I had the pleasure of observing an interesting couple a while back. The man had an obvious ailment, but it was the way that his wife took care to help him which stirred my attention. It was obvious the couple had been together for many years by the way she fussed over him, taking great care to make sure he was in no pain throughout his laboured movement. Their love for each other was evident in their actions.
That’s one of the great things about the senior years – the tempering effect they can bring to the behavioral tendencies of one’s more youthful years, when interactions tend to be more of brashness, or bragging – with less caring about others.
Young people have a hard time visualizing growing old. It doesn’t make it easier that society glorifies youth and looks upon old age as something to be shunned and disrespected. The material things in life which are perceived to make us happy - be it wealth, power, or position - are so fundamentally different from the caring and mellowing of character after all our huffing and puffing through life is over. We then realize from a long term perspective, that acquaintances are many, but true friends, the love of a spouse and family are more valuable than physical substances.
This is the time of life when you realize that being 40 is no longer over the hill, but rather a bygone memory. Still, it is something to embrace, rather than fear. It is, so to speak, the finished product of our lifetime of experiences. Our successes, failures, sorrows, and joys, all depend upon what we have done and how we have dealt with life.
If you are blessed to be a senior, with a productive lifetime behind you, then you will appreciate the values that have contributed to the golden years being the happiest of your life. Yet it is also sobering to think on. Most of us are merely children in the great school of life and are learning something of its great laws. But with graying and eroding hairlines, there really is a proverbial “age of wisdom” — a period of expanded consciousness, uncanny mental abilities and boundless imagination.
In his book, “The Wisdom Paradox: How Your Mind Can Grow Stronger as Your Brain Grows Older,” Dr. Elkhonon Goldberg a clinical professor of neurology at NYU School of Medicine, expounds on this thought. He says that exposure to new experience creates expanded neural networks in the brain which are attracted to each other, bundle, and accumulate over time. These neural networks of experience build and expand with age, adding a kind of super-layer of new patterns and templates. Only the aging brain, a result of decades of accumulated life experiences, can produce these more powerful neural networks and processes.
He also defines “wisdom” clinically, as the integration of thought and analysis based on the condensation of years of vast prior analytic experience – compressed and crystallized. Such an accumulation of knowledge places the onus on seniors to share the proof of that way with others – showing how to built a strong and stable society, provide good health, happiness, happy families and strong values. If you won’t, no one else will. What a tragedy that would be for our younger generation.
Posted by Jorg Mardian RHN, CPT 