Changing Thoughts, Changing Bodies

Can we just change our aging patterns by changing our thinking about it? To me, the evidence seems to point that way.

When my grandparents retired at 65, they really looked beat and they did not live to enjoy more than a few years of retirement before their health failed.

After a lifetime of working on farms and factories and doing other manual labor, they were just plain tired by the time they got that age.

Now my mother, on the other hand, also worked a long hard life, but she always kept busy with her friends or her volunteer work, and later in life even took up things like yoga and water aerobics, and now she has outlived her parents by quite a number of years.

How many of us have accepted as a fact that as we grow older, we will lose various functions and abilities and that these diminish to the end?

And how many of us reject that thinking? How many people are still doing things they enjoy doing in their 70s, 80s and beyond? Quite a few I see.

Consider this as a very real example of how our thoughts can shape our lives.