The Pleasure of Aging: my gift to you

05 Aug The Pleasure of Aging: my gift to you

You may have read about my recent travels to Mexico. It elicited some conversation, with women reaching out to tell me about their desire to travel, and their fears about doing so. Most of the women who reach out to me have some fear about their life: getting older, worrying about their looks. Many seem to express dissatisfaction about aging and maybe even stuck in the way they view day-to-day life. They know they want something different but aren’t quite sure how to go about creating that change.

I get it. I spent far too long feeling miserable—prolonging the agony because I didn’t think I had the right to choose a better, happier, alternative. Worried that folks would think poorly of me or that I didn’t really deserve to consider my own needs and well-being.  It’s easy to get stuck in our fear and to stay stuck, mired in old thoughts and patterns.

Toni Morrison once said, “You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.”

Maybe you don’t know what sh*t is weighing you down. Or maybe you aren’t ready to believe you have a right to embrace pleasure. So I want to offer you something—a week of writing prompts about the Pleasure of Aging. My life right now is focused on exploring what Aging Unapologetically looks like for us as women–in my personal life and as part of my work with women.

I firmly believe to be alive at this age, whatever that is for you, is a privilege and in many ways pleasurable. For starters, I’m grateful to be alive. And I intend to make the most of what I’ve learned and what I feel is going to make me happier, lighter, more joyful and full of pleasure.

The thing is we don’t always remember to be grateful for being alive. And we live in a time when aging women are not valued. Making it all too easy to focus on all the negatives and the losses we feel about our lives as we get older. I can’t fix that but I can offer you a way to examine what you believe and what you’d like to change. By signing up for the Pleasure of Aging, you’ll receive an email each morning for 6 days with an introduction to the day’s topic and a writing prompt. The goal is not to enhance your writing skills, but to use that method, of pen to paper, as a way of creating change.

We’ll start Monday, August 19 and end on Saturday, August 24. On Saturday you will be invited to join me for a live session, on Zoom, where I’ll talk about the prompts and invite you to discuss what came up for you. I’m not charging for this because I want, in all honesty, to encourage you to participate—the reward for me is helping you feel better about who you are right now. And the feedback I get gives me insight into women and aging.

I’d love to have you join me.  As I said, it’s free. Consider it my 65th birthday gift. The prompts will show up in your email early each morning and the amount of time you invest is up to you. It’s not about the quality of writing, it’s not about how well you think you express yourself in words. Writing is the tool I find useful in examining our  beliefs, fears, goals, desires–all the things in our heads that need to see the light of day.

I want to help you explore your aging process, to maybe come to find the pleasure in aging as it applies to your life. This is your chance to look at some of the issues we face around aging and how to create something that feels better for you. You can participate by simply reading and thinking about the questions, by writing and going deep, and by deciding to join me in a video conference to process what you’ve learning at the end of the week. All, up to you.

I’d love to have you join me. Leave a comment here or send me an email at walker@walkerthornton.com to get on the list!

Photo by Allie Smith on Unsplash