Aging is Living

To Cindy, aging is just another word for living.

With each new decade of your life, you’re not only aging. You’re experiencing a new kind of beauty. Cindy challenges you to celebrate that beauty and set an example for all the women who come after you.

Watch the video to find out why.

Video Transcript:

Hey, guess what, it’s Saturday again. So it’s a beautiful day here. It’s a little stormy, a little windy. I’m up, bathrobe, nightgown, comfortable, and ready to chat. Oh, that was my curtain that just flew in here.

All right, so let’s talk about age. What is age? Some of you have heard me talk about it before. Some of you have read what I have to say about it, but I discovered that age, aging is living. We are born, and we start living, and from the day we’re born we start aging. And we continue until the day we die. So aging and living are one in the same.

Who said aging was bad? Now a lot of people start to get sick when they get older. And it started when they were younger, it’s an accumulation. It’s like I can hit my hand with a hammer and it would hurt, and it might do some damage, but if I keep hitting it, and hitting it, and hitting it, and hitting it, eventually my hand is going to have to fall off. Wow, it’s getting really windy here. So it’s really a matter of taking care of yourself, and the good news is if you have abused your body, or gotten sick and your health is going down, you can rejuvenate. It’s proven beyond the shadow of a doubt, you can get healthier from where ever you are. Through fasting, cleansing, eating the right diet, and exercising, and getting sleep, taking care of your emotions and your psychology. I’m a big, big proponent of therapy, personal growth workshops. Anything it takes to go inside and nurture yourself, and love yourself, and take care of yourself.

So just aging is not a bad thing. Coasting, you can only go one direction. So it’s important to take action. If you’re healthy, do what it takes to stay healthy. If you’re not healthy, do what it takes to get healthy. Instead of waiting, coasting, and getting down, going down hill and then getting to neutral. Start at neutral and then step up, do what it takes to go from good to better.

There is a beauty in every state of life. Newborn children, newborn humans are so beautiful to us. Toddlers are so beautiful when they get that little fat roll and they have that cuteness, that roundness. Adolescence, there’s a beauty to adolescence you can almost see a little bit of the adult in the child. Teenagers, wow, they start blossoming. It’s beautiful, and then a young adult. A young woman in her 20s. There’s a beauty there that’s totally different than the beauty that she has in her 30s. And then when you hit your 40s, wow, there is a maturity in the beauty. There is a definition, in the muscle, in the tendons, and the ligaments that you can see. The skin starts to shift. There’s that little sign of higher maturity.

I love women in their 40s, I think they're so beautiful. And then, when a woman hits her 50s, there’s a whole other kind of beauty, it’s like you see the youth, and you see the age you see in an elder. They start coming together. And then, when a woman hits the decade of her 60’s, wow. Those are the pictures we put on our walls. Those are the pictures we see when see the details of the lines and the age in the hands.

There’s this deep inner beauty. I always like to say the veil the between the inner life, and the outer life starts to thin as we age. So the feelings, the life experiences, the sadness. The tragedies we’ve seen, the births we’ve seen, the beauty we’ve seen, starts to come through and show on the outside. So our tenderness, our compassion the inner beauty starts to show more on the outside.

And then the 80s, God, like wow, we want to know what that person has experienced. We want a piece of what they have. So many people, when the become elderly, they start to get ignored, and they give up. They give up trying to be seen, and there’s so much wisdom, and life experience to glean from them.

So we buy these photographs, the old native American at the potter's wheel. The old Arab man sitting there with his turban, smoking his cigarette. We’ve all seen them in National Geographic. Some of us have invested money, hundreds, sometimes, thousands of dollars and framed them, and put them on our walls. Georgio Keefe, in her studio, with the sunlight raking across all of those wrinkles, across her face and we say, look, you can see the roadmap of her life in her skin. But God forbid we get one of those on our faces.

So start appreciating the beauty of your stage in life. If you’re in your 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s or beyond. You have your own unique beauty in your age, and you have your own unique beauty amongst all the women your age. Because you are unique and beautiful yourself. So start looking in the mirror. Start finding all those things that you love about your own unique character, and your own unique age, and start celebrating it and now I’m getting emotional because if you do that you are going to be an example for all the woman younger than you that want that.

They want to see that they have a wonderful place to go, and it’s up to us. It’s up to you to do that. Do that for your daughters, your granddaughters, your grandnieces, and all the women you’re never going to meet. You’re going to be gone, leave a legacy for them. Celebrate, celebrate your beauty, celebrate your life. It’s a beautiful thing. You are a beautiful thing. Thank you. See you next Saturday.