We chose the phrase “Age on Purpose” carefully. Doing something “on purpose” means doing it consciously, actively, by choice, not by accident. Getting older does not have to be just something that happens to us. We can view it as a conscious movement through this journey of life. There will almost certainly be times when we’d like to stop the clock or turn it back, but when you know something is inevitable, why not face up to it and take it on wholeheartedly?
Age on purpose” suggests that each of us is ON a path in life. We are headed somewhere, and each of us is accountable for where we are now and where we are going in life. This is true at all ages and all life stages, but maybe especially so now. As the years pile up, each of us is the sum product of a myriad of choices we’ve made up to this point in life, and we will continue to make choices until the day we die. So to say that we are “aging on purpose” connotes that each of us is the travel agent of our own lives, that we are ON a path to somewhere of our own making. If we’re not happy with the path, we can change it. But whatever we choose to do about our path, we are ON it and we must OWN it.
Finally, the words “Age on Purpose” were chosen to try to make an important distinction between activity and purpose. In the course of writing our book, we interviewed a number of people in their fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties. We are grateful for their wisdom and their honesty. We learned many things from them. Perhaps the most important thing we learned and which has become central to this book is that there is a big difference between activity and purpose. People are fond of advising older people to stay busy, to keep active. That’s good advice, as far as it goes.
But our learning says it doesn’t go far enough. It’s not enough just to have a lot of activity in our lives. We also need an understanding of what all that activity is for, where it’s taking us, why we choose to focus on certain things and not on others. We’re calling that “purpose”, and it’s fundamental to happiness at every time of life. But it’s different at this stage of life because when we are younger, our days are usually full of things that constantly demand attention: work, marriage, children, friendships, community, and so on. We may not always be clear on what our purpose is in each of these areas, but we have a lot of momentum propelling us along.
With age, many of these elements become less central to life. Children grow up and leave home, careers plateau or retirement looms, marriages sometimes end and social connections that produced friendships often decline or change. We can fill up our days with tasks and errands and hobbies and activities. We can exhaust ourselves running from a community meeting to a lecture to an exercise class to a part-time job. But at the end of the day, what have we accomplished? What is it all for? If we can’t answer those questions, we need to discover our purpose. Stop confusing being busy with being purposeful. Don’t mistake activity for meaning. Let’s get on purpose!
