Embrace the red giant in your golden years

Our Sun is halfway through a 10-billion-year cycle of mind-blowingly intense light and power generation before morphing into a resplendent red giant for another five billion years.

At the end of its life, it will put on a fantastic supernova display as it ordains a designated patch in the Orion spiral in the Milky Way galaxy with a glorious planetary nebula full of raw material ready for the next star birth.

As a red giant, our Sun will engulf and probably destroy our Earth but will honour its new status and responsibility as a massive star breathing life into previously uninhabitable regions of the solar system, frozen since their inception.

Don’t panic. There’s plenty of time for humanity to adapt and travel to planets and moons to support our enlightened lives.

The parallel between our Sun and our own lives cannot be overlooked: we burn super bright for a long time until one day we realise that the intensity just isn’t there anymore. Like our Sun, we will go through a middle-age period of denial before eventually coming to grips with our new magnificence and lighting up an old world with new inspiration.

Nothing wrong with cooling down a little after a frenetic life raising families, building fortunes, breaking sporting records and gracing social circles with our pulsating personalities.

Those of us who believe we have lived a vibrant, productive life to this point may be terrified about the prospect of fading into insignificance, unable to continue a driven existence after middle age. If we look at the flames instead of the fire, this is a reasonable assumption. Crook knees and hips will slow us down. Receding hairlines will expose our thin brain capsules to dangerous gamma rays. Delayed memory recall may ruin punchlines and add curious nuances to everyday journeys.

But it’s all still there. We can get around fine with titanium joints, we can wear hats, we can tell shorter jokes and what the heck if it takes an extra 10 minutes to get into town? We see the flames, but others see us as a fully involved fire. We are what we project.

If we consider ourselves to be red giants in our golden years, we will tap into an enormous fuel load and radiate gloriously for a long time. We can’t be superheroes forever, but we can be super influencers for a very long time – well after the cape has frayed and the underpants must be worn on the inside.

 Charlie Griffiths is a certified life coach and Neuro Linguistic Programming practitioner dedicated to helping fellow professionals refocus after being diagnosed with a chronic disease. Visit charliegriffithscoaching.com