21 Golden Rules For a Good Old Age (years wise not mentally)

Some of us have reached our golden years, and some of us have not. But these suggestions should be read by everyone. They have been collected from many a senior, each with his or her own piece of advice. Some you know, some may surprise you, and some will remind you of what's important. So read well, share with your loved ones, and have a great day and a great life!

1. It's time to use the money you saved up. Use it and enjoy it. Don't just keep it for those who may have no notion of the sacrifices you made to get it. Remember there is nothing more dangerous than a son or daughter-in-law with big ideas for your hard earned capital. Warning: This is also a bad time for an investment, even if it seems wonderful or fool-proof. They only bring problems and worries and this is a time for you to enjoy some peace and quiet.

2. Stop worrying about the financial situation of your children and grandchildren, and don't feel bad spending your money on yourself. You've taken care of them for many years, and you've taught them what you could. You gave them an education, food, shelter and support. The responsibility is now theirs to earn their own money.

3. Keep a healthy life, without great physical effort. Do moderate exercise (walking every day), eat well and get your sleep. It's easy to become sick, and it gets harder to remain healthy. That is why you need to keep yourself in good shape and be aware of your medical and physical needs. Keep in touch with your doctor, get tested even when you're feeling well. Stay informed.

4. Always buy the best, most beautiful items for your significant other half. The key goal is to enjoy your money with your partner. One day one of you will miss the other, and the money will not provide any comfort then, enjoy it together.

5. Don't stress over the little things. You've already overcome so much in your life. You have good memories and bad ones, but the important thing is the present. Don't let the past drag you down and don't let the future frighten you. Feel good in the now. Small issues will soon be forgotten.

6. Regardless of age, always keep love alive. Love your partner, love life, love your family, love your neighbor and remember: "A man is not old as long as he has intelligence and affection."

7. Be proud, both inside and out. Don't stop going to your hair salon or barber, do your nails, go to the dermatologist and the dentist, keep your perfumes and creams well stocked. When you are well-maintained on the outside, it seeps in, making you feel proud and strong.

8. Don't lose sight of fashion trends for your age, but keep your own sense of style. There's nothing worse than an older person trying to wear the current fashion among youngsters. You've developed your own sense of what looks good on you - keep it and be proud of it. It's part of who you are.

9. ALWAYS stay up-to-date. Read newspapers, watch the news. Go online and read what people are saying. Make sure you have an active email account and try to use some of those social networks. You'll be surprised which old friends you'll meet. Keeping in touch with what is going on and with the people you know is important at any age.

10. Respect the younger generation and their opinions. They may not have the same ideals as you, but they are the future, and will take the world in their direction. Give advice, not criticism, and try to remind them of yesterday's wisdom that still applies today.

11. Never use the phrase: "In my time". Your time is now. As long as you're alive, you are part of this time. You may have been younger, but you are still you now, having fun and enjoying life.

12. Some people embrace their golden years, while others become bitter and surly. Life is too short to waste your days on the latter. Spend your time with positive, cheerful people, it'll rub off on you and your days will seem that much better. Spending your time with bitter people will make you older and harder to be around.

13. Do not surrender to the temptation of living with your children or grandchildren (if you have a financial choice, that is). Sure, being surrounded by family sounds great, but we all need our privacy. They need theirs and you need yours. If you've lost your partner (our deepest condolences), then find a person to move in with you and help out. Even then, do so only if you feel you really need the help or do not want to live alone.

14. Don't abandon your hobbies. If you don't have any, make new ones. You can travel, hike, cook, read, dance. You can adopt a cat or a dog, grow a garden, play cards, checkers, chess, dominoes, golf. You can paint, volunteer at an NGO or just collect certain items. Find something you and spend some real time having fun with it.

15. Even if you don't feel it, try to accept invitations. Baptisms, graduations, birthdays, weddings, conferences. Try to go. Get out of the house, meet people you haven't seen in a while, experience something new (or something old). But don't get upset when you're not invited. Some events are limited by resources, and not everyone can be hosted. The important thing is to leave the house from time to time. Go to museums, go walk through a field. Get out there.

16. Be a conversationalist. Talk less and listen more. Some people go on and on about the past, not caring if their listeners are really interested. That's a great way of reducing their desire to speak with you. Listen first and answer questions, but don't go off into long stories unless asked to. Speak in courteous tones and try not to complain or criticize too much unless you really need to. Try to accept situations as they are. Everyone is going through the same things, and people have a low tolerance for hearing complaints. Always find some good things to say as well.

17. Pain and discomfort go hand in hand with getting older. Try not to dwell on them but accept them as a part of the cycle of life we're all going through. Try to minimize them in your mind. They are not who you are, they are something that life added to you. If they become your entire focus, you lose sight of the person you used to be.

18. If you've been offended by someone - forgive them. If you've offended someone-apologize. Don't drag around resentment with you. It only serves to make you sad and bitter. It doesn't matter who was right. Someone once said: "Holding a grudge is taking poison and expecting the other person to die." Don't take that poison. Forgive, forget and move on with your life.

19. If you have a strong belief, savor it. But don't waste your time trying to convince others. They will make their own choices no matter what you tell them, and it will only bring you frustration. Live your faith and set an example. Live true to your beliefs and let that memory sway them.

20. Laugh. Laugh A LOT. Laugh at everything. Remember, you are one of the lucky ones. You managed to have a life, a long one. Many never get to this age, never get to experience a full life. But you did. So what's not to laugh about? Find the humor in your situation.

21. Take no notice of what others say about you and even less notice of what they might be thinking. They'll do it anyway, and you should have pride in yourself and what you've achieved. Let them talk and don't worry. They have no idea about your history, your memories and the life you've lived so far. There's still much to be written, so get busy writing and don't waste time thinking about what others might think. Now is the time to be at rest, at peace and as happy as you can be!

And remember: "Life is too short to drink bad wine." 

Life Management By Self-Empowerment

by: Harish Nagpal

To find the ways to manage our lives, we have to first understand what life is and what management is?

The difference between a dead and live person: Our body consists of innumerable number of live cells. Each cell is an independent unit. Numbers of cells keep on changing all the time. The dead cells are replaced by the new cells. A person is live till the time this process of change in number of cells in his body is taking place. If this process stops the person is dead. Throughout the life span of a person this process keeps on taking place. Therefore, if one wishes to increase his life span, he has to make sure that this process of change in number of live cells remains active. Moment this process stops he is declared dead.

Now Life (age) of a person in years is the time span between his birth and death. When we say `management of life; we mean `to manage activity in this time span'. In my opinion, we keep on changing our life span (or remaining-age period) all the time. This happens because of our activities. We can't survive without activity. Even while sleeping (either relaxing or otherwise) our life span keep on changing. All our activities – god or bad – will have effect on our life span. In other words, our remaining life span is in our hand.

Management is broadly defined as `efficient utilisation of all available resources to achieve the desired objective in predefined time frame.'

Now to manage life we have to define its  objectives, available resources and the time period available - to achieve those objectives.

Now let us first understand that time period available (remaining-age) to one is not specified. One can live for a long period or one can die at any moment. So we can't define time period available. This increases our difficulty to manage life.

Next we have to define objectives of our life. Now each individual may set different objectives for his life. This also makes it impossible to make a fixed formula, which can be universally applied to all persons, for managing life.

Next, resources available also vary from person to person. Resources available may be time, energy, will power, intelligence level, money, manpower, material help, responsibilities etc. 

Thus it becomes more difficult to define a universal formula for life management. In short, laying down a plan for life management, which can be applied to all, is not an easy task.

However, we should not leave hope and try to do it.

Firstly let us set an objective that is universally applicable to all living beings, irrespective of time period (remaining-age) and resources available to an individual.

We know-one of the main requirements of good management is efficient utilisation of available resources. Efficient means optimum utilisation of resources to achieve optimum results.

Now it is a well-known fact that our efficiency is optimum when we are happy (i.e. we are in the best mood and our mind is at rest). When we are sad our efficiency is the least.

Therefore, our aim in life should be `to remain happy all the time' so that our efficiency is optimum; and thereby whatever we do we do it to the perfection. Now this objective can be universal, as it is independent of available time or resources.

Now we will try to find ways to achieve this `objective of life' i.e. TO REMAIN HAPPY ALL THE TIME.

In other words, Management of life means – `to manage our life in such a way that we are happy all the time'. In other words, we have to control our activities in the present, so that they have good effect on us and we remain happy all the time.

To remain happy all the time we have to understand what happiness is and what are the factors affecting our happiness?

One of the paths to achieve happiness is self-empowerment. And this is the most important path, as anyone who is dependent on any one else for anything can't remain happy. Can you remain happy in your old age, when you have to depend on others (including doctors or medicines or conveyance etc)? So, we have to depend or rely more on us for our daily requirement. How we can do it?

As we have realised that life can be managed well if one can live it efficiently; and one is most efficient when he is happy.

As the life span of an individual is uncertain one has to live happily all the time. One cannot postpone his living happily otherwise his efficiency will go down, and his life span (remaining-age when he can do some activity as per his wish) will reduce.

Living happily all the time means we have to live our life (consciously) in the present, as we can't live in past or future.

Living in the present means we have to live every moment of our life consciously so that we make sure that we utilise that moment efficiently. The moment not utilised will not come back to us. Our future depends upon our activity in the present. We will reap in future what we sow in the present.

Therefore, we have to empower ourselves so that we live all the time happily. Therefore, one should not waste any moment without efficiently utilising it.

Self-empowerment can be achieved by self-awareness and self-actualisation.

The other important point in life management is – how to increase our life span so that our problem of life management becomes little bit easy. Less the time, more is the difficulty in managing it.

Therefore, we should find methods of increasing our life span – period available to us till our death. This period should be such that we can use it for some creative work – not to feed the body only and curing it with medicines.

This leads us to next important point of living healthy all the time. Unless we are healthy we can't be happy. We will also see how to remain healthy without having any medicine – whether allopathic, ayurvedic, homeopathy or of any other pathy.

Self-Awareness

By knowing and accepting our weaknesses and sharing our strengths and aspirations (self-awareness), we can get the support of others on our journey to self-empowerment.

Knowing what is right and what is wrong in our own inner consciousness is insufficient. It is not the knowing of truth that transforms a person; it is the doing of truth that has an impact on you and on the other people that you interact with.

You may know that it is inappropriate to think selfishly and look out for your own best interests first, but your inner emotions may drive you to be blinded to the needs of others.

You may know that it is against your basic truth to judge another individual, but your inner emotions may cause you to look at that person and make a judgment because of the effect you are allowing them to have on your life.

You may understand that all of God's creatures were created equal, but that doesn't stop you, on an emotional level, from feeling that the human race is the most important life form on the planet.

The discrepancy lies not in a lack of information, for the information is available on a world-wide basis for those who would seek it, evaluate it, and accept it as their own; the discrepancy lies in the ability to integrate Universal Law into your lifestyle.

Awareness of the self does not just focus into the positive aspects of a personality, or the positive aspects of skills and talents that you brought with you into this lifetime, but into the negative as well; it is only when the positive is weighed against the negative, and thebalanced perspective is used as a guidepost in integrating higher consciousness into the self that the influence becomes apparent inyour relationships and in your lifestyle.

Thus, self-awareness means – `to understand one's strength and weaknesses so that one can empower himself by minimising or eliminating his weaknesses with the proper utilisation of his strengths'. 

Self-Actualisation

Self-actualisation can be translated to - making the self actual.

Self-actualisation means there is no difference between what you think and what you do. There is no contradiction between what you tell others and how you respond yourself. It is manifesting who you are and what you believe in on a day-to-day consistent basis.

The path is a long and solitary one, and many individuals give up:

·         It is difficult to accept what our `conscious choices' in the course of a specific existence have driven us to do to other people.

·         It is hard for us to accept that we have been selfish, or resentful, or spiteful.

·         It is hard for us to see where we have deliberately manipulated our lives so that we have control over the people and the situations and the events within it.

·         It is not easy to admit that we are not the positive, smiling, loving person that we prefer to see ourselves as; when, in the course of personal growth, it becomes necessary for an individual to truly, honestly evaluate how they have interacted with their fellow human beings.

This is unfortunate, because personal growth cannot proceed — self-awareness and self-actualisation cannot be accomplished — without a true and open acknowledgement of - who we used to be and how we used to live our lives, no matter how unpleasant that panorama may be.

This does not mean that we need to spend years of our lives suffering regret and remorse for the wrong we have done in their lives to other people.

It does mean that we need to take a reasonable amount of time to look back and to evaluate honestly what was really at play in any particular situation, where the two parties were really coming from, and where each conducted themselves with less than universal love.

We cannot change the past; we cannot undo the influence that we have upon other people by our thoughts and our feelings and our reactions, but we can learn from that experience and make a personal commitment never to treat anyone with that lack of respect again.

If that person is still in our life, we can have the grace to apologise, and share our learning experience, and say, "I'm sorry that I used to be like that. I want to be like this, now, and I hope that you will help."

It is only by acknowledging our past weaknesses, and sharing our future aspirations, that we can experience the support and encouragement of others on our journey to self-actualisation leading us to self-empowerment.

If we are not willing to admit that we have ever made a mistake, ever reacted inappropriately, ever deliberately hurt someone, then we cannot admit that we need to change, or that we need other people's help in doing so.

It is, from a soul evolution perspective, self-defeating behaviour to remain in situations made from the lower consciousness that create less than fulfilling situations and relationships in our lives.

Self-Empowerment

When you learn the art of self-awareness and self-actualisation, you are empowered to live a useful and meaningful life. You start to live a life consciously. You start enjoying life. Life is no more a burden.

"When you are empowered, you are bigger than a problem rather than a victim to a problem, and living in such a space makes you a winner".

Understand the following aspects to empower your self for such a life:

1. Attitude:

Your attitude is more important than facts - for the right attitude can empower you. An easy task becomes difficult when you have a poor attitude. A difficult task becomes challenging when you have a good attitude.

2. Happiness:

Learn this art to operate from happiness and not for happiness. Happiness is an attitude. To be a winner in life is also an attitude. One has to know how to take it easy and float in life and not fight with life. You can't fight with the waves but you can learn to float. Go with the flow and you will glow.

3. Change Your Body Posture: 

A trainer talking to students on the subject of public speaking told them: "When you talk of heaven your face must be glowing and radiating joy. Your eyes must shine and lips should reflect heaven." "What about talking of hell" asked the student? "Your normal face is enough," replied the trainer.

4. Always Entertain Healthy Thoughts:

Positive thoughts are a great asset. A pessimist sees difficulty in an opportunity and an optimist sees opportunity in a difficulty. Understand that when one door closes another opens. The quality of your life is the quality of your consistent emotion. When your emotion is low, just change it; think of a happy incident. Have values that connect to goodness and connect to people.

5. Insecurity:

Insecurity invites you to be alert and not worried. It tells you to be creative and not complain. You feel insecure because you have a concept of what is security and from that concept you are seeing life. Anything that does not fit that concept makes you insecure. If you have the spirit of adventure in you then insecurity is a great adventure for you to explore. You will have fun with that insecurity. Learn to trust that insecurity is inviting you to be creative.

6. Fear:

Also understand that fear is a movement of thought; Thought is nothing but a movement of the mental word. If you get identified with a fear which is actually just a thought, which again is just a word, then this identification makes you a prisoner of fear. Also, this thought-fear unconsciously pulls in the previous memories of fear and with the past fears, a snowballing effect happens. So when fear happens, just become totally aware and don't get identified with that thought. With wordless awareness, just watch. This watching will not allow the previous fears to have a snowballing effect. This is called objective watching. Lots of people fear failure, death, insecurity and rejection. Come from a commitment that failure is only postponed success. Failure is the fertiliser for success. If you bring this energy into your life, it will give you methods of handling fear of failure. Are you now ready to face the life with new concept of EMPOWER YOURSELF TO LIVE AND LOVE YOUR LIFE. If interested, you can join the yahoo group Inner Engineering and Being Yourself, moderated by me; do write to me at

imhappy1949@yahoo.com or harinag49@yahoo.co.in

Lt Col Harish Nagpal"

harinag49@yahoo.co.in