Take executive control of yourself and your journey. There is a difference between aging and getting old. Aging is finding ways to manage your life changes so you can be optimally alive, active, and engaged. Getting old, on the other hand, means taking on the characteristics that our society expects old people to have, losing interest in life, accepting the notion that it s too late to change, believing that life doesn t matter anymore, failing to set goals and commitments, losing a sense of surprise, and giving in to passivity and boredom. None of us can stop aging, but we don t have to grow old.
Heredity accounts for only one-fourth of the variation in human life spans.
Gerontologists have found that nutrition, exercise, and social relationships are more important than genetic structures. Keep up, mentally, with your fields of expertise, with new knowledge and skills, with areas of emerging interest. If you neglect your talents and skills that have been essential to your life, they begin to wane, and then you begin to wane. If you are interested in new skills rather than the ones you ve been performing, that will work fine. Learning is a central feature of creative aging.