One of the hardest battles in this life is learning how to ‘be yourself’; sometimes it feels like the whole world is asking you to become someone else. Retirement has had many descriptions but one common thread is that most of us are looking for fresh opportunities to use this precious time to fulfil our lifelong ambitions.

We walk a tightrope between our obligations and our desires and much of what we choose to do is determined by our experiences of the world. What triggers the opening of one pair of eyes may not be what triggers another. Most readers of this blog are interested in investigating how to be more conscious in their decision-making. Part of that journey is questioning our assumptions about what we are being told about the world. 

Henry Miller may be right when he said “If you can keep from growing sour, surly, bitter or cynical… you’ve got it half licked”. Much of the energy we spend in older age is protecting what we’ve got, hanging on to stuff that seems connected to our happiness, but we tend to trip up when we find out this hanging on is limiting our ability to pursue any wider interests and restricting our ability to find a more impersonal life that can open up new doorways and the possibility to experience a remarkable thought that: ‘what we thought was possible has already been achieved’.

If we continue to always swing between that place where fear and hope rule our world then we are lost. It seems that in the aging process, the life cycle of deeper happiness grows closer to us by the mere fact that we observe the world moving on and our time within it restricted. All the positive and meaningful changes that enliven us are always preceded by an expansion of awareness and it’s our job to notice it.

We will always have the forces that make us unhappy battling with the forces that make us happy but when we act wisely and with deeper awareness we are assisted with our striving to prevail over these forces. No one can build a bridge for you to cross over but when we take responsibility for ourselves the right path opens before us… And so it is, unlearning the habits of a lifetime is the path to becoming oneself. We cannot let what comes from the outside become our destiny. It is only from within that we gain the courage to be happy and remain strong to the end.