As long as you can keep your health (physical, mental and spiritual) there are a lot of advantages to growing older that are better than being under ages 35 or 40. The biggest one in being a man is that usually you are much more mentally and physically disciplined, especially if you have been married and have been raising kids or grandkids.
So, recently when I visited an old friend, my wife and 15 year old daughter stayed home because they don't ski. So, I was skiing with a couple who attended my wedding in December 1995 in Yosemite at the Chapel there. In fact, at this point they are the only couple at the wedding to still be both alive and together now, as three of our wedding party (my mother, wife's mother and wife's father) have passed away since then. Other members might have been married but attended the wedding and reception alone. We could only get a small block of rooms at Yosemite Lodge and a night for us the wedding couple at “The Ahwahnee Hotel", the night before we flew to Hawaii for a couple of weeks for our honeymoon on Oahu and Kauai at that time.
So, as I skied with about 6 or 8 of my friends (unbelievable around June 1st by the way with 12 feet of snow at 7000 feet and up to 20 feet up higher on Mt. Shasta.)
I realized that two of my friends might be breaking up after being together for about 20 years. However, being entertainers (musicians) there idea of what was actually different than how I see things as someone who has been raising kids non-stop since 1974 through 3 marriages for a total of 35 years of marriage. But in a sense we all started out in the late 1960s and early 1970s the same with my friend as a musician and getting his master's degree from UCLA at that time. So, we dated some of the same girls and double dated and traveled the western states together rock climbing and mountain climbing and even traveled once together with my ex-wife to India and Nepal for 4 months (he about 2 months mostly in Nepal). He had traveled over from visiting relatives in Switzerland at that time.
But, I found myself at age 63 much more easily able to be platonic in my helpfulness and was actually able to counsel both his likely outgoing girlfriend and the incoming girlfriend in a way that would be helpful longterm. But, it is also true that I'm also very proud of my musician friend because he has always remained friends with all his girlfriends down through the years. I have found this much more difficult to do than he, even though I am still friends with my first wife but my second wife and I no longer speak to each other at all. So, I guess there is something to be said for his approach to reality even though it has never included being married to anyone. So, I have been there as a mountain climbing friend and traveling friend since about 1969 and traveled all over the western states and to Nepal with my friend. Since ALL my other close friends from that era have died that I have stayed in touch with I found all this relationship change thing sort of unsettling because it dredged up my own horrors of my own really awful divorce, custody battle, almost dying from a heart virus and all that. So, that even though when the angels came to me when I thought I was dying and told me that "You aren't going to die. Your life will get better now!" It was hard to believe them because of the difficulty of those times. However, I must say you can always trust what angels say because they are always right! My life has been amazing since I turned 50 in 1998. God Bless the Angels!
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