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
My audiobooks project is ready to roll. I’ve just completed two stages of preparation and am launching a full year of exhilarating listening.
The first stage was conceptual: investigating whether audiobooks could offer a sustainable workaround to reading printed books. Intensified lighting and magnifying devices gave temporary relief from my visual impairment. But print was fatiguing and often illegible. Making connection with Sacramento’s Braille and Talking Book Library confirmed that audiobooks could be my main solution. BTBL had a friendly, professional staff and a field-proven system for complimentary lending of recordings. Their regularly replenished collection of 150,000 audio titles made clear they could satisfy my borrowing requests.
A trial run suggested I could listen to an average of one audio recording per average week, about 50 per year with periodic pauses. While I hoped to sustain my enthusiasm into the indefinite future, I’d start with a single-year timeframe.
So that brought me to the second preparation challenge: what categories of audiobooks did I most want to read and where could I find recommended titles? With a targeted bookshelf of only 50 total books, I decided to limit my search to prose works, excluding poetry and drama. Top-quality writing was a prerequisite. I definitely wanted to revisit literary classics, but I also wanted to sample prize-winning recent works. Fiction was my favorite genre, celebrating writing as an art form. But I also aimed to include non-fiction, for some in-depth analyses of politics, economics, science and current affairs.
This account of my searches for recommendations and selections will necessarily contain a number of lists. My late-in-life hunt began with a return to early adulthood.
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