If You Can Accomplish These 4 Goals In Your 70s, You're A Rare Gem Of Person
These four achievements aren't easy at any age.
Denisfilm | Canva There are a few moral achievements that are almost impossible to attain, but ones we should try for anyway if we want to achieve the rarest of human status. If we shoot for the moon, we might land in the stars, right? Let me share some other high moral achievements with you that are probably impossible to attain, but we should try for anyway, especially as we get older.
If you're in your seventies and still pushing toward these four deeply meaningful goals, you're a rare gem of a person, embodying deep wisdom and grace.
If you can accomplish these four goals in your 70s, you're a rare gem of a person:
1. Showing grace to people who don't deserve it.
Suffering is the first of the noble truths in Buddhism. Every being on this planet that breathes has to suffer at some point or another in life. We all know this, don’t we? But can we use this knowledge to be more mindful, compassionate humans? Yes, we can.
Say you’re going to the supermarket, and a jerk behind you is honking like someone’s paying him to do that. On reaching the store, you have to deal with a really rude store owner. When you come back home and open your laptop, you find a halfwit leaving stupid and rude comments on your social media post.
On your way to the store, you mentally abuse the honking jerk. After leaving the store, you promise yourself that you’ll never set foot in that place again. On reading those comments, you’re all set to start a digital war on the internet. And these are all valid responses.
Although I recently found a better way to deal with all of this. In an article, entrepreneur Jane Park shares a question to practice empathy for such people. She says that when we cross paths with such people, we should ask ourselves: What if they’re secretly suffering?
She says anger or any other negative energy, for that matter, “is the external expression of internal grief and sadness…” Instead of being mad at such people, can we learn to assume that they may be suffering and that their suffering is just taking ugly outlets? Can we learn to empathize instead?
If we’re able to do that, it enables us to be better people. So whenever someone directs their negative energy to you, try to assume that they’re suffering. Because even though they may not know it, they probably are suffering. No happy person radiates negative energy. If we try to see such moments not as a nuisance, but as opportunities to practice empathy instead, we’ll be much better people.
2. Clapping for someone else's moment
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Mudita is the Pali word for sympathetic or vicarious joy. The aptest example would be the joy a parent feels when their child accomplishes something.
Mudita is simply the cousin of sympathy. Sympathy is feeling sorrow on behalf of others. Mudita is to feel joy on behalf of others.
But our ability to feel Mudita for others is minimal. We may feel Mudita for just our family members and a few friends. But Buddhist monks train to feel Mudita for every human on this planet.
What if we can learn to feel Mudita for everyone on this planet as well? That would exponentially enlarge our reserves of happiness, won’t it?
Someone once told me that they knew a person who believed that her superpower was that she was able to be genuinely happy for others. And I thought to myself, “Yes! That is a superpower. And it is so rare. I want this superpower as well.”
In the competitive world we live in, we easily feel threatened when we see someone doing good, which prevents us from being truly happy for others. But we fail to realize that this envy robs us of our happiness.
If we’re able to engage in Mudita, we’ll unlock our happier selves. Here are some principles to bear in mind if we’re to engage in Mudita:
- Add Mudita to your vocabulary. Since we don’t have a word in English that translates to Mudita, we’re not able to think about the concept. So add it to your thought process, and you’re good to go.
- Recognize your hurt. If you’re unable to be happy for someone else, it may be possible that you’re hurt within and your hurt is taking ugly outlets.
- Believe in abundance. Look, it’s natural to feel threatened when someone does good in life. But there’s no shortage of success and happiness in the world. No one is taking out of your bucket. There’s a true abundance of happiness in the world, and you can get it whenever you want.
- Practice. Find opportunities. Try to be happy even when people you dislike succeed in life. It won’t be easy, but it will make you a better person.
Happy older adults are better equipped to navigate the challenges that often accompany aging, such as illness, loss, and life transitions. Research has found that they exhibit greater adaptability and a tendency to view challenges as opportunities for growth rather than dwelling on despair.
3. Practicing unconditional forgiveness
In Think Like a Monk, Jay Shetty shares four levels of forgiveness:
- Zero Forgiveness: “I won’t forgive you, no matter what.”
- Conditional Forgiveness: “I’ll forgive him only if he apologizes.”
- Transformational Forgiveness: In this type, we try to find the strength to forgive a person without needing an apology or expecting anything else in return.
- Unconditional Forgiveness: This is the kind of forgiveness most parents have for their children. No matter what children do, parents forgive them.
Of course, the level of forgiveness we have depends on who the person is and what they have done. If the mistake is huge, we might hover at zero forgiveness. And if the person is someone extremely close to us, we might even forgive them unconditionally.
However, through self-introspection, we can begin to see how forgiving we are in a general sense. Most of us may operate under conditional forgiveness because, according to research at Luther College, it becomes easier to forgive when someone realizes their mistake and apologizes.
But Jay suggests that we must aim for transformational forgiveness. And since this article is about shooting for the moon and going for the gold, we might as well aim for unconditional forgiveness.
And no, it does not mean that we should just forget everything that people have done to us. No. We must know the kind of person we’re dealing with so that we can protect ourselves in the future. However, forgiveness is never about the other person. It’s about us.
In an article in Psychology Today, forgiveness is defined as the release of resentment or anger. It’s not about the other person. It’s a weight off your shoulders.
It’s not to say what happened was okay, but to get over it for the sake of our mental health. Forgiveness boosts our mental health by elevating mood, enhancing optimism, and guarding against anger, stress, anxiety, and depression.
If forgiveness is good for us, why not go all-in on it? That is why we should try to rise to the level of at least transformational and even unconditional forgiveness.
To get here, we have to remind ourselves that forgiveness has nothing to do with what happened and even with who we’re forgiving. We’re just forgiving for the sake of our mental health.
A 2021 study explained that holding onto resentment, anger, and hostility can be a heavy burden. Forgiveness, especially the unconditional kind, allows older adults to release these negative emotions, freeing up emotional space for more positive feelings like joy, peace, and contentment.
4. Abstaining from all judgment
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The way we’re wired, you cannot stop judging people. Judgment enables us to understand the world better. That is why we’re so quick to judge. But even though ending all judgment is impossible, we can learn to tame our judgments pretty well.
What has helped me the most is the philosophy of Tabula Rasa. Tabula Rasa translates to ‘clean slate.’ It is a theory that states that babies are born without preconceived notions; that they are born as clean slates and that all knowledge comes from experience or perception. Is that insultingly obvious?
But let’s try to understand it further. A baby is born with a clean slate. And then, his external environment — mostly his parents — writes programs on his blank-slate-like mind, which then he uses to run his entire life. But what if the programs that were written were wrong in the first place?
The way we live our lives is decided by the programs that were written on our minds by our external environment. If you’re a good person who works hard and takes responsibility for your life, you’re lucky to have had the right programs written for you. However, when we judge a person who does something wrong, we fail to be mindful of the fact that maybe they were just unlucky as to what programs were written in their minds.
Our past shapes our present. And ultimately, external forces shape our past. Therefore, we have no right to hold ourselves superior to others just because we were lucky to have had good programming done to our brains.
Older adults often exhibit a greater capacity for emotional regulation and are less prone to negative rumination compared to younger adults. A 2023 study suggested that letting go of judgment can help break cycles of repetitive negative thinking, a known contributor to anxiety, depression, and stress.
Again, understanding this won’t mean that you will just stop judging people. Our brains make it impossible to do that. But we can get the next best thing. We can learn to tame our judgments. Here are two things we should all try to do.
- We can learn to develop an eye to catch ourselves when we judge others.
- We cannot control our brains from judging. However, we can control our mouths speaking. Judgments will always arise in our brains. Our only job is not to let them come to our mouths.
We’re all trying to be good people. Like any journey, there are milestones on this one as well. In this article, we discussed some extremely tough moral achievements to attain.
- Assume suffering — when you’re subjected to a person’s negative energy, try to hold your own and recognize their internal grief instead of retaliating.
- Mudita — try to be genuinely happy when other people do good in their lives, especially when it’s someone you dislike.
- Unconditional forgiveness — try to forgive people as fast as you can. This does not mean forgetting what they’ve done. Forgiveness is just for the sake of our mental health.
- Ending all judgment — judgments will arise, but try not to let them come to your mouth.
Akshad Singi, M.D, has been published in Better Humans, Mind Cafe, and more.
