How to Choose Your Quality of Life in Your 60s

Blog by the Unhurried Living team

Choosing your quality of life is not about achieving more; it is about becoming more intentional with what you already have. In this episode of the Unhurried Living podcast, Gem Fadling names four words that rose to the surface when her spiritual director asked a question that landed deeply: What is the quality of life you want in your 60s? Those four words (free, meaningful, rested, and fruitful) offer a framework for anyone standing at a significant life threshold, whether that is their 40s, 60s, or any season of honest reckoning with what truly matters.

What Does a Meaningful Life Actually Look Like as You Age?

Gem Fadling opens this episode with a confession that many leaders quietly recognize. A few years ago, she found herself in what she calls a season of reset. She had been moving at an accelerated pace, and her body and soul stopped negotiating and said, simply, enough. It was not a dramatic breakdown. It was a holy interruption, a gentle but firm invitation to realign. When she brought this experience to her spiritual director, she expected the usual practice of looking back, reflecting, and turning those reflections into discernment and intention. Instead, her director turned toward the future. The question he asked reoriented everything: What is the quality of life you want in your 60s?

That question is worth sitting with. Most leaders spend enormous energy asking what they should accomplish, what others need from them, or how they can serve more effectively. The question of what a meaningful life actually looks and feels like from the inside is one that often gets deferred. Gem names this honestly. The desire to engage in a meaningful existence is at the heart of most people, and as we age, that desire sharpens. We begin asking not how much we can accomplish, but what truly matters.

A meaningful life, she argues, is not self-focused. Contemplation and action are inseparable siblings. Time with God fuels love toward others, and love toward others deepens our experience of God. Meaning is not found in busyness; it is found in alignment. When the inner and outer world are in step with each other, meaning naturally flows. This is the slow, patient work of spiritual formation (not a puzzle to solve, but a loving relationship to nurture).

One small step you can take today: write down your own version of the question Gem's spiritual director asked her. What is the quality of life you want in your next decade? Let three to five words rise to the surface without overthinking. Sit with them. Pray with them.

If you want to explore resources that support this kind of intentional, inward work, find it here.

What Does a Rested Life Look Like When the World Keeps Moving Faster?

Gem is disarmingly honest about the gap between teaching and living. She leads an organization called Unhurried Living, and yet she names what many practitioners of rest quietly know: it is one thing to teach about an unhurried life, and another thing to live it consistently. Life keeps accelerating. She describes the feeling of swimming upstream in an ever-growing current. And yet her desire (her chosen quality of life for this next season) is to engage everything, inner life and outer life alike, from an unhurried heart.

A rested life, in Gem's framing, is not passive. Rest is a kind of resistance. It pushes back against the cultural narrative that ties worth to productivity. The forms rest takes are concrete and varied: sleep, Sabbath days, family, play, friendship, solitude, and silence. A sustainable pace is not a luxury; it is a form of faithfulness. She says plainly that she intends to live and lead from a rested center (not as an aspiration, but as a chosen quality of life).

This reframing matters for anyone in ministry or leadership who has quietly absorbed the idea that rest is something you earn after the work is done. Gem's point is more foundational. The rested life is not the reward for fruitfulness; it is the condition for it. You cannot give from an empty interior. You cannot sustain meaningful work from a depleted soul. A rested life is a quality of life worth choosing; not occasionally, but as an ongoing posture.

One small step you can take today: identify one form of rest that has been crowded out of your week and schedule one hour of it before the week is over.

When you are ready to go deeper into what unhurried living looks like in practice, explore it here.

What Does Fruitful Living Look Like When You Step Out of the Way?

The fourth word Gem names (fruitful) carries the weight of John 15:16 behind it. Jesus says to his disciples: "You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit — fruit that will last." This is the kind of fruitfulness Gem longs for. Not impressive output. Not a full calendar or a measurable impact report. Fruit that remains. Fruit that emerges from the Spirit within, not from her own straining effort.

Fruitful living, she says, means stepping out of the way as often as possible. She cooperates more than she initiates. The more she relies on God's movements within her, the more fruitful her life becomes. This is not passivity; it is a different kind of agency. Jesus is the vine. She is the branch. The branch does not manufacture fruit; it simply remains attached. Fruitful living flows from abiding, not achieving.

This reframe is quietly countercultural for leaders who have been rewarded their entire careers for initiative, output, and results. Gem invites a different imagination. What would it look like to bear fruit that lasts because it grew from a rooted, abiding life rather than a driven, producing one? She closes this thread with 2 Corinthians 4, which Paul writes to a community that is outwardly wasting away but inwardly being renewed day by day. This is the quiet miracle of aging. The outer self slows. The inner life, if tended, freshens. The invitation in every decade is to cooperate with that renewal rather than resist or ignore it.

One small step you can take today: choose one small concrete action this week that aligns with one of your own chosen words. One Sabbath hour. One boundary. One act of service. Renewal grows through small faithfulness.

What Is the Difference Between the Life You Have and the Quality of Life You Want?

Where Are Leaders in Ministry Finding a Sustainable Way Forward?

Burned-out Christian leaders across the country, from solo pastors to executive directors of national nonprofits, are asking the same questions Gem raises in this episode. What does a quality of life look like that is actually sustainable? Where can someone who has given everything to ministry find a community that takes their interior life as seriously as their external leadership? Unhurried Living exists precisely for that question. Through the podcast, the weekly email, and the PACE certificate program, leaders from every corner of the church are discovering that unhurried living is not a retreat from meaningful work; it is the foundation of it. Wherever you find yourself in the arc of ministry life, this conversation is for you.

What Does It Mean to Cooperate with the Life God Is Renewing in You?

The final third of life is not a decline. Gem Fadling names it plainly: it is an invitation into depth. Freedom, meaning, rest, and fruitfulness are not things to achieve. They are qualities to receive, cooperate with, and allow to grow. Outwardly, things change. Inwardly, renewal is available every single day. The question is not whether that renewal is happening. The question is whether we will notice it, respond to it, and let it shape the quality of life we are choosing.

If this episode opened something in you, sign up for the Weekly Email to receive ongoing reflection and encouragement for the interior life of leadership; sign up here. Or if you want to begin a 40-day guided experience of unhurried living, the Unhurried Daily Email is a gentle and grounding place to start here.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How do I live a more meaningful life when ministry keeps pulling me in every direction? A: Gem Fadling suggests that meaning is not found in busyness but in alignment — when the inner and outer life are moving in the same direction. A meaningful life begins with asking the right question: not how much you can accomplish, but what truly matters. Spiritual formation and intentional reflection are the practices that make alignment possible over time.

Q: How can I live from a rested center when the pace around me never slows? A: Living from a rested center is a chosen posture, not a circumstance you wait for the world to provide. Gem identifies concrete forms of rest (sleep, Sabbath, solitude, silence, friendship, and sustainable pace) as the daily practices that make an unhurried heart possible. Rest is a form of resistance to a culture that ties worth to productivity.

Q: What does fruitful living look like in aging? A: Fruitful living in aging looks less like striving and more like abiding. Drawing on John 15:16 and 2 Corinthians 4, Gem describes a fruitfulness that emerges from the Spirit within, not from personal output. As the outer self changes, the inner life can be freshened and renewed daily. The fruit that lasts grows from a branch that stays attached to the vine.

Q: How do I begin to choose my own quality of life intentionally? A: Gem offers three simple starting points: name your own three to five words for the quality of life you want in your next decade; identify one obstacle for each word (fear, hurry, people-pleasing, fatigue); and choose one small concrete action this week that aligns with one of those words. Renewal grows through small faithfulness, not dramatic overhaul.

Q: What is the difference between true freedom in Christ and the freedom the culture offers? A: True freedom in Christ is not the freedom to do whatever you want whenever you want. Gem names that kind of freedom as a form of captivity (reactive, driven, and often anxious). The freedom she longs for is the freedom to choose good, to be released from others' expectations and opinions, and to respond rather than react. It is the fruit of apprenticeship to Jesus, spiritual formation, and the healing work of God over time.