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I would say the two most important factors are genetics and life style. You can't do anything about genetics, but you can do alot about lifestyle. Don't smoke, eat properly, get lots of exercise, be concerned about what you can control and don't worry yourself to death about things over which you have no control.
My idea of "gracefully" has a lot to do with equanimity, I think. Ageing only goes in one direction, and it only has one end; no one avoids the process and no one avoids the end.
Old is not young.
Taking active care of your mind/body clearly makes a great deal of sense, rather than pretending that everything is still okay. Adjusting activities to accomodate whatever limitations ageing is imposing only make sense, pretending we can do what we cannot do any longer is the royal road to disaster.
For me "keeping up" is highly selective. To know what technological innovations are out there is a yes, but having them often is not. A mobile phone makes sense, I live alone and drive alone usually; a high definition TV or a Blackberry are not.
Yes, I have listened to rap and hip-hop, and they are musically monotonous and the lyrics are whiny, pop ballad writing has fallen into the hands of the semi-literate - I do not feel compelled to keep up. Much of what needs keeping up with in popular culture will simply be a footnote in some book after I am dead....and if I have any doubts I can look back through the decades of my own life and have no trouble seeing that much that was totally and completely IN during various periods is just as totally irrelevant now.
Keeping up with news, yes - investing my emotions in it, no.
The last part of life offers many of us the time to do more than just keep up with what we've been keeping up with all our lives. It is a time we can look into the many things from all over the world: music, ideas, religions, forms of exercise, art, and cities and countries themselves, that we never had time to reach out for.
With many decades of living behind us, I think old age is a time for questioning and reflecting on our familiar ways, habits and thoughts, and being (one hopes) better able now to examine and experience unfamliar things with curiousity and equanimity rather than knee-jerk aversion and fear.
I think it has to do with happiness from within oneself. My Grandmother did not have a good life outside of having her children and grandchildren, yet she was always happy and fun to be around. My Mother, here daughter has aged to be bitter, we do not know why, me & my sister tease her and tell her that she isn't good at adult motherhood, if that's even possible. Maybe inside she isn't happy and that's why she is bitchy and grumpy. But, needless to say, she isn't fun to be around like my grandmother.......Oh well, and I am not about to find out why.
For me, it's what you did 10 years prior to where you are now, that effects your physical health...
10 years ago I was a health nut...and so it's paying off now....
It's like you invest in yourself by the things you do now...so that down the road you can collect dividends....
And yes, mental health plays a large role to....but that branches off into to many other subjects that I don't feel like going into now...
...I greatly appreciate the past, I try to live in the present and I look forward to the future. Attitude is about the only thing in this life that I have control of;
This is a wonderful statement! I think this sums up what living well and aging gracefully is all about.
What makes some people age gracefully and others not?
genetics play a big part
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