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
For the new year’s first post, I’d like to review and recommend two stimulating recent publications:
• Hampton Sides, THE WIDE, WIDE SEA: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook;
• Michael Taylor, IMPOSSIBLE MONSTERS: Dinosaurs, Darwin and the Battle between Science and Religion.
Both works closely re-examine crucial milestones in British imperial history: Captain Cook’s strategic mission to locate the elusive Northwest Passage; and the intensifying culture war triggered by an explosion of fossil discoveries. These developments occurred only a generation apart. Cook’s voyage concluded in 1779. The transformative fossils began emerging in 1811.
Both studies report on scientific breakthroughs and their practical applications: navigation, cartography and first-contact anthropology in Sides’s case; geology, paleontology, botany and zoology in Taylor’s.
Both are articulate, accessible, educational and entertaining. They garnered “Best of 2024” kudos from The Economist and The New York Times.
Have a look. I think you may enjoy them.
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