Aging is not a mindset problem. It is not a personal failure. It is not something you can outsmart with willpower and good lighting.
It is life, doing what it does.
This year, a lot of older adults felt that in very specific ways. In the body. In relationships. In daily function. In the quiet recalculations we make that no one else sees.
Meaning tends to get richer with age. Not because everything gets easier. Often it is the opposite. But time has a way of clarifying what matters. The noise falls away. The unnecessary gets harder to tolerate. The small, steady goods start to feel like treasure.
And then there is the body. The part nobody can negotiate with forever.
This year may have brought new limits. New aches. New medications. New fatigue. Slower recovery. Less certainty about what tomorrow will feel like. Even when changes are expected, they can still land with grief. It is disorienting to realize you are adapting again. It is sobering to need help with something you used to do without thinking.
None of that is weakness.
That is the honest and sacred work of living inside a human body with a timeline.
Relationships shift too. Social circles often shrink. Sometimes it is choice, a clearer understanding of what you want and what you no longer have energy for. Sometimes it is loss, distance, illness, death. Either way, the world can get quieter.
But depth can grow where breadth once lived.
Many older adults tell me that they have become less interested in performing and more interested in being real. Less interested in pleasing and more interested in peace. The relationships that last are often the ones sturdy enough to hold truth. There is a particular intimacy that comes from saying, simply, “This is hard,” and being met with, “I know.”
And all of this happens in a culture that worships youth and treats aging like a problem to be solved.
It is no small thing to keep showing up in a world that equates worth with speed, smoothness, and constant reinvention. To live amidst wrinkles, a slower pace, a different body, and still insist your life is not shrinking, it is changing; that takes courage, day after day.
Aging is an ongoing relationship with transition. Yes, it includes loss. It also includes freedom.
Beneath all the things we cannot control, there is one thing we still can.
We have enormous control over how we narrate our lives. We do not get to choose every change. But we do get to choose what it will mean to us. We get to choose whether we speak to ourselves with contempt or compassion. We get to decide whether aging is only a list of what we have lost, or also the slow work of contentment, practiced one ordinary day at a time. For ordinary days can become our biggest blessings.
If this year asked more of you than you expected, you are not alone.
If you are grieving something you cannot quite name, that makes sense.
If you found moments of peace you did not see coming, hold onto them.
Blessings upon you as this year draws to a close. Please, meet me back here in 2026. Let’s keep doing this.
