The Anti-aging Bullet

Have you noticed that most of the Spring issue magazines are featuring anti-aging articles, or if not, it’s “being beach ready by Memorial Day”?  Not to mention the hundreds of books that are now out on those same topics.  There’s everything from anti-aging products such as nutrition, physical fitness, skin care, hormone replacements, vitamins, supplements and herbs. It is a lucrative global industry (and one that I wish I had stocks in)!

What’s wrong with being the age you are if you are over 60?  OK, we do have our aches and pains but on the plus side we have the experiences of life.  That can’t be packaged into a pill and given at doses a couple of times a day. My role models are Dame Helen Merrin, Dame Judi Dench and Suzanne Lumley.  All of whom are beautiful over 60 and loving life just as they are! (is it me or are all of the lovely let me all hang out 60+ ladies British?)

We should all have a list of things that we want to accomplish, whether or not we call it our “bucket list”.  What we want to accomplish in our lives is completely free and based on who we are.  What makes each of us special is what we desire and our determination to see it flourish.

I have to admit that I’m a “self-help junkie” and I’m constantly reading books on how to improve myself.  Those of you who know me know that I’m not sure any of them have really worked but I’m considering myself a “work in progress”. When I lived in the UK, I was lucky enough to meet the most wonderful lady, Pippa Davies, who is a marketing guru, as well as speech coach and author.  She’s a psychologist who helps people communicate.  We immediately hit it off and I threw myself into reading all of her books.  She’s an amazing lady of “our age” who has coached Prime Ministers and several cabinet ministers as well as CEO’s and board directors of blue chip companies and has presented on BBC.  She has also had the tremendous pleasure of coaching an Oscar winner.  She’s a formidable lady but I love her to bits and really miss her and our lunches. She’s also a confessed self-help junkie and we’d often discuss what the most current self-help articles and books had to offer. I’d really just like to be able to sit down with her and ask if it’s so terrible to be 60+ and why do we have to buy into all of this anti-aging hype.

We have to face the fact that no cream, supplement or any other devise is going to reverse the aging symptoms, regardless of the advertising hype.  We have to realize that it’s not fatal to have a few wrinkles and aches and pains – it’s a right of passage into the “golden age”. And we can take the advertising blurb from the hair commercial – “We’re worth it!!” and know that whatever we want in life, it’s worth going after.  It might not be the bikini on the beach or some other 30-something dream but it’s real life, as we are living it in our 60’s!