Books I Like: Act 3 The Art Of Growing Older

What I learned from this book:

Act 1 – that’s the growing up bit. If it was a season, you’d call it spring. The baby, the child, the teenager and the young adult.

Act 2 is busy. There is money to earn, a career to grow, maybe a life partner or long-term relationships and, for many, raising children, and coping with the decline of their own parents.

We could summarise Act 3 as a big time of change and increasing loss. From eyesight to waistlines, routines of work and family life, it’s all change. And for most women, the physical and emotional upheaval of the menopause will be a major part of their transition into Act 3, and can feel like the end of the world. (It isn’t.)

Our Act 4, when we can be as helpless as a baby, but with the mind of a sage, sitting in a care home with a TV on at full volume. But we’re not there yet.

"Your way of life has so little to do with what you feel and love in the world."

If your goals are inconsistent with what’s fundamentally important to you, you’ll find it harder to gather the motivation.

If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always got.

– Unknown

Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

A bad attitude is like a flat tyre.

You can’t move until you change it.

If you believe you can,

or believe you can’t,

you are right.

– Henry Ford

Our greatest freedom is the freedom to choose our attitude.

...for a successful happy life in Act 3, you need a purpose – a sense of who you are and where you are going. A reason to get up every day. It could be to save the world, or it could be to walk the dog. Both give purpose. Both can feed the soul.

Another way to find and build purpose

Here’s a tool to think about it which comes from the Japanese concept of Ikigai, where purpose is described as a balance of:

•  what you love

•  what the world needs

•  what you’re good at

•  what you can be rewarded for

It’s sometimes easier to identify what our values are when they get denied.

Eat half. Walk double. Laugh triple.

And love without measure.

– Tibetan proverb

Vocation does not come from a voice ‘out there’ calling me to be something I am not. It comes from a voice ‘in here’ calling me to be the person I was born to be.

– Thomas Merton, writer and monk

Working just for money – without real emotional commitment – will rust your soul.

this Irish saying: ‘Mo sheasamh ort lá na choise tinne’, which translates as:

You are the place where I stand on the day when my feet are sore.

Let it go. Let it out.

Let it all unravel.

Let it free and it can be

A path on which to travel.

– Michael Leunig

The man who views the world at 50 the same as he did at 20 has wasted 30 years of his life.

– Muhammad Ali

You cannot go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.

– James R. Sherman, Rejection