Better with age

This morning a client of mine, Shaun, told me that in a couple of more progressive places, child-care is being mixed with aged-care for some pretty incredible results.

The kids are keeping the oldies young, and the oldies are teaching the kids a thing or two. The kids want to play and have no concept of what an old person shouldn’t be able to do, so an interesting thing happens: the old folk forget they’re old, absent-mindedly leave their walking aids behind and start playing with the kids.

Occasionally, an old timer will remember they’ve forgotten their walker, and snap back into their old-person-persona. It’s interesting that what reminds us of our ability is not always a physical boundary, but often a mental one.

Perhaps to a larger extent than we realise, the physical process of ageing is accelerated by mental inflexibility: a more rigid idea of who we are and what we are capable of. If we can understand how mind and culture combine to create self-fulfilling realities, then perhaps we can free ourselves of this for a better life.

Common sense thinking says that it’s the body that causes the mind to age. It’s just the price we pay as we endure the physical stress of life on a planet with gravity weighing us down. And so in this paradigm, it’s obvious that a crunchy hip or a cranky back is the reason for low energy and a dreary outlook on the future.

But we focus too much on the deterioration process and too little on our ability to rejuvenate ourselves. Everyone’s had that conversation with the old dude who used to be able to blah blah blag but can’t cause he’s got a bung knee. Poor guy. You feel sorry for him, right? Maybe you can relate. I certainly can.

Except there’s also something a little off… It’s like he’s carrying a parasitic story with him, that dictates what he can and can’t do “because of the knee”. And this story eats away at his cartilage just as badly as any wrong movement does. I empathise with this guy, but the parasitic story makes me uneasy.

Mainstream reality operates on the idea that with ageing comes a narrowing of the body’s potential. This idea is backed by a huge, almost overwhelming body of evidence. Look at all the old people. All the sick people. They don’t play sport. They move slowly. They don’t jig and bounce. They’re fragile.

We see this and think it must be miserable to be old… and that makes us miserable while we’re younger, knowing that we’re headed there too. Arthritis this, X-rays that, jam-donut-disc-bulge this, neurofen that. Ugh. So much evidence piled up to suggest what is possible and what isn’t when you hit “x” age.

These ideas can be dangerous. We learn to expect a particular future because someone with credentials told us so. The beliefs we hold in our minds form a very real part of our embodied experience. So much so that we can feel pain when there is no damage in the body, simply because of a memory or an expectation.

The trouble is, the bulk of our data is collected from people who don’t have the tools to do better. See the problem? It’s a broken lifestyle talking, not the body’s potential. When we get injured and a specialist gives us the prognosis, it’s based on people with in a less than ideal situation. You’re here, reading thins, so that doesn’t have to be you. That is a reality you literally do not have to be part of.

I’m not here to piss into the prevailing wind. It’s irrefutable that ageing happens. The crucial point is that with the right knowledge, it doesn’t have to happen to us as early or as dramatically as it does. I’m fortunate to be in a bubble of people who have the tools to create their own statistics. I see women in their 60s learning to handstand and seasoned athletes reversing their body-clock and crushing it.

We age the way we do because we learn the way we do. Why is it that playing, exploring, climbing trees and asking shamelessly curious questions is a predominantly child-like set of habits? These young beings are thriving by accumulating experiences. They’re sponges, digesting life at every layer of their being - hands, feet, eyes, brain, tongue, gut, heart. They’re living; expanding.

We think kids are special… and they are, but perhaps it’s partly down to the time they spend in a state of open, impulsive exploration. We can’t rewind the clock literally, but we can steal their methods and therefore regain some mental flexibility. I know because I’ve done it. Playing, exploring, un-learning and re-shaping my mind has freed me of pain and injury. It’s helped me reshape my expectations.

I didn’t always have this relationship with my body. I had to rebuild it. The initial betrayal of my body began at school when I was told to sit still, shut up, ignore my impulses and cram my brain with more knowledge than I could ever digest. All so I could get the job I was told I’d later want. I learned to disembody. And so when I played sport or went to the gym, I was ordering my body around, like a stranger, not experiencing body as self.

Where would I be if I didn’t get lost for so long? Rather than complicating learning by studying endless isolated topics with no contextual framing in our lives, what if we learned to connect the dots as young adults? What if we learned to recognise patterns, find common threads, think in more than one dimension? What if we could draw, speak or move our ideas into reality with all of ourselves?

What if there was less academic analysis paralysis and more felt, embodied, unified experiencing? It might seem abstract or complicated but it’s not. I know we can explore big, philosophical ideas through movement. I know we can learn about human relationships through play wrestling. I’ve made it my job to know.

Of course, kids have to go to school and adults have to go to work. Of course, everyone’s doing their best with what they have. I’m not blaming anyone. I’m just saying that we can do better and I know how to start: by promoting human learning that acknowledges the whole nervous system. A more flexible way.

If we can mentally unstick ourselves enough to begin to think differently about how we age and how we learn, we will save ourselves from self-sabotage as a species. Rather than drifting towards an unhealthy, unfulfilling normal, thinking it is inevitable, we can walk the path towards a more fulfilling, high resolution life.

I’ve spent the last decade scratching around trying to articulate what exactly this way of living is, and how to start putting it to practice… and the best word I’ve found to signpost the way is attuned. It’s a state of open, receptive harmony in which we are in-touch with our own nature and skilled in our interactions with the world.

No discipline is off limits. Neuroscience, yoga, strength and movement development, psychotherapy, rehabilitation, linguistics, music… If it improves the human’s being-ability, it should be of interest. Obviously some fields are more in my lane an others, less so, but I recognise a necessity to blend specialisation with synthesis (dot-connecting). So many world-altering ideas come from tangental adventures.

Anyway, there’s a clear truth emerging: the reality we perceive is the reality we get. Our ability to stay flexible and ‘try out’ new ways of interpreting experiences is what truly defines our vitality. A chronically open, receptive, aware human being who explores learning and moving in new ways will inevitably enjoy two things: a younger, more capable body and a more colourful, interesting life.