Dr. Toni

Aging Invisibly – or not

Posted on by Dr. Toni

A poem from Shel Silverstein nicely captures the invisibility that cloaks people as we get old:

Said the little boy, “Sometimes I drop my spoon.”
Said the old man, “I do that too.”

The little boy whispered, “I wet my pants.”
“I do that too,” laughed the old man.”

Said the little boy, “I often cry.”
The old man nodded, “So do I.”

“But worst of all,” said the boy, “it seems
Grown-ups don’t pay attention to me.”

And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.
“I know what you mean,” said the old man.

In an interview in Australia’s The Age several years ago, mystery writer Ruth Rendell talked about an instance of invisibility at her age – then, 76:

“…I am not going to pretend that growing old is all sweetness and light. And this is not because of my outlook on life and my attitude, but very much because of the way younger people view old age.

“Old women especially are invisible. I have been to parties where no one knows who I am, so I am ignored until I introduce myself to someone picked at random. Immediately word gets round and I am surrounded by people who tell me they are my biggest fans. This is fine for me, but what about the others, my contemporaries, left isolated?”

And so it goes. I have my own stories of being made invisible and I know you do too. But sometimes – oh, so rarely and therefore amazingly – we are, for moment or two, noticed.

It was last week and I had stopped in my local Rite-Aid to replenish a couple of personal items. A new girl, impossibly young from the vantage point of my 71 years, was at the checkout stand. I could tell she was new because she wore a name tag that said, “Trainee.”

An older clerk was observing and helping out by packing up the purchases. As the trainee handed me change, she blurted out, “What beautiful hair you have.”

I say “blurted” because it was like that. The statement erupted from her spontaneously and I think we were both surprised.

Now, my hair is gray, fading lately toward white. It’s rather long and I usually wear it pulled back in a clip of some sort to keep it out of my face. Nothing special. But the obviously genuine compliment was.

We both grinned as our gazes connected. I said thank you then as she turned to the next customer and I left the store.

A small moment that the young trainee may not remember at all. But a small moment that made my day and has delighted me each time I have recalled it.

 

FROM Time Goes By

What is So Good About Growing Old

Posted on by Dr. Toni

Forget about senior moments. The great news is that researchers are discovering some surprising advantages of aging
By Helen Fields
Smithsonian magazine, July 2012,
Scientists are finding the mind gets sharper at a number of vitally important abilities as you get older.
Karsten Thormaehlen

Even as certain mental skills decline with age—what was that guy’s name again?—scientists are finding the mind gets sharper at a number of vitally important abilities. In a University of Illinois study, older air traffic controllers excelled at their cognitively taxing jobs, despite some losses in short-term memory and visual spatial processing. How so? They were expert at navigating, juggling multiple aircraft simultaneously and avoiding collisions.

People also learn how to deal with social conflicts more effectively. For a 2010 study, researchers at the Univer- sity of Michigan?presented “Dear Abby” letters to 200?people and asked what advice they would give. Subjects in their 60s were better than younger ones at imagining different points of view, thinking of multiple resolutions and suggesting compromises.

It turns out that man- aging emotions is a skill in itself, one that takes many of us decades to master. For a study published this year, German researchers had people play a gambling game meant to induce regret. Unlike 20-somethings, those in their 60s didn’t agonize over losing, and they were less likely to try to redeem their loss by later taking big risks.

These social skills may bring huge benefits. In 2010, researchers at Stony Brook University analyzed a telephone?survey of hundreds of thousands of Americans and found that people over 50 were happier overall, with anger declining steadily from the 20s through the 70s and stress falling off a cliff in the 50s.

This may be news to people who equate being old with being sad and alone, but it fits with a body of work by Laura Carstensen, a psychologist at Stanford. She led a study that followed people ages 18 to 94 for a decade and found that they got happier and their emotions bounced around less. Such studies reveal that negative emotions such as sadness, anger and fear become less pronounced than in our drama-filled younger years.

Cornell sociologist Karl Pillemer and co-workers interviewed about 1,200 older people for the book 30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans. “Many people said something along these lines: ‘I wish I’d learned to enjoy life on a daily basis and enjoy the moment when I was in my 30s instead of my 60s,’” he says. Elderly interviewees are likely to “describe the last five or ten years as the happiest years of their lives.”

“We have a seriously negative stereotype of the 70s and beyond,” says Pillemer, “and that stereotype is typically incorrect.”

Read more: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/What-is-So-Good-About-Growing-Old.html#ixzz1yjtluj00

Fear of Aging – by Keith Wommack

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What we fear can only keep us in captivity
Keith Wommack, In Your Words

Recently, when asked, “What can fear do to you?” I was reminded of two experiences.

The first started with me asking a Sunday school class of first-graders: “What would you say if someone wanted you to pray for them?”

A visitor to the class, a young girl, spoke up and confidently said, “I would tell them that they were safe in God’s pocket.”

A few hours later, my phone rang. A man who had a physical problem asked me to pray for him. Because the girl’s simple but confident response had so impressed me, and because I understand the cause of most problems to be fear, I was led to say, “You are safe in God’s pocket.”

He began to cry and hung up, without giving his name.

A week later, he called back to report he’d been healed of the physical problem the instant he hung up the phone. He also stated that for the next few days, every time he tried to smoke cigarettes, they tasted terrible. Not only had he been healed of the physical trouble, he’d stopped a long time habit of smoking, as well.

Yes, the girl’s pure trust in God’s constant care inspired a prayer that erased the man’s fear.

The second experience I was reminded of took place when I stepped out of a dressing room and into a packed church auditorium. I was suddenly nervous. Anxiously, I stepped over to a chair, sat and waited for the prelude music to finish.

My fear was puzzling. I had freely performed in a rock band in front of small and large audiences for many years. And although I was about to conduct my first church service of a three-year term, I was prepared. Everything I needed to conduct the service was in place on the podium. There was nothing to worry about.

Then, while the music continued, I recognized that the fear wasn’t mine but rather waves of sympathy from the audience. Many people have a fear of public speaking, and I was mentally sensing this fear.

I affirmed to myself that the fear wasn’t mine, and that I didn’t have to suffer from the thoughts of others.

When the music stopped, I stepped up and began the service. Immediately, the fear vanished. I found that I had the ability to stop being afraid. I could stop being a victim of fear.

What can fear do to you? It seems a lot. Anxiety, fear and worry can be mentally and physically harmful. Jere Daniel in a Psychology Today column, “Learning to Love Growing Old,” wrote, “Fear of aging speeds the very decline we dread most. And it ultimately robs our life of any meaning.”

I’m discovering that we experience what we think and that fear seems to be able to negatively touch every part of the body, if we allow it. I’ve found it effective to filter my thoughts through spiritual reasoning. Many call this prayer.

As I was listening to the prelude music in the church auditorium, I realized that fear was not a power to be battled with and defeated. The thought, “I am afraid,” was not mine. Not only did I affirm mentally that the fear wasn’t mine, I also knew that no power apart from God could govern my being.

If one glances through the King James version of the Bible, it is hard not to spot one of the 70 times “Fear not” appears. The second book of Timothy has helped me when I’ve been afraid. It states in part, “God has not given us a spirit of fear. But he has given us a spirit of power and love and self-control.”

Jeff Levin, in his book, “God, Faith, and Health: Exploring the Spirituality Healing Connection,” writes, “The best study conducted to date on the topic of religious attendance and health found the most amazing results. It showed that the protective effects of frequent participation in church can last a lifetime. … Published in the American Journal of Public Health, [one] study found that frequent religious attenders had greater survival rates — that is, lower mortality — that extended over a twenty-eight-year period. Frequent religious attendance in 1965 was still reducing the risk of dying in 1994.”

If we are children of God, a fearing soul is not who we really are. Fear keeps us from living freely as spiritual beings. However, fear disappears when we glimpse our identity as the image of the divine.

Keith Wommack is a syndicated columnist, Christian Science practitioner and teacher, husband and stepdad. He is a legislative liaison for spiritual healing and Christian Science in Texas.

http://www.statesman.com/life/faith/what-we-fear-can-only-keep-us-in-2402785.html

Now I Become Myself

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Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before –”
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!
The black shadow on the paper
Is my hand; the shadow of a word
As thought shapes the shaper
Falls heavy on the page, is heard.
All fuses now, falls into place
From wish to action, word to silence,
My work, my love, my time, my face
Gathered into one intense
Gesture of growing like a plant.
As slowly as the ripening fruit
Fertile, detached, and always spent,
Falls but does not exhaust the root,
So all the poem is, can give,
Grows in me to become the song,
Made so and rooted by love.
Now there is time and Time is young.
O, in this single hour I live
All of myself and do not move.
I, the pursued, who madly ran,
Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

– Reprinted from Selected Poems of May Sarton edited by Serena Sue Hilsinger and Lois Brynes; W.W. Norton & Company; 1978–