see it, is learning to relate to the life we actually have rather than continually measuring it against the life we once had.
That doesn’t require denying the difficulties of aging or insisting that every change is welcome. Some are not. There are losses we would never choose and adjustments we would gladly do without. But there are also choices in how we meet them.
At 88, I am still making those choices. I am still learning what to hold onto, what to let go of and how to remain interested in what is available to me now. I don’t expect that process to end.
Perhaps that is why I continue to think of aging as an adventure. An adventure does not promise that everything ahead will be easy or even pleasant. It simply means the journey isn’t finished.
And neither are we.
About the author: Shulamit Sofia, MSW, is the author of From Oy to Joy: A Soul Journey Towards Making the Best of Your Life for the Rest of Your Life. She writes about conscious aging at SpiritualAging.org.
Reader submissions may be lightly edited for clarity and length, while preserving the writer’s original voice.
