“Youth is wasted on the young” – George Bernard Shaw
Attaining the optimum life of a human being, which should be our duty, our role – not a side-show issue – is to achieve wisdom, grace, beauty and health. Often these only come to us with the years, not decline, as is sometimes perceived. You will know the saying “life begins at forty” and if you are beyond those years, you will have discovered this is true. In the main, we do not find ourselves or learn much about the process of living until we have had years of practice.
That’s logical.
But the old way of looking at things was that, by then, it was too late; we had missed our chance.
Trash this belief at once! At forty you have barely lived half your life -often the painful half. The remainder is the reward or pay-off. It’s the part which brings about the reckoning or balance, if you like.
Now that’s a contrived way of introducing the key anti-ageing topic for this site, which is BALANCE.
As in so many endeavours, bliss, success or achievement only comes about from a harmonious balance of counterpoised forces. Buddha advocated the Middle Way; the Chinese introduced us to yin and yang; whereas we might talk of male and female virtues; nowadays we have the concept of right and left brain.
These are NOT competing elements. These are co-operative elements. Each plays its part. There is no good or bad side. It’s the balance between the two which counts. We need both, like night and day, sweet and sour or fast and slow. Some combinations invent each other, like good and bad, high and low, or old and new; you need one to create the other (much advertizing, for instance is to create the destructive unbalanced notion that “old” is bad, only “new” is good, but that’s just to get you to part with your bucks).
Other combinations seem to exist in the nature of things. You can’t have a left without a right, really, otherwise you would just walk around in circles. And that’s a good way to think about this all-important issue. All left turns or all right turns is an idiots way to get nowhere!
So it is that health and vitality, your main passports to a long and happy life, are built around many balances: balanced nutrients, balanced energies, balanced hormones and a balanced view of life.
We’ll be looking at ways of achieving all these desirable states on this website. In the meantime, I suggest you make it your mot juste for the third age. Think it, speak it and act on it! You’ll be calmer, happier, healthier, livelier and wiser.
That’s a promise built into the fabric of life!