Amazing Older Women

The other night, at a soiree to celebrate a friend’s birthday, I was reminded just how fantastic many older women are. Like Mary Wesley, mentioned in an earlier posting, these women do not believe that they need to grow old at sixty or put their feet up. No! They see it as a time to start something new or at least take what they are doing to a new level. And they all look good without the help of Botox and surgery. No invisibility for them, thank you very much. Also, although not anti-male (some are still married, some are not), they do not now allow a male to define their lives. I can’t say for sure how typical this group is of the general population of women over fifty and sixty, but they are the type of women that I come in contact with more and more often now. Let’s look at some of the group: a philosopher boutique owner; who was once the Australian Marketing Director of a well-known advertising company; a facilitator of workshops for older women in the workforce who spent three years sailing her own boat around the world with a male friend as her only crew; a Professor of Linguistics, the lesbian partner of a younger, entrepreneurial businesswoman; a hand painter of French antique furniture; a reiki practioner; a woman head-hunted by an elite travel company to run their operations after being retrenched from her top position in American Express in her early sixties. Then there’s my birthday friend, who is starting up her own business at 65. Wow! What a bunch! And how they enjoy themselves. Being positive and having fun, is one of the things that most of these wonderful women have in common.Other things some of them share, although they would not dwell on them, are loss (of finances or loved ones), and some form of tragedy. Another amazing older women, is a friend who married for the third time at the age of 65, became a marriage celebrant at 68 and at the same age travelled to Paris on a writing workshop. She has carried out four amazing house renovations since the age of sixty and has recently completed her ‘last’ (I’m not sure if this is true) makeover at 72. She has written a first or second draft of a memoir and is anxious to get back to writing. During this time, she suffered a dreadful tragedy: the death of her eldest son at 44, and had to nurse her husband through bowel cancer and chemotherapy. Although she occasionally has her down days like all of us, she is a positive thinker and a tireless networker. All of these women are generally not whiners and whingers. Sure they have their moments, but I suspect they know intuitively that whining makes it impossible to have genuine communication and blocks the spiritual development that is so much a part of growing older.In the words of Jean Shinoda Bolen, noted American Jungian psychiatrist, these are ‘juicy women’. In our youth–oriented society, in a world of self-absorbed and impatient younger people (I’m generalising here of course), these women are truly wonderful. If only, our society would call on their know-how, their dynamism, their compassion and above all their wisdom.