Getting Older and Golder

GETTING OLDER AND GOLDER

Health and Happiness in Body, Mind,

and Spirit in our Senior Years.

JOHN PARKER

Copyright John Parker 2013

All rights reserved.

Vigilant Press

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To Lorraine

TABLE OF CONTENTS

SECTION 1: HOW’S THE BODY?

Our joints are not immortal

Who’s in charge of your health?

Talking about walking

Exercise routines won’t work unless you do

Use it or lose it

What’s the best exercise?

Exercise doesn’t necessarily get you fit

Dem bones, dem bones

While the kettle boils

Ouch! That hurt!

Loose as a goose

SECTION 2: FOOD FOR THOUGHT AND THOUGHTS FOR FOOD

We are what we eat?

Diets and dreams

Food and gratitude

SECTION 3: MONEY, MONEY, MONEY, OR HAVE WE GOT ENOUGH?

Dollars and sense

Do we need to update?

Leaving it for the kids?

Ignorance is no excuse

SECTION 4: THE BLUEBIRD OF HAPPINESS

Making the best of it

Who are you?

From humbug to happiness

Don’t sweat the small stuff

Don’t exaggerate!

Something to live by

Should or could: duty or possibility

Stick a geranium in your hat

The waiting game

Look at the big picture

Living in the moment

Revenge or forgiveness?

Righting a wrong to yourself and others

Letting go

Being honest with ourselves

The giving spirit

Tomorrow hasn’t happened yet

Don’t believe what you read in the newspapers

SECTION 5: STAYING FRESH, or ARE YOU SHRINK-WRAPPED?

Fixed opinions

Brain train

Giving it a try

The listening ear

The good old days

Rags and glad rags

Clutter and cobwebs

The travel bug

SECTION 6: USING THAT PRECIOUS TIME

Wasting? Or using well?

Lucky earth and lucky earthlings

SECTION 7: THE SIGNIFICANT OTHER

The ideal partner

None of us is perfect

No fool like an old fool

SECTION 8: STAYING SAFE AND SOUND

Looking after yourself

The fall

The lift

What if?

Behind the wheel

The rear vision mirror

Where do you put your hands?

Stay focused

SECTION 9: THE R-WORD – RETIREMENT

Goodbye to the nine-to-five

You and the significant other

Fight or flight?

Getting slack

You and the grandkids

SECTION 10: ALONE BUT NOT LONELY

The F-word: saying goodbye

Without a partner but with wings of steel

Introduction

We all want to live healthier and happier lives, especially in the years of our older adulthood. These years are no sinecure. They need vigilance, discipline, and courage. They need analysis and focus. They need nourishment in mind and spirit.

And they need a sound body. If we’re in pain or unhealthy, life’s that bit harder. Hence the first section – all about keeping fit and well.

Section two reflects on what we eat, section three discusses money matters, and section four suggests ways of being happier in spirit and attitude.

Section five considers openness to new ideas and fresh ways of thinking, section six encourages us to take advantage of precious time, and section seven is about partnership with the significant person in our life.

Section eight is about staying physically safe and sound, and section nine explores the R-word – retirement.

And section ten has thoughts on coping with funerals: the F-word. And the inevitability of being alone - but not necessarily lonely.

Will this be helpful? Well, whenever I’ve taken the advice I’ve offered in these pages, my life has changed for the better!

Happy reading!

John Parker

SECTION ONE: HOW’S THE BODY?

Give me a good digestion, Lord,

And also something to digest.

Give me a healthy body, Lord,

With sense to keep it at its best.

From a poem in Chester Cathedral

Take care of your body.

It’s the only place you have to live in.

Jim Rohn, American author and speaker

If I’d known I was going to live this long, I’d have taken better care of myself.

Eubie Blake, American composer and jazz pianist

Our joints are not immortal

The knee is God’s mistake.

physiotherapist

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Health isn’t everything – but it’s central to enjoyment of life. And balance, commonsense, and knowledge are prime ingredients in the health recipe. So let’s meet some folk who could do it better. Are you one of them?

Stan

For three years Stan has been visiting me annually to sharpen all the tools in my garage: saws, spades, shears, hoes, clippers. If you want a shovel sharp enough to shave with, then your man is Stan – but how sharp is Stan’s health management? Read on.

Five minutes into our first conversation, Stan asked me to guess how old he was.

I stood back in appraisal. He had thick iron-grey hair, a lean and sinewy physique, a handsome tanned face, and blue eyes shining with the light of challenge. The total effect was impressive.

Fifty-five? I said.

Stan laughed with delight and punched the air. I was seventy-two last month!

My astonished disbelief was music to his soul. Then he listed all his athletic ultra-distance exploits over the last decade in running, cycling, swimming. Even though I enjoy my sport and regular exercise, hearing his accounts made me want to lie down. Finally he enthused about how he’d run down and passed a younger guy in his latest marathon. It was another trophy in his cabinet. I had an image of a 44-pointer stag’s head mounted over the scoreboard on the paneled wall of a hunter’s billiards room.

I noticed a slight limp as he walked to his car. Something wrong with the knee?

Stan grinned wickedly. No pain, no gain!

Stan visited me a couple of months back. It took him twenty seconds to struggle out of the driver’s seat. Every joint in his body seemed to have seized up. He couldn’t sleep at night. He was living on anti-inflammatories and painkillers. The face still looked young, but the bones looked eighty-five.

And as Stan hobbled back to his car and drove off, he shook his head at his folly. Three years ago I thought I was indestructible. I took pride in being so much faster and better than people my age. Look at me now.

Stan’s story tells us that sometimes commonsense is not so common.

Retaining a sense of competition can backfire when it’s fuelled by vanity. Yep, there’s that sense of achievement when you beat a young upstart to the finish line, but it’s not so smart if the glory of the minute exacts irreversible toll on knees and hips and backs.

Please note: I’m all for exercise and using our muscles. Winston Churchill, so the legend goes, remarked that whenever he felt the need for exercise he lay down until the feeling went away. He was lucky to live as long as he did. For most of us, that attitude would have our bodies looking like jellyfish.

I’m not advising long johns, the rocking-chair and Sudoku in the sunlit lounge of a retirement home called Boring Eventide. Immobility may work for the giant tortoise, which apparently routinely lives to well over a century, and moves only after considerable reflection – but it’s a no-no for human beings. We need to work our bodies. They’re ingeniously designed and capable instruments for active living. And we know that physical inactivity and illness go hand in hand. As the saying goes, Those who’ve never had time for exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.

Yes, there’s something extraordinary about endurance events like a marathon. To complete one is a formidable and inspiring achievement. Few of us can run 26 miles – and 385 yards. I admire and applaud the participants’ bravery and determination – but there’s a cautionary tale in the marathon’s history.

The original marathoner was apparently an Athenian called Pheidippides, a Greek messenger. Legend reports he ran a huge distance to the city of Athens to proclaim the Greek’s victory over the Persians in the Battle of Marathon in 490 BC. What an effort - but the legend also states that he collapsed and died shortly after giving the glad tidings.

Happenings like that might have motivated this observation from the famous English actor, Peter O’Toole: The only exercise I take is walking behind the coffins of friends who took exercise.

Maybe all those friends were over-achievers like Stan, and the star of the film Lawrence of Arabia was promoting the virtue of exercising commonsense in exercise. But note again that I’m not prescribing under-achieving, either. That’s a no-no in the recipe for health.

So we need exercise – but it must be analyzed and sensible, especially in our older years. What’s the point of winning or competing or completing if it destroys the joints? We all know the rallying-cry for the victory-seekers - Pain is temporary. Glory is forever. Hear that trumpet? But crippled joints are forever, too. That trumpet note can become a deflating flub.

Otherwise it’s like the battle won at Asculum in 279BC by Pyrrhus, the King of Epirus. Though technically a win, the king lost so many good soldiers that the result was really a defeat. Who wants a Pyrrhic victory?

Sam and Robert

One friend of mine, Sam, loves long walks with her friends, including in half-marathon events. Trouble is, she’s in her late 60s, with a wonky left knee. After a long walk, she’s hobbling for four days, and having to down pills to cope with the pain. Never mind, she says, with a fatalistic shrug of her shoulders. In a couple of years I’ll get a new knee. If only it were so easy. We all know that arthroscopy or knee keyhole surgery is a modern miracle. And artificial hips are getting better and better. Knee replacements are improving all the time, too. But surely it makes more sense to stop a particular joint-destroying exercise before you become a miracle of modern medicine? An accountant acquaintance of mine, Robert, is about to have his second total knee replacement. What happened?

I ran eighteen marathons, he said. They were seventeen too many.

Sometimes the Everest endeavors in our lives can be inspiring for ourselves and others. Sometimes they are also pointless exercises in egotism or stem from the delusion that determination is in itself a virtue. We all know the rallying cries that motivate athletes as they grind their way through their latest epic – something like Adventure begins when your comfort zone ends. If we do more, we know more.

Well, maybe and maybe not. Sometimes we need to differentiate between endeavor that is harmful and endeavor that is life-enhancing. We don’t want that 44-pointer mounted on the billiards-room wall to have a knowing grin on its face as it regards our osteoarthritic joints.

Let’s exercise to stimulate, not to annihilate.

Who’s in charge of your health?

Doctor, doctor, come and see!

Is there something wrong with me?

Nursery rhyme

A doctor gave a man six months to live. The man couldn’t pay his bills so the doctor gave him another six months.

Henny Youngman, American comedian

Harry

When you visit Harry, he pulls out all the stops as he gives you an organ recital. He’s not performing a Bach fugue however. He’s telling you all about his internal organs: how his liver’s feeling, what his heart’s up to, the state of his kidneys.

And on the table are a couple of plastic boxes. Take off the lid and they’re full of pills in little compartments. One contains his morning pills. One contains his evening pills. There are so many of them there’s probably a pill which acts as a traffic cop telling the other pills where to go. And some of them are pills for the pills. Harry has to swallow these in order to counteract the side-effects of the ones first off the cab rank.

I’m sure Harry’s GP is a dedicated professional who just wants his client managing all his ailments. But are they all necessary? Harry wouldn’t have a clue. I’m sure the doc knows best, he says. I just keep swallowing them. They know where to go.

I point to a pretty blue one. What’s that one for?

Harry scratches his right ear. Dunno, he says.

And that pale green one? Harry scratches his left ear. Dunno, he says.

Harry seems proud of the things as they lie in wait for him each day. They’ve become his daily friends, his companions, his walking-sticks, his props. Making sure he takes them all at the right time – including the traffic-cop pill – seems to have supplanted his daily crossword.

Perhaps Harry has relinquished control of his health to those pills – and to the system which administers them. He needs a professional to tell him whether he’s okay or not. It’s disempowerment. Harry’s handed over his wellbeing to the experts. His job is just to keep swallowing.

Jay

Friend Jay was very loyal to her GP. She’d been seeing him for over 35 years. Why, he was just like a family friend! But that longevity in Jay’s relationship with her doctor somehow precluded questions. She had forgotten that the golden rule is to keep informed control of your health as much as possible. Then she found herself with intermittent stomach and bowel upsets. She visited her doctor every couple of months for almost a year with the same symptoms. You’re probably stressed, said the doc. Just nerves of the stomach, and she was handed scrip for a concoction to calm the gastric juices. It turned out to be terminal bowel cancer. Jay could have lived a useful and happy life for another 15 to 20 years if she’d sought a second opinion – but she didn’t wish to offend. The doctor was a family friend. And the doc had