I’m getting older, just like all the rest of you. Even my five year old grandson has stopped wearing Spiderman pajamas and has graduated to T-shirts and shorts for sleepwear. We age, we grow, we decline in some ways. My interest in aging, my own and yours, is not so much with the physical changes we each experience, or even the mental and emotional ones, but in how our aging affects our motivation to change ourselves.

In my thirties and forties, and even my fifties to some degree, I was too busy interacting in the world to spend the time and effort it might have taken to make any significant change. Oh, I’d try to be less prickly if a boss asked me to, or more attentive when my husband told me about his day, but I had no time to make fundamental changes to my character or even to my physical self.

In my sixties I find that I do have the time suddenly. I also have the awareness that I’m mortal. Although I knew this earlier, it seemed so far off or so remote that it was easier to deny. So I’m aware that I will die sometime in the next 40 years, and I’m aware that there are things about me that I want to be different, especially if I do live that 40 years!

I’m really interested in how you feel about change as you age. Are there things about yourself that have become intolerable? What have you done about them? Are you enjoying new experiences that you’d not known about before? How does your aging link to your ideas about and actions toward change?