How We Age Poorly — By Forgetting
- Jul 15, 2021
- 5 min read
Written by: Cheryl Whitelaw, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
We are adaptive beings. We adapt to changes in our environment, our community, and in ourselves. But we forget to adapt, so we age in a way we don’t have to – we age poorly.
When we are young, our nervous system and brain form as we learn to move around in our environment. This is a tremendous opportunity – this learning as we grow and go. But we commit a crime against our nature as adaptive beings; we learn something and stop when how we function seems good enough. This stopping at the place of good enough is mostly unconscious. And the scene of a crime against our natural capacity to grow and go.
I was driving on a side road after an evening kayak paddle on the river and came across a deer with twin foals suckling in an open field right on the other side of the wire fence – an unexpected and compelling sight.
The foals learned to stand and walk within hours of birth. The foal has a nervous system that is formed for standing and walking – the learning process to come to functional movement is relatively rapid.
Our apprenticeship to moving upright is much longer, going through stages of crawling, standing, walking sideways along with a coffee table, and a fall-prone stage of walking, falling, and getting up. As a child, we repeat this process hundreds of times. Why do we put ourselves through this – striving to walk, to run, and falling over and over again?
In a word – Desire. The desire for a toy out of reach, to touch a parent, to grab a banana to eat. A desire fueled by early ambition that we can control something in our environment. And a desire to grab for what is just out of reach.
What makes an Olympic athlete perform? As Simone Biles and other Olympic athletes prepare to perform in the last days before the 2021 Olympics, at the root of her dedication is her focused desire to go as far as she can go. This is part of our fascination with watching the Olympics, to see this part of human nature, the part of us that grows and goes as far as we can, to see what record-breaking outreach of possibility can be achieved.
What does this have to do with aging?
There is nothing that happens in the aging process that shuts down our ability to learn from our movement in our environment as we learn to function in it. We are never too old to grow and go.
The crime we commit against ourselves is this. We get to some kind of personally and socially acceptable way of functioning in our world. Then we stop. We specialize in moving in a way that is good enough.
This is a trap that I work with my students – the desire to “get it,” which drives them to settle for a movement that seems to be “good enough.” Because that is what they know.
Simone Biles has reached a level of powerful, integrated functional movement in her quest to be the best. But, how do you get on the path to be the best if you don’t know what powerful, integrated movement feels like?
Once I was training with an aikido partner for 40 minutes straight, reaching for an integrated way of moving. 40 minutes of failure. I was unusually fortunate on that training day – there were 3 things going for me as I failed.
I had a training partner with the patience to let me find what I was striving for, a teacher who supported my learning by not interrupting my struggle to find it, and my desire to taste a quality of movement, a level of powerful, integrated movement that I did not yet know. This training day was an experience of the gritty groundwork of adapting. We see Olympic athletes at the semi-finals at competitions leading up to the big Olympic event. We see a nearly finished product. What we don’t see is the daily grind of reaching, falling, failing, and reaching again.
There is one more clue that tells us a crime against our adaptive nature has happened.
We use our adaptive capacity to focus on repeating what we know how to do so we can avoid making mistakes in the performance of what we know. This is the end of learning. And the place where aging lands harder.
We stick with what we know and repeat it. Our knees and shoulders, or other parts of us, get worn out. And we accept this as an inevitable part of aging. The crime against our natural adaptive ability is complete. We age poorly because we forget to adapt.
A foal learns to stand and walk as an inborn function of living – without a choice in how that process happens. A child learns to stand and walk and has choices in he or she uses that capacity. As adults, we have to capacity to grow as we go, to learn from how we function in our lives.
We only have to choose to re-enter the learning process that is our nature. We only have to allow that as we learn, we will fall and fail as we acquire our next adaptive ability. Without re-entering the learning process, we commit an unconscious adaptive crime over and over. And accept it as a part of our aging process. We choose, unconsciously, to age poorly. Choosing to learn another way to perform, another way to move, does not stop us from getting older. It does allow us to age well, to perform from our whole nature as adaptive beings.
Cheryl Whitelaw, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Cheryl is a leader in using movement to improve brain and body performance, reversing the impacts of aging. As a child, Cheryl asked, “If we can do war, how do we do peace?” Her lifelong exploration of that question led her into embedding transformative learning technologies into adult education, coaching, inclusion, and diversity training and supporting people to recover their personal sense of wellness and wholeness after injury and trauma. A devoted practitioner of aikido, Tai Chi, and Feldenkrais, she is committed to her personal evolutionary path to integrate body, mind, and spirit in service of peace in the world. She has coached individuals in private, public, non-profit organizations, unions, and utility companies from over 12 countries around the world. She is a published author in the field of diversity and inclusion and is well regarded for her blog on how our movement can help us create a more potent and peaceful self in the world. Her mission: Move more; react less, and live more fully with no regrets.
