Support4Change Blog

June 29, 2009
By Renee Payan Wong, Webmaster, Support4Change.com

Arlene will be on hiatus from the Support4Change Blog, while working on the Better Tomorrows Program. In the meantime, I will provide you with what I think of as Arlene’s “Greatest Hits.” This post is a recently added article from the Support4Change website.

Some of Arlene’s reflections on the occasion of her birthday.

Three e-mails came across my desk in the past two weeks that have given me an idea of what I want to write for this page on celebration of birthdays, which is being written the day before my birthday.

1. First is the article by Joyce Vissell, half of the exceptional counseling team of Joyce and Barry Vissell. For several years they have given me permission to use their excellent advice for couples. In this article she talks about a notebook that became the focus for using birthdays to notice the blessings that year (and all of life) have given them.

2. The second e-mail came from a woman who often sends me interesting and inspirational pieces. This was by Regina Brett, 90 years old, who wrote in The Plain Dealer, Cleveland, Ohio, that, “To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught me. It is the most-requested column I’ve ever written.”

The list contained many aphorisms and affirmations that have been attributed to lots of people, sometimes with the same words and other times the words are slightly different. After all, how many ways can you say, “No one is in charge of your happiness but you”?

For this birthday I decided to share a few from her list that most resonated with me because they have been lessons that were particularly valuable for me to learn, or ones I am still trying to put into practice:

• Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up the present.
• Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.
• Don’t compare your life to others. You have no idea what their journey is all about.
• No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.
• Yield.
• You don’t have to win every argument.
• Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie. Don’t save it for a special occasion. Today is special.

3. The third communication came from my brother, John, whose 75th birthday I celebrated by creating my very first video. He wrote about his family’s get-together to celebrate the occasion and shared how much he had to stretch himself over the years in the process of entering into the lives of others as they struggled with problems in their lives. (He was a psychologist and human resources specialist before retiring.)

The same is true for me. Since becoming a therapist, I have learned as much about myself when counseling others as I have learned outside the therapy office working on my issues by myself. And in writing books and offering advice on my websites, I have deepened my understanding of the subjects about which I write. (It’s a little disconcerting to discover that opinions I once stated so firmly were built on less than firm ground, a fact that which could only be understood as I got older.)

As I celebrate my birthday this year, I am reminded once again of the passing of time (an image of a calendar with pages flying off comes to mind).

How do I look upon the aging process as I jump from one birthday to the next? To answer that, I can go back to several years ago when I posed four questions for readers to consider about their age:

What do I like most about my age?

What do I like least about my age?

What do I do to lessen the difficulties associated with my age?

What are your concerns for your next stage of life?

If you read My Experience at Age 70, you will know how I feel today — about the same I felt then. As I’ve gotten older, I realize that I have truly found my path in life (it’s about time I did). And as I learn to live more fully in the moment, I know that I am “following my bliss,” as Joseph Campbell recommended many years ago.

I believe there are two requirements for a full life at any age. Learn and love. I try to do both. The more years I have, the more I can learn and the more I can love. Getting older has its rewards in being able to know how to put into practice what one learns and how to make the world a better place by loving others more effectively.

©2009 Arlene Harder, June 2009

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