GRUMPY OLD MEN?! NOT!

There was an article today on the Huffington Post entitled: 

"Why the Older You Are, the Happier You Get!"

Here's an excerpt:

"Grumpy old men, and women, are not grumpy whatsoever -- contrary to popular myth. In fact, this truth remains the most contrarian of all research on happiness, and is still the most evidence-based. In a brilliant study published in 2010 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Arthur Stone and colleagues interviewed over 340,000 people in the United States by telephone to ask about how happy they were. What the researchers found surprised them. Levels of stress and anger decline progressively and significantly after people pass through their early 20s." 

Here's something I wrote for FPL a while ago about the misconceptions about the aging process, called "DECLINING WITH AGE? NO, WITH TIME!":

Many believe that aging is a declining conveyor belt that we're all on.

The deterioration that we think occurs "naturally" and inevitably with aging is, in fact, an erroneous belief, a negative judgment.

As a self-actualizing person moves through the years, he or she becomes more open and vibrant in their body than at 20, 30 or 40 years old, belief it or not, and in addition, one gains more wisdom, more confidence, and the growing ability to make decisions with greater ease and less second guessing than when younger. Now, personally, I know that I clearly no longer have a shot at playing shortstop for the Yankees in this lifetime, but this is not a "decline." This is growth, and specifically, growth towards spirit. As we progress in our lives, assuming we are not fighting our process tooth and nail, we are designed to be absorbing more and more of our soul's energy into our bodies, which can mean less and less actual flesh. But the more soul force in your body, the more powerful you become, not the weaker, though your priorities may surely change. Playing shortstop... or having babies, for instance, focusing intensely on the physical, is part of the early phase of experiencing being human. Depths of passion, pleasure, understanding and wisdom is part of the latter phase.

To call these changes in priority a decline is a negative judgment, supported by 3D society and its nefarious medical and pharmaceutical industry.

Secondly, and this is a greatly misunderstood issue - it is not age, but TIME that catches up to us in the second half of a lifetime.

It's not that nature intended for us to fall apart physically and mentally later in life, nor is it that the odds somehow make us more susceptible to the assaults of a capricious universe with the passage of time. It's simply this: after years and years of suppressing feelings and emotions, keeping beliefs and "forbidden" thoughts out of consciousness, directing hostility towards ourselves and accumulating toxins along the way without doing any cleansing work - emotionally, mentally or physically - the body and mind give out, as any matter-bound creation would. As any neglected or abused machine would.

If your eyesight is going, ask yourself how much time you spent not wanting to "see" certain things throughout your life. If you have high blood pressure, take a look at how much anger you've suppressed and how much laughter and great, loving sex you've had by comparison. If your skeletal system is bent out of shape, you've also probably been "bent out of shape" emotionally for decades. On and on. And most destructive of all, when you come to experience these cumulative effects of your self-abuse and neglect, how do you handle it? Therapy? Meditation? Cleansing your body? Or have you relied on drugs, numbing activities, denial and distraction? If your answers are the latter, how absurd that you would then feel victimized by an unfair and random universe when you end up with cancer or Alzheimer's.

I know this is radical in the face of a lifetime of hypnotic suggestions to the contrary, folks, but human beings are designed to improve with age, and life is meant to get better and better with the passage of time. You can find this out. You can heal. You can repair a lot of the damage if you want to, and the rest can just be your unique scars, serving only as reminders of your experiences, not as deterrents to happiness. Laughter, love, pleasure - these are the only "drugs" you really need, the real medicine worth taking.

Enjoy!