AMAZING THINGS HAPPEN
WHEN YOU TALK
AND
L I S T E N
especially when you ask
curiously
and
listen hard. . .
WE
L E A R N. . .
(A LOT)
KNOWING (LIVING) YOUR WHY
“Until I die, I will be knitting,” Matsouka said. Her knitting needles clicked through her expert fingers, her nails painted red. “It brings me joy to share them.” Since she took up knitting in the 1990s, Matsouka has easily made over 3,000 scarves, her daughters estimate.
In the hallway by the door, shopping bags filled with her latest creations await their new home. A knitted patchwork blanket is thrown over the sofa where she spends her days.In the beginning, the scarves were gifted to friends. As stock grew, they were donated to children’s shelters across Greece. Then, through acquaintances, they reached children in Bosnia and Ukraine. The latest batch of 70 went to a refugee camp near Athens this winter, via the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR.
“The fact that we give them away gives her strength,” said her daughter Angeliki.
Matsouka knits one scarf a day, now with small imperfections. Her vision is impaired and she suffers from bouts of severe facial pain, a condition known as trigeminal neuralgia.
C E L E B R A T I N G
I once put in a Work Suggestion Box that
E V E R Y O N E
should have their Birthday off
. . .in fact, it would be a fireable offense to work on your Birthday
. . in fact, not only should you have your Birthday off
but the day before and the day after, too. . .
IF YOUR BIRTHDAY
falls on the weekend, even better,
you’d either get the Friday before or the Monday after
. . .uhhhhh, THAT IDEA
never even got a reaction let alone approval
(I thought it would be an absolute MORALE BOOSTER
saying, YOU COUNT; WE VALUE YOU)
I always take off Birthday’s. . .
THE WHOLE WEEK
Mine and Erin’s. . .
we really don’t do much or go anywhere all that special
in fact, our Birthday weeks this year in March and now finishing up this week in August, we were both kind of under a cloud but always with a few rays of sunshine among some of the raindrops
WHICH MEANS WE SHOULD NEVER CELEBRATE
FOR A WEEK AGAIN
(maybe we should actually take off two weeks)
But before the fireworks get canceled
p a u s e
(ever so briefly)
and RAMP UP the
C E L E B R A T I O N
even more. . .
Like a Trick Candle
my life has ignited
Blazingly
Sparkingly so
Only to be blown out
e x t i n g u i s h e d
just to sputter back up into
a glimmer
that tricks the dark
into thinking
it matters
So many
HAPPY BIRTHDAY’S
HOW YA DOING’S
THINKING ABOUT YOU’S
WELL WISHES
. . .some from people I’m not sure I even know
as they came across the many forms of
social media
Which not only tells me that the Celebration never ends but continues on in a variety of surprising ways if we take the time to not just notice but to abundantly EXPERIENCE
Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhh. . .
here’s a secret to keeping
YOUR CELEBRATION
g o i n g
AGE(LESS)
In the past couple of days I have been reminded
YOUR BIRTHDAY IS COMING UP
and
MAN, YOU’RE GETTING OLD. . .
Luckily
I’ve never been much about
(PERSONAL–MY OWN) Birthdays
and even less about
GETTING OLD
albeit I’m not all that crazy
feeling/seeing/experiencing
the many different ways
the body sneakingly
betrays
when
out of nowhere came
T H I S:
“I asked an elderly man once what it was like to be old and to know the majority of his life was behind him. He told me that he has been the same age his entire life. He said the voice inside of his head had never aged. He has always just been the same boy. His mother’s son. He had always wondered when he would grow up and be an old man. He said he watched his body age and his faculties dull but the person he is inside never got tired. Never aged. Never changed.
Our spirits are eternal. Our souls are forever. The next time you encounter an elderly person, look at them and know they are still a child, just as you are still a child and children will always need love, attention and purpose.”
~ Author unknown & Photography by Rita French
A CALENDAR
WILL NEVER MAKE YOU OLDER
only your
FRAMED IN MIND
can do that. . .
One of the greatest things
hospice has taught me
c o n t i n u o u s l y
since I began
waaaaaaay back a few calendar pages ago in
1994
is out of all the things
L I F E
can take from you
as it
e x t r a c t s
from you
EVEN ON A DEATH BED
my love
and my ability to kindly share it
(especially to share IT)
T H I S
is what it means
not to get older
but become more
much more than an
AGE(LESS)
So I’m just not looking forward to having a few more
Birthday Candles lit
but blowing a few more
o u t. . .
RE-TIRED
Everyone SHOOTS for
THAT DAY. . .
R E T I R E M E N T
At 65
with ONLY 149 days before I hit
6 6
the question I’ve been getting a lot is
WHEN ARE YOU RETIRING?
Many of my friends are already retired
and the ones that are not
give me how many
D A Y S
until they retirement
(YOU KNOW THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT!)
S O:
What is the ideal age to retire. . . ?
N E V E R,
according to a neuroscientist
Just recently Daniel Levity PhD wrote a book, Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of our Lives that tries to uncover what just might be AN answer to that question
Rachel Chew did some noodling on this and came up with some of the following thoughts:
If you want to live a satisfying,
long life,
neuroscientist Daniel Levitin has some advice for you:
Stay busy. . .
What is the ideal age to retire?
Never. . .
Wait, What?
Even if you’re physically impaired, it’s best to keep working, either in a job or as a volunteer. Lamont Dozier, the co-writer of such iconic songs as “Heat Wave,” “Stop! In the Name of Love” and “Reach Out, I’ll Be There” (and with fourteen number-one Billboard hits), is 78 and still writing.
“I get up every morning and write for an hour or two,” he says. “It’s why the good Lord put me here.”
Too much time spent with no purpose is associated with unhappiness. Stay busy! But not with busy work or trivial pursuits, but with meaningful activities. Economists have coined the term unretirement to describe the hordes of people who retire, find they don’t like it, and go back to work. Between 25 and 40 percent of people who retire reenter the workforce.
Harvard University economist Nicole Maestas says, “You hear certain themes: a sense of purpose. Using your brain. And another key component is social engagement.
Recall Sigmund Freud’s words that the two most important things in life are to have love and meaningful work. (He was wrong about a great number of things, but he seems to have gotten that quote right.)
I interviewed a number of people between the ages of seventy and one hundred in order to better understand what contributes to life satisfaction.Every single one of them has continued working. Some, like musicians Donald Fagen of Steely Dan (age seventy-one) and Judy Collins (age eighty), have increased their workload. Others, like George Shultz (age ninety-nine) and the Dalai Lama (age eighty-four), have modified their work schedules to accommodate age-related slowing, but in the partial days they work, they accomplish more than most of their younger counterparts.
Staying busy with meaningful activities requires some strategies and reshifting priorities. Author Barbara Ehrenreich (age seventy-eight) rejects the many tests that her doctor orders because she doesn’t want to waste time in a doctor’s office for something that might only add three weeks to her life. Why?
“Because I have other things to do. Partly this seems to start for me with the kind of trade-off decision: Do I want to go sit in a windowless doctor’s office waiting room, or meet my deadline, or go for a walk? It always came down to the latter.”
Many employers will allow older adult workers to modify their schedules in order to continue working. In the US, employers are required to make reasonable accommodations, such as start and end times, break rooms, even a cot to lie down on for a nap, and age discrimination is illegal.
Age discrimination is similarly illegal in Canada, Mexico and Finland. The laws around the world vary. Generally, the European Union permits termination at the pension retirement age (in Germany, for example, that’s currently age sixty-five and is being extended to sixty-seven). In South Korea, the mandatory retirement age is sixty.
In other countries, such as Australia, the laws and interpretations of those laws are evolving. (Courts in Australia, for example, found in favor of Qantas Airways, which terminated a pilot at age sixty. Although this was in violation of the country’s Age Discrimination Act of 2004, the high court ruled that because it was a requirement of The Convention on International Civil Aviation that captains aged sixty or over be barred from flying over certain routes, termination of pilots over sixty was lawful.)
I think we need to work together to fight for changes in the way our societies see older adults, particularly how they see them in the workforce. Corporate culture in the US has tended toward ageism. It is difficult for older adults to get a job or get promoted. Two- thirds of American workers said they had witnessed or experienced age discrimination at work. Employers should recognize that offering opportunities to older workers is smart business, and not just a feel-good, charitable act. Multigenerational teams with older members tend to be more productive; older adults boost the productivity of those around them, and such teams outperform single-generational ones. Deutsche Bank has been at the forefront of this kind of approach, and they report fewer mistakes as well as increased positive feedback between young and old.
Many countries have passed laws prohibiting discrimination in employment against people with disabilities, including Alzheimer’s disease (for example, in the US, there was the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, and in the United Kingdom, the Equality Act of 2010).
The nonprofit BrightFocus Foundation lists accommodations that might be helpful for workers with Alzheimer’s:
• Incorporating reminders into their day — written or verbal
• Dividing large tasks into many smaller tasks
• Providing additional training when there are workplace changes
• Keeping the workspace clutter-free
• Reducing the number of hours worked per day or week
• Changing the time of day worked
In recognition of this, Heathrow Airport in London became the world’s first “dementia-friendly” airport, with one thousand employees dedicated to serving the special needs of those with cognitive impairment. Researchers at John Carroll University, a private Jesuit Catholic University in University Heights, Ohio, created an intergenerational choir, bringing together young people and older adults with dementia. It changed the attitudes of the students who participated, who talked about the closeness they felt in the choir and the development of intergenerational friendships. Through singing together, the adults with dementia felt included, welcomed, valued and respected.
The late Tennessee Women’s Basketball Coach Pat Summitt, who was also a silver medalist from the 1976 Summer Olympics, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in August 2011. She continued working, finishing out the athletic season through 2012. “There’s not going to be any pity party,” she said, “and I’ll make sure of that.”
If continuing to work in your job isn’t possible after a certain age, and if new employers aren’t willing to hire older workers, there are still ways to stay actively engaged in meaningful work. In the US, there’s the Head Start program, an organization that allowed my grandmother to come in and read to underprivileged children. The AARP Foundation has a program called Experience Corps, which matches older adults as tutors in public schools for economically disadvantaged children.
The program has had a positive impact on the children in the ways you’d imagine: improved literacy, increased test scores, and improved classroom and social behavior. But it also has a positive impact on the volunteers. In one study, volunteers felt a greater sense of accomplishment than a group of control participants and showed increases in brain volume for the hippocampus and cortex, compared to the controls, who had brain volume reductions. This was particularly true of male volunteers, who showed a reversal of three years of aging over two years of volunteering. As Anais Nin observed, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” It’s true of brain volume as well.
That courage, that expansion of life, can come about in a variety of ways for different people: taking classes online, such as from Coursera or Khan Academy (but be sure you can interact to discuss what you’ve learned; learning in isolation can only go so far in keeping your mind active); joining (or hosting) a book club or current events discussion group; volunteering in a hospital or church; asking your local YMCA or church what they need; working in a soup kitchen.
There is a transformative effect in helping others. In his novel Disgrace, Nobel Prize-winning South African writer J. M. Coetzee wrote: “He continues to teach because … it teaches him humility, brings it home to him who he is in the world. The irony does not escape him: that the one who comes to teach learns the keenest of lessons, while those who come to learn learn nothing.”
I have observed this firsthand in my own life, although I like to think that my students avoided learning nothing. And I am perhaps not so cynical as Coetzee (or at least his character in the novel). I think the right teacher, the right believer in a child or an older adult, can tip the balance for that person’s life and help them to overcome life’s obstacles, to get on a track toward happiness and success that will lead them into successful aging. My teachers did that for me.
Excerpted with permission from the new book Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of our Lives by Daniel J. Levitin. Published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright © 2020 by Daniel Levitin.
So here’s an idea, Class:
How about instead of counting the days on the calendar
you make the days on the Calendar
C O U N T
don’t skip one of them
don’t let one of them slip by
LOOK AHEAD
to
LOOKING BACK
a n d
simply remember:
(and assure your timelessness)
WHY EVER RETIRE FROM
T H A T
?
A Person of No Age
21,550 isn’t all that a big number. . .
Until, until it is.
If a person were allowed to live for 21,550 days, 3.078 weeks would have been ventured; 707 months survived, 15 leap years endured…
1,861,904,152 seconds
31,031,735 minutes
517,195 hours
1,539 fortnights
792 lunar moons
414 dog years
60.81 lunar years
2.27 generations
0.59 centuries
0.05904 milleniums
0.00000025669823197229 galactic years
…Countless Moments. . . .
As much as we are not a Label, we are not a distinct moment.
We are so very, very much more and much, much more to become.
What. . .which day isn’t a Birth Day…which day isn’t one we haven’t expired to be birthed again…in another, new way?
I’ve decided to become, without another fortnight or galactic, nanosecond to pass,
A PERSON OF NO AGE.
Ten thousand flowers in spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
this is the best season of your life.
–Wu Men (Hui-k’ai)
I’m inspired and awed by so much and better–so very, very MANY.
Pause…as I have a few moments before writing these few facts/figures and thoughts from Sherry Ruth Anderson’s story about harp lessons (in this google link below)
http://books.google.com/books?id=fG4dAgAAQBAJ&lpg=PT53&ots=q2SKD57_Jn&dq=sherry+ruth+anderson+ripening+time+harpo+marx&pg=PT52#v=onepage&q=sherry%20ruth%20anderson%20ripening%20time%20harpo%20marx&f=false
How about it? Are you up for becoming a Person of No Age?
Join me…let’s be TIMELESS…and oh yeah…Happy Birth
Day.