Live These Years Well!
A Women’s Day Reflection | The Joy in Being Well
By Lynda Stanton | Evolved Wellness
Today, on Women’s Day, I find myself thinking about just how much a woman can be in one lifetime.
We are women.
We are daughters and sisters.
Friends and partners.
Mothers and grandmothers.
We are entrepreneurs, creators, designers, professionals, homemakers, caregivers, leaders and dreamers.
We build businesses and families. We create homes and communities. We nurture relationships, hold hands, solve problems, make plans, change direction, begin again and somehow continue to evolve through it all.
And as the years pass, there is something else we accumulate that perhaps isn’t celebrated enough.
Wisdom.
The wisdom that comes from having lived.
From the things that worked — and the things that didn’t.
From love and loss. Success and disappointment. Raising families. Building careers. Starting over. Learning boundaries. Finding courage. Discovering what matters and, eventually, what doesn’t.
There is enormous value in the woman we become.
And I believe our later years should give that woman the opportunity to shine.
Not disappear.
Not shrink.
Not spend her life wishing she were younger.
But to embrace herself fully and acknowledge everything she has become.
We don’t simply want more years. We want to live those years well.
This is where health becomes about so much more than numbers on a scale or trying to look younger.
Our bodies are the vessels through which we experience this extraordinary thing called life.
They allow us to get out of bed in the morning.
To walk.
Travel.
Work.
Create.
Dance.
Hold a grandchild.
Build something new.
Sit around a table laughing with people we love.
Explore places we’ve never been.
Keep contributing.
Keep learning.
Keep saying yes to life.
And that changes the conversation around ageing for me.
I don’t want women to simply live longer.
I want us to have the capacity to live those years well.
With vitality.
With mobility and strength.
With clarity.
With independence.
With curiosity.
With connection.
With enough energy left to enjoy the lives we have worked so hard to create.
Because longevity without the capacity to participate fully in our lives isn’t quite the goal.
Living well is.
Perhaps caring for our bodies is one of the greatest acts of self-respect
Women are incredibly good at looking after other people.
Sometimes so good that we don’t notice how far down our own list we have slipped.
We push through tiredness.
Ignore the whispers.
Promise ourselves we’ll get back to exercising when things calm down.
Eat on the run.
Carry stress quietly.
Accept feeling depleted as part of getting older.
But perhaps this Women’s Day we can ask ourselves a different question:
Woman, while you have been taking care of everything and everyone else — how well have you been taking care of you?
Not from criticism.
From acknowledgement.
Look at what you have already carried.
Look at what you have created.
Look at what you have survived, learned, given and achieved.
And then ask:
What do I want the next chapter of my life to feel like?
Because there is still so much life available to us.
Our wisdom should have somewhere to go.
Our ideas still matter.
Our creativity still matters.
Our voices still matter.
Our experience matters.
And our bodies deserve the care that gives us the greatest possible capacity to keep showing up for all of it.
This is our time too
There is something beautiful about a woman who begins to fully embrace herself.
She no longer needs to become someone else.
She begins to understand who she is.
She knows more clearly what she values.
She becomes more conscious about what she gives her time, her energy and her attention to.
Perhaps ageing gracefully isn’t about holding onto youth at all.
Perhaps it is about growing into ourselves.
Becoming stronger where we can.
Softer where we need to.
Wiser through what we’ve experienced.
And increasingly intentional about protecting our health, our energy and our capacity for life.
So today I celebrate women.
Our daughters and our mothers.
Our sisters and our friends.
Our grandmothers.
Our entrepreneurs, creators, caregivers, professionals, homemakers and change-makers.
The women still discovering themselves.
The women beginning again.
And the women who finally understand that they don’t need to apologise for taking care of themselves too.
May we honour the bodies that have carried us this far.
May we nurture them for the journey still ahead.
May we allow our wisdom to shine.
And may we never measure the gift of ageing simply by how many years we live — but by how fully we are able to live them.
Here’s to living these years well.
Happy Women’s Day.
Lynda Stanton
Evolved Wellness