A Fear of Getting Old

This post is my entry into the Power of Positivity Contest #popcontest that is run by the ever active Steemian @karenmckersie. I highly recommend taking a look at this contest and submitting an entry.

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I've always been one to become very introspective when reaching a milestone birthday. I remember becoming very frustrated and upset when I was about to turn 30. And questioning whether or not I had achieved anything of significance in my first 30 laps around our big flaming ball in the sky. I didn't think I had done enough, and could see that I had a long way to go in order to achieve my goals.

I was also unhappy in my job, which was leaving me feeling isolated and in an environment that was very different from what I was accustomed to. You can read about this experience in this post. In addition to this, my dog had run away. So I was panicking that I wasn't going to see his fat little face ever again (thankfully he was being well looked after by a stranger and we got him back a day or so later).

_{The Escape Artist}

But now, I'm about to turn 40. And all those old feelings that I felt when turning 30 have returned. But this time, I'm surrounded by a very different group of people. And they've offered some advice that I found incredibly insightful, and changed my perspective on this new mile-stone immediately. So I thought I'd share this advice here.

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Should you fear turing 40, 50, 60, or any other age for that matter?

As it turns out, not at all. I was having a chat with one of the members of my gym a couple of weeks ago and complaining about how rapidly I was approaching middle age with the transition from 39 years of age to 40 years of age.

_Source

This young lady, who is barely 30 years old, looked at me and said something very simple. She said that while travelling through third world countries she saw the way the people celebrated their birthdays. These nations really celebrate birthdays in a big way, for a couple of very good reasons.

Firstly, surviving another year is a great achievement. In a country where the death rate is so high, and life expectancy is low compared to richer nations, reaching your next birthday is a fantastic achievement and must be celebrated.

Further to this, in many countries, the elderly are revered rather than look upon as a burden which can happen in western nations. And while I'm not saying I'm elderly, far from it, the fact that some countries show more respect to a person as they age is a real sign of how much they respect and celebrate the ageing process.

This TED Talk highlights how the elderly are valued differently across the globe. The primary point in this talk is that poorer nations use the elderly as repository for information and advice, and western nations simply either don't need to or don't look at the elderly as useful in this regard.

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In essence, many other non-western nations celebrate ageing as a great achievement and something to be respected and celebrated. It's something we can learn from too. We've grown older, gained more knowledge, experience, hopefully more wealth. And we're still alive and this is a very good thing indeed.

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What if we viewed reaching each milestone as a fresh start?

I have a new business partner who is in his 50's and has experienced a lot of success in his life. We were chatting the other day about my impending advancement in age and he said something very profound. Which isn't at all surprising coming from this guy. He's a very intelligent person.

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My business partner said that I should look at my transition to 40 years old as a new beginning. You see, over the past 2 years I have left a stable and high paying career, bought a business, almost lost that business, and am now working hard to re-build that business you can read about this here. And now that I have a business partner on board, we're looking at expansion plans and will be developing some new income streams over the coming 12 months.

So his view is that I should look at turning 40 as a fresh start that will be leading to even bigger and better adventures. Turning 40 doesn't mean slowing down and easing off on the exciting things in life. For me, turning 40 will mean stepping into new adventures, learning many new lessons, and having a whole lot of fun.

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And I think this is a pretty sensible view to take for any milestone birthday. Every decade (hell, even every year for that matter) brings new opportunities, new adventures and plenty of new things to learn. Even this Steemit experience is one hell of a fun adventure and offers so many opportunities to learn new things and meet new people.

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So let's look at ageing as a positive thing

The simple lesson in all of this is that we should look at ageing as a positive thing. We've survived for this long, we have learned so much, and there's no need to slow down the fun, lessons and adventures.

I'm looking forward to the coming decade like never before. There is so much to do, and a lot of fun to be had.

And I look forward to sharing these adventures with all my friends here on Steemit!

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