Sweet. That's the place in the aging process when we don't care about aging any more and just let go and open ourselves to the possibility of being one of those "extraordinary elderly." That term pops up in "Aging as a Spiritual Practice" by Lewis Richmond. Examples of those "extraordinary elderly" include Clint Eastwood, Betty White, Hillary Clinton, T. Boone Pickens, and Lewis Richmond himself.
One day we wake up and we are on the other side of the shame of not being young. America, a youth culture, is programmed to push the elderly into emotional ghettos. There we are supposed to implode because we, well, don't look young.
The shame gone, we take inventory of our new strengths, which come with having made it this far and through so much. One big thing we got going for us is that we don't need so much any more. Not so much money, praise, resources, or even so many folks on our network.
The next step is taking new kinds of risks. The odds are that we will fail a lot. But remember when we used to look for jobs and our mentor told us that we only needed one job so it didn't matter a damn how many jobs we didn't get. The game is about being about to gain access to fresh opportunity.
And, the maintenance step is to continue to not care. It's what we do every day which counts. As the Buddhists put it, be in the now. Caring is an emotion which drains our energy to do.
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