By Elizabeth

As August is Pro-age Month at BOOM!, I’ve been thinking a lot about what that concept means to me and to this amazing community of women. 

What is it to be truly pro-age in mind, heart, body and soul? 

Of those themes, the body is the one that gets the most attention. We live in an aesthetics-obsessed culture, for one thing. And for another…bodies are fun! Beauty is fun! I’m all about enjoying looking good and pursuing looking good in healthy, emotionally kind, authentically pro-age ways. 

But in order to experience aging not just as something we tolerate but as something we are legitimately in favor of, mind, heart, body and soul all come into play. 

Today I want to focus on the pro-age mind. 

I recently met an actress who is in the throes of menopause. She’s experiencing all the physical realities of that process.

And she’s dealing with the feelings that come up around aging out of her reproductive years in a culture and in a profession that tends to tune out “women of a certain age,” as she put it. 

On the other hand, she’s feeling…elated. She said she feels unburdened, and what she described as “freakishly” excited about the next phase of her life. 

As we age, we become less what we are told by the outside world we have to be and more who we actually are. 

For the actress, this means going out for roles she never would have considered in her younger years—now that she doesn’t fit “the” mold she’s realizing how limited she was by it in the first place. 

And even more importantly, inside her mind, she’s finding that as one sense of herself ebbs, another one is just beginning to flow. “I feel like I’m rediscovering my childhood but I’m coming at it with all this wisdom,” she said. “Aside from the night sweats, it’s the best of both worlds!”

That is the pro-age mind: Recognizing that the passage of time is a gift, allowing us both to deepen our relationship with life and reacquaint us with prior versions of ourselves, all culminating in a richer, more nuanced and ultimately freer outlook on life. 

And if you can do all that with a sense of humor, you truly are golden!

How would you describe your relationship with aging? What does aging well mean to you?

Elizabeth is a journalist who has been writing about health, beauty and wellness for over 20 years. She lives in Northern New Mexico with her two dogs and several hundred trees, shrubs, bushes and succulents. 

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