Let me hear from you. Contribute your experience and thoughts. I can’t promise to answer every email, but as common themes emerge, I’ll publish some responses and try to faithfully relay the range of points-of-view. rbs@AgileAging.net
In your most private moments, what do you think about aging? Does advancing seniority fill you with distaste, or with relief? Apprehension or contentment? Are you grinning or grimacing?
What image of aging first pops into your mind’s eye? More memory-making with the grandkids? More midnight shuffles to the bathroom? A lengthening shelf of unpronounceable pills? A closet-full of business attire dry-cleaned for schlepping to Goodwill?
Have you dreams deferred or nagging irritations? A Danube cruise? Elusive words on the tip of your tongue? Performing with the Community Players? Being nibbled to death by ducks?
Like most of my peers, I’m aware the aging glass is both half-empty and half-full. We have to take the sour with the sweet. But it’s my impression that we tend to over-emphasize seniority’s downsides. If that’s correct, this reflexive pessimism exacts a high price. Not only can it impair our mental and emotional health. It can also neglect and undervalue seniority’s rich offsetting opportunities, passions and pleasures. This blog is dedicated to helping rebalance the scales. I want to make the case for a positive approach to growing old.
CURRENT POST
It all started with the Reunion. My Yale Class of 1964 was convening in New Haven in late May. This 60th anniversary felt like a last roundup; a good one not to miss. But how to get there from California? Nancy and I shun air travel’s increasing stress. And an Interstate marathon would hold no appeal for a one-driver couple in our eighties.
Amtrak seemed an inviting solution. Spicing a cross-country railway route with layovers would let us visit friends and family along the way. And speaking of routes, why settle for a boring identical return? A jump to the north could bring us back across Canada. The loop of a lifetime. We started to plan. Our actual itinerary ended up spanning 44 days and 8,500 miles.
In this month’s post, I’d like to share encounters and impressions from our expedition’s trans-American first phase. Next month I’ll do the same for trans-Canadian Phase Two. Both installments will feature lessons Nancy and I learned and relearned about the attractions and challenges of North American rail travel for oldies like ourselves. A candid journal of a transformative journey.
Welcome aboard!
Russell Sunshine worked for 40 years in 40 countries as an international development lawyer and independent policy advisor to foreign governments. Now retired back in America, he’s writing non-fiction and practicing agile aging on California’s Central Coast. Russell’s memoir, Far & Away: True Tales from an International Life, is available on Amazon. Click Here