What If Getting Older Isn’t Something We Need to Fix?

I turned 50 and discovered something rather disappointing: I still felt like me.

There was no sudden transformation into an elderly gentleman who enjoys complaining about the price of things and inspecting the garden from behind the curtains. My body has changed, certainly, but then it has been changing since the day I was born.

Today is the International Day of Older Persons, and this year’s theme is “The Age of Longevity: Rethinking Systems for Longer Lives.” The World Health Organization⁠ is using it to talk about longer lives with health, dignity and the ability to continue contributing.

I like one phrase in particular from WHO Europe: “Ageing is living.”

Because somewhere along the way we’ve made ageing sound like a personal failure.

Grey hair needs covering. Lines need reducing. Bodies must be made to look younger. Advert after advert offers to fight, reverse or defy something every single one of us is doing successfully every day.

Naturism has given me a rather different view.

Spend enough time among ordinary naked people and you see bodies at different stages of life. There are scars, wrinkles, softer bits, stronger bits, bits that have moved south without leaving a forwarding address. None of it makes somebody less of a person.

Perhaps ageing well isn’t about desperately preserving the body we had at 25. Perhaps it’s about continuing to use and enjoy the one we’ve got now.

That might mean keeping up something we already love, learning something completely new, staying curious, making plans or simply refusing to decide that we’re “too old” before we’ve even tried.

At 50, I’m not interested in turning the clock backwards.

There’s still far too much ahead.

What would you try if you stopped telling yourself you were too old for it?