Still Becoming: Time, Growth, and the Power of Living Forward

As a writer, I’ve met women, who like me, have carried the weight of generations quietly, courageously, and without applause. They’ve raised families, run businesses, buried dreams and planted new ones, marched forward when no one was watching. They’ve survived things that would break most of us.

And yet somehow, when our culture speaks of aging, it does so in whispers, if at all.

It treats growing older like a fade-out. A soft closing of curtains. As if the best stories have already been told.

But I’ve learned this much: the best stories begin right where most people stop looking.

There’s one woman I often think of when I write. She’s not famous. She never wanted to be. But her presence is the kind that fills a room without saying much. She’s lived. She’s done more than most. But what astonishes her most isn’t what she’s done but how fast time flew.

“I can’t believe how quickly the years went,” she told me once. “But I’m not finished. Not even close.”

Her words stayed with me. Because in a world that measures worth by youth and speed, she offers something radical: the belief that life is about living and learning and never counting the years past, but the years forward.

She’s still learning languages. She’s writing poetry. Participates in community activism. She does all this not to prove something, but to feel everything. She laughs when younger people call her wise “I’m still figuring it out,” she says. And maybe that’s the point because we never stop learning.

The world may not always appreciate the contributions of its seniors but it should. Not just with plaques or polite nods. It should rejoice. Rejoice in the living proof that we don’t stop growing with age, we deepen. We sharpen. We dare.

She’s not fading. She’s becoming. Again. And again.

And when I look at my life I hope I will never slow down for I too am still becoming.