Is the decline story about aging actually true?

No. The decline you've been promised is not a fixed fact about your body. It's a forecast. And a long line of research, along with my own life at 69, says the forecast is not your destiny.

Let me tell you what made this land in my body, finally, after a year of trying to say it.

The morning a hummingbird drank in the rain

Saturday morning a hummingbird came to my feeder in the pouring rain. I couldn't understand how she stayed up. Those raindrops must seem like boulders to her. My husband and I marveled at her for a long time, and then he got quiet and said, almost to himself, that something that small shouldn't be able to hang in the air like that.

I started crying before I knew why.

A hummingbird is the only bird that can truly hover. She does it by moving her wings in a figure eight, so fast they disappear. Her smallness isn't her limitation. Her smallness is the whole condition of her miracle. A bigger bird could never do what she does. She flies precisely because she's small enough to.

Two weeks earlier, at 69, I'd gotten married, and I'd been waking up ever since feeling like I'd been born again. Standing at that window, I caught the thing I'd been trying to name for a year. The aging default was never describing the real me. My body had been trying to fly against it the whole time.

The story we're handed about getting older

We're all handed a story about what a body is supposed to do as the years add up. The story is decline. You hear it in the predictions, in the charts, in the gentle "well, at your age."

The quiet tragedy is that we believe it, and the believing does its own damage long before the years ever could. We start aging into the forecast because we were told the forecast was the truth about us.

It is not the truth about you. It was never the truth about you.

Can how you think about aging really change how you age?

Yes, and the size of the effect is hard to believe.

A researcher at Yale named Becca Levy followed 660 people aged 50 and older for more than two decades. The ones who held a positive view of their own aging lived seven and a half years longer than the ones who didn't. That gap held even after she accounted for age, gender, income, loneliness, and how healthy people were to begin with. Levy found it made a bigger difference than lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol, or never smoking. (Levy et al., Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2002. She tells the fuller story in her book Breaking the Age Code.)

Seven and a half years. Almost a whole decade, traced back to how these people held aging in their minds, sometimes measured more than twenty years before.

I'm not telling you that years don't touch a body. Of course they do. I'm telling you there's far more going on underneath the forecast than anyone taught us. Your body responds, in real and measurable ways, to how you live inside it. When you brace against your own aging and reject what you see in the mirror, the bracing has a cost. Your body reads it as a kind of threat, and that's the very state that wears us down faster.

The hummingbird doesn't know her flight is supposed to be impossible. Her default is thriving. She just drinks in the rain and flies anyway.

How to begin choosing to thrive

If there's an emptiness in you that you can't quite name, I want to say this plainly: that emptiness is not the thing wrong with you. It's an invitation to come and find how much more of you there is.

You don't fix this with one grand decision. You begin with small, repeatable moments where you stop running the forecast and feel, in your own body, that you're still here and still lit from the inside. Here's where I'd start:

• Each morning, before the day has its say, put your hand over your heart for a few minutes. Notice where your shoulders are sitting. Notice your next breath. That noticing is the whole beginning.
• Catch the decline story when it speaks ("well, at my age") and let yourself question it instead of nodding along.
• When you feel disapproval or fear move through you, let it pass like weather. A storm can move over a house without the house being a bad house.

None of this asks you to pretend. It asks you to stop handing your body a verdict it was never required to obey.

You are not too late. You are mid-flight.

Kristin Milan

Coach and author for women in the third act of life, holding faith and consciousness in the same hand. Master's in Social Work, degree in Psychology, HeartMath trained, and nearly five decades engaged with the science of change. She writes about outgrowing the aging default and coming home to a wholeness you already belong to.