Healing Power of Memoir and Life Review, Septuagenarian Vitality and more....

 I am a big fan of Dr. Bill Thomas's work to provide  liveable alternatives to what we currently call nursing homes. Dr. Thomas does this pioneering work through The Eden Alternative and The Green House Project. Are you aware of his work? If not, check it out. It's marvelous and needed.

His blog Changing Aging is a platform for sharing news about his very important work and the work of others, too.

I am very pleased that I have had two guest blogs published on Changing Aging recently. My first blog was about our musical revue A New Wrinkle. How glad I was when Changing Aging Editor Kavan Peterson emailed me to tell me that he had listened to the mp3s of songs from the revue, and had read some of the lyrics on our website as well and that he found the songs funny and wonderful. As I've said before, the artist's life can sometimes be a solitary endeavor, and it is very encouraging to receive positive response from one's audience.

This morning, I had another guest blog published at Changing Aging, on the healing power of memoir and life review. 

In it, I describe the value of life review to older adults and share some experience of my own life review over the past 17 years, which has resulted in my new book Songs of the Inner Life.

Life review is considered one of the important tasks of later life. It allows us to examine, let go, forgive, understand and integrate our life experience.

On another note, Mick Jagger turned 70 and 71-year old Paul McCartney gave a big concert in Seattle. Both of these music icons' ages resulted in New York Times articles. The articles are very different from one another.

Gail Collins took a friendly retrospective view of what rockers including Jagger said about aging when they were younger, and how they feel about it now that they have entered the territory of aging. Her opinion piece is warm and engaging. Enjoying your life has a positive effect on the aging process as Collins points out.  "... if you’re doing something you love to do, you can rise above it."

The article Septuagenarian Strut by Timothy Egan is another story entirely. Egan's reflections on Paul McCartney's recent concert were unsettling, a  flagrant display of the kind of disgust many people feel about aging and older adults. It's a rather sad read. Egan himself is in the demographic he writes about so scathingly.   Such repulsion and aversion to aging--it cannot be healthy. Here's one excerpt.

"Milling about Safeco Field in Seattle under a nearly full moon, I loathed my self-loathing. Demographically speaking, I’m smack dab in the middle of a generation that refuses to acknowledge age or get off the stage. Where is the off-ramp marked grace, dignity or class for the 76 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964?"

Readers sent over 200 comments on each of these articles--the comments make for fascinating reading.

That's the news today from southern Oregon, where wildfires are raging all around, making the air very, very smoky. Air quality is rated as unhealthy and we are urged not to go outside at all. We are all hoping for the fires to be contained and the air to clear soon.

News Roundup

"For the unlearned, old age is winter; for the learned, it is the season of harvest."-- Traditional saying from the Hasidim

Wow, the articles on various aspects of aging are proliferating, with the New York Times bringing forth quite a bouquet of them. I imagine this is a trend that will continue, because after all we are in the midst of an age wave, called even more poetically a silver tsunami.

Anyway, here are a few of the articles that have caught my attention recently.

Here's a delightful article on silver-haired women, some of whom flaunted their natural hair on a Silver Sisters Strut in Times Square. Silver hair is becoming more accepted, though we still have a way to go on that score. For a lot of women, and for men too, coloring their hair still seems like a necessary procedure.

There was another wonderful article in the New York Times. It is the story of a late life romance. Beautifully written, touching and well worth the read.

The San Francisco Chronicle ran a review of The Quartet, one of several new films about aging.

The Quartet appears to be much more lively than Amour, whose focus is the decline and death of a beloved wife. I want to see both of these movies, which are jam-packed with great actors and thoughtful material.

Back to the New York Times and an opinion piece by Tim Kreider. Kreider explores our jaunty way of facing aging, avoiding sadness. I love this quote from the piece.

"Segregating the old and the sick enables a fantasy, as baseless as the fantasy of capitalism’s endless expansion, of youth and health as eternal, in which old age can seem to be an inexplicably bad lifestyle choice, like eating junk food or buying a minivan, that you can avoid if you’re well-educated or hip enough."

Finally, a touching article from the New York Times New Old Age blog about a group of long time friends and how they chose to support one friend as she developed Alzheimer's. It is wonderful to read some of these positive articles about aging and how people are responding to it.

Paradigm shift! It's happening and it's about time!

Inspired and Inspiring Elders

Since I started writing this blog, I have covered a variety of inspired and inspiring elders. Some of them are elders whose lives and work I already am aware of and others are folks I have found in articles in major newspapers. This week on the NPR site, I saw an article on a 100-year old man finishing the Toronto marathon. Here's a photograph of Fauja Singh after he crossed the finish line.

Singh, a British citizen born in India, took up running at the age of 80.


I was saddened to note the passing at 83 of James Hillman, a brilliant thinker, fascinating writer and Jungian psychologist whose book The Force of Character and the Lasting Life is one of my favorite books on aging. The New York Times obituary provides some details of Hillman's life. I spent months contemplating Hillman's writings as I developed Sage's Play and began to write A New Wrinkle. He was a major influence for me.

I wanted to review some of the people I've featured in this blog because lately people have been talking to me about how hard they find it to locate positive news about elders. I am very aware of ageist prejudice but I also manage to find wonderful stories about inspired and inspiring elders in major media.

In my October 23rd post, I mentioned 92-year old folk singer Pete Seeger appearing the other day at Occupy Wall Street. In June, I linked to Dominique Browning's great article on natural aging The Case for Laugh Lines, which appeared in the New York Times.

In May I featured the 82-year old British model Daphne Selfe. "Your face is your history," she commented. "If you have a few lines, it's your life that you've lived, and people should embrace that. Some [models] want to alter themselves and I hear talk about getting all this wretched cosmetic surgery done, but I don't want to do that myself as it costs too much, it might go wrong and what's the point? It won't stop you from getting old."

Also in May I mentioned a great article from the New York Times on 100-year old Bel Kaufman, author of Up the Down Staircase, a lively gal who likes to dance the mambo and tango. Another blog from May links to a New York Times article about comedienne Betty White.

In my April 8th blog, I covered the cross-Atlantic sailing voyage of the An-Tiki whose crew was led by 85-year old captain Anthony Smith. The rest of the crew of three men were between 56 and 71. They successfully completed their 2,800 journey across the Atlantic on April 7th when they reached St. Maartens on their raft made of pipes after 66 days at sea. The expedition was intended to raise awareness about lack of clean water on the planet and to raise money for WaterAid. The An-Tiki voyage--yet another example of late-life adventure and altruism.

In that same blog I featured a 91-year old retired dentist who took up body-building at the age of 85. I found out about both the sailing trip and the body builder in the Guardian, a paper from the United Kingdom.

In February I featured 91-year old track star Olga Kotelko. I read about her in the New York Times. Yes, the New York Times prints many wonderful articles on inspired and inspiring elders.

However, the New York Times also has an editorial policy that favors the use of the word elderly as a generic way of describing older adults. Ronni Bennett in her great blog Time Goes By posted on October 25th a letter she wrote to NYT editor Arthur S. Brisbane protesting the Times' prejudicial use of the word elderly. As she pointed out in her letter, elderly is a word that implies frailty and does not apply to the vast majority of elders. Hopefully the New York Times will see the light and change its generic nomenclature to older adults, which is neutral.

Over the past two years, I've written about dancers, painters, sculptors, political protesters, explorers and writers. All of these folks are in their 70s or better.

I consider it great fun to explore the media and find positive, inspiring stories about older adults. This time of life is an adventure on both outer and inner levels.

How do you find the good news about inspired and inspiring elders?

News on Creative Aging, Older Artists and Re-invention

I thought I would share a few of the things that I've read or seen on creative aging recently. The New York Times ran an article on dancer/choreographer Twyla Tharp, 68. The article talks about Tharp's career, her successes, failures and latest works.

Another current New York Times article reports on the large number of people over 55 who are starting new businesses, which is certainly a form of creativity.Starting New Businesses at 55 or Older Older adults are starting their own businesses at a great rate, partly because of the economy, which makes it difficult for them to find "jobs" and partly because they want to stay engaged with new adventures.

Here's another link I wanted to share with you. It's a video clip from US News on the value of creativity for health and wellness in the later years. It includes an interview with the late Dr. Gene Cohen, who pioneered the field of creative aging with his marvelous work.
US News Article

Perhaps you are tired of clicking on links by now. Are you? I enjoy it myself, but not everybody does. I read a great article on creative aging in the November-December issue of Aging Today. It's by Gay Hanna, executive director of the National Center for Creative Aging. I am not going to put a link to it, but you can easily find it if you are fired up to read it.

I am a real fan of slowness--spaciousness, leisureliness, enjoying things in the moment and connecting fully rather than rushing onto the next whatever. I was delighted to find a great book about it-- Slow is Beautiful: New Visions of Community, Leisure and Joie de Vivre by Cecile Andrews. It's quite a marvelous exposition on how happiness and slowness are connected. I will probably talk about it further in another post once I've finished reading it.

The photo in this post is of a Cuban dancer. I have a collection of images of older people from our own and various other countries who are engaged in various kinds of creative expression. They will make their way onto these posts as time goes on.

I am getting ready to do more video clips for You Tube, and I am packing, packing packing for my upcoming move. Today I am having a friend over for lunch, then attending a concert of the Rogue Valley Chorale where my friend and collaborator Laura Rich will sing a solo from Guys and Dolls. That's my news of the day here.

Enjoy the emergence of spring with your own fervent dances, in your own unique style. Be yourself, everyone else is taken, as my friend Cache likes to say.