Limitations of Ecstasy

I want to know if you can be with joy, mine or your own; if you can dance with wildness and let the ecstasy fill you to the tips of your fingers and toes without cautioning us to be careful, be realistic, remember the limitations of being human.

-Oriah Mountain Dreamer

As with almost everything, I ideas change as we age...so does our connotation and definition of JOY.  I think it does not take much to have us feeling Joy, have us allowing JOY in our life, acknowledging JOY in our life.  Joy is that thing that Oriah Mountain Dreamers says you feel in every fibre of your being.  I think JOY becomes PEACE.

I find that I focus more on positive things rather than negative and it is a blessed relief.  Yes, that is JOY too.  I am learning, better and better, how to delete the negative thoughts and suppress my Evil Inner Witch/Ego.  I seem to be able to stop, take a deep breath, and sort things out better, as well.  When negative things arise, I handle them more quickly.  This lets me feel JOY more deeply. I am more resilient.

As we age, we become more isolated.  There can be myriads of reasons like losing our drivers license, like medications, like poor health, etc.  But, we can be more isolated because we fear a thousand thousand things about going out.  Sometimes we just do not have the energy.  It is imperative that we do get out.  We can use excuses, and there are many of them, but social interaction is huge for our well-being in every quadrant of our lives.  We have to push ourselves sometimes, rather than sink into victimhood of isolation imposed by self.  We age much quicker when we keep ourselves away and JOY gets difficult to find as we lose our physical, intellectual, emotional resiliency and give in to biding time.  We need meaningful engagement with life and others in order to stay healthy.

Another thing that brings us joy is being able to be flexible in decisions and engagements.  We can do something now or later.  We can go now or later.  We can plan what needs planning and scrap it if we choose too.  No sweat.  Simply doing what we have to do and doing it when we can.  That is relief/JOY as well.
Another thing that can bring us joy, as we age, is to realize there are things we did not try before, places we have not gone, people we have not met before and we can find immense pleasure if we try it all.  Again, small things can give us joy as we age.  Sometimes we have not tried things because we did not have time to even know we had a choice to do so.  We will fail, stumble, and have body emissions you never dreamed of, and still have success in being out and about and around.  When we try and succeed.. there is wonder to it.

We see a great deal of plastic surgery, puffed up cheekbones, chin and nose rebuilding, eyelids lifted, everything on the body is worked on in order to think we have defied aging.  People parachute at 80 and 90 years of age, just to prove what, really?  We can be such pathetic beings chasing the illusive youth and never ever finding it.  In the end, we live to die, and we are terrified and unable to come to terms with it.  Thank goodness I have no fear.  I am, day by day, noticing a lessening of things, and I am, so far, able to accept it.  My mother did.  She was amazing.  She made her plans/goals to be in over 55 housing, then move to assisted living and then made her own decision to go to auxiliary care.  We did not have to make those decisions for her.  She was so lovely.  As for me, I will find joy in something every day.  A Shuswap snail showing up and sharing my art table with me;  a beautiful butterfly; the baby birds singing in the hedge; a huge blossom on my Dinner Plate Dahlia...  little things make me feel joyful as I can be.  I want it known to all, that nothing in me cares to be kept alive for years in nursing homes.  It would bring me great joy to just go and find relief from life down here.  We cannot combat aging but we may combat the idea of ageism.

We are baby boomer seniors.  We still have strong voices, hands for giving service,

we have wisdom from our experiences down here in this hard life and we have refined what JOY is to ourselves.  We all have different experiences, attitudes, and health but we still celebrate ourselves and our little successes.  We do not want to relive our lives.  We have done it, seen it, tried it, failed at it, succeeded at it, and we know when we will be done, we will be done.  We know there are inconveniences behind us, with us, and coming to us.  We know to not make other people's lives more miserable by us being miserable.  We do not want to be burdens on others and society.  We know about bringing JOY to other peoples, places, things.  We want it so we give it.

Joy is feeling a sense of fulfillment.  There are no other expectations other than that we feel peace and comfort and a sense of "I am enough"!  We can still find joy in non-conforming (oh, we 60's women).  We can socialize with any age.  We can dress as funky as we please.  We can find others who also have a sense of identity that we do. We begin to really cultivate JOY when we stay involved with life. We can still make homemade bread and pies and our favorite recipes and share them, not just cook for one.   By this age, we have made family of those who not even blood.  We love them dearly and are loved back.  We have our own community of people easy to be around.. oh, and laughter.  We have laughter.  We cultivate hobbies.  We make JOY for ourselves.

We come to an age where, with everything we have ever heard, or believe, about a next life, there should be no fear.  We are ready and willing for it to come when it comes (some hope for sooner), but we refuse to live like we are dying.  We motivate each other through invitations, through texting, through Face Book, through chatting over the fence.  We are here!  We remain here, seeking bits of JOY through our days. 

What brings you joy? What are you saving up for later joy?

©Carol Desjarlais 6.23.19