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How To Live A Full Life while Accepting Your Age?
First, you decide if you are going to let your years or your abilities limit you.
Life is a balancing act between constraining limitations and endless possibilities.
There are some precocious babies, bright and winsome but they won’t be talking to their parents at six months. Being in the baby phase has limitations.
Old age does have limitations too that vary with individuals. Shakespeare called it Dotage and Death and vividly describes the last stage
Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. As you like it Act 11, Scene VII [All the world’s a stage]
Never mind this grim picture, I still have everything even if there is a dilution of quality. Physically, there is not a button that switches on decrepitude but health problems increase, agility slows and the mind forgets in its own time.
Erik Erickson did groundbreaking work in the eight stages of psychosocial development. In the nineties, he contributed with colleagues to a book, Vital Involvement in Old Age. Age sixty-five years start the last and eighth stage. Its success depends on our sense of our own accomplishments in earlier stages.
