Must One Deteriorate (Age)?

Is deterioration an inevitable process of aging (time), or could it be merely the accumulation of bad choices that have caught up with one?

Conversely, are there good choices one makes, that improves the viability and vitality of life – throughout one’s existence?

Most people just accept the “fact” that they will deteriorate into an eventual hopeless condition until death seems like a natural conclusion – but if one were to continue to improve and get healthier, most would say that is not possible – or is it?

Much of what people do, ultimately harms them – unless they realize what they are doing, that causes them that injury, pain and suffering – more than it is, that bad things just happen.  People predispose bad things happening, as much as they predispose good things happening – although they often claim that they have absolutely no control of what is happening.

But is that really true, or just another rationalization, like all the rationalizations they accept for explanations that delude themselves?  They really don’t want to know, don’t want to see that they are ultimately responsible for what happens to them.  They like to believe they are just helpless victims of fate – and society, and not that their lives are the accumulation of all the individual choices they have made that have brought them to their present condition and situation (crisis).

A life of care – or a life of abuse, eventually shows itself.  There is no escaping one’s self-created (inflicted) destiny.  We are mostly, what we make ourselves.  Those are strange and aliens words in these times – when very few think they have any impact on their own lives!  How did we come to this?

More importantly, how can we take our lives back, and become the masters of our own fate and lives?  We have to show constant and continual improvement – even in the smallest ways, because even the smallest things matter – but there cannot be this resignation, that nothing matters, or makes a difference.  Something has to make a difference – and that is the beginning of progress – to find out what that is.

Obviously, the things that don’t work, don’t make that difference – but that should not lead one to conclude that nothing does.

We know that some people age better than others – which the people of despair and hopelessness will quickly attribute only to genetics – and not to the many choices one has made along the way to attaining that grace and presence of being.  Few grow old gracefully – with dignity and beauty.  That should be the aspiration of all – and not the current vision of increasing disability and senility, with enough health care insurance to ensure as much health care as possible, simply prolonging an irreversible decline of health as long as possible – as the only case possible.

Certainly, there has to be a better, more noble fate for humankind.  No society can be viable and sustainable, merely producing more disabled, dying and less-able bodied people.  That is the crisis of these times – that threatens to overwhelm every mature nation in the world – that is aging at an unprecedented alarming rate no society has dealt with before – unless they have already perished.

The first waves of the mass aging populations have already gotten there – and fared badly thus far, cut down by heart attacks, strokes, cancers, depression,  social alienation, dementias, disabilities, obesity and atrophy.  Underlying those difficulties, is no will to change and improve their conditions, other than that the government, or maybe the medical institutions should do something about it – while these individuals feel there is nothing they can do for themselves.

Obviously, that is the wrong paradigm and attitude – moving in the wrong direction.  But rather than time working against one, time can work for them – because that is the major advantage most have at that time in their lives, and nothing is more important to do than to improve their health as the primary occupation of their lives.  That doesn’t necessarily mean they have to devote all their time to it – but that should be their top priority, and then they can better go about the rest of their lives.

But that has to be the critical path – the first thing they do, and not the last, if they get around to it at all.  It should come even before they eat – just like in the monasteries, their devotion to God, comes before they breakfast – to get their priorities straight.  In others, it is their meditation, or exercises, before anything else, and those who don’t, don’t eat.  It is what one must do themselves, alone.

Many don’t know how to do anything themselves, alone – and that is their major problem, because unless one has that intense inner drive to improve, one will not do it for themselves – and no one will force them to.  So most won’t do it – but must suffer the consequences.  There is no escaping that fate.