Growing Old With John
Welcome to Growing Old With John, that’s me. I’m 60 years old, a small ‘l’ liberal, a small ‘h’ humanist and a small town Ontario boy.
I am very interested in aging well and dying a good death. I am reading and researching these topics everyday. What I want to do with this blog is bring you the important news and information that I come across. SO by following this blog my hope is to keep you current on many of the issues and topics you should know about as you age. Aging starts at birth so to some extent we should ALL be interested in how it works and how we can work with it instead of in opposition to it.
I’ve had my share of issues with aging, in general and dealing with the effects of life while aging. Here’s the idea I have for this web site: to combine the power of ‘crowd wisdom’ with the issues of aging. Imagine the synergy we could create if we all committed to helping each other grow old with vitality and wisdom. We could all learn a great deal from each other.
There are 4 important points to make in encouraging you to join me in this endeavour.
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1.You stand to learn from others who have already faced issues that you are facing.
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2.You stand to teach others about issues you have faced and they are confronting.
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3.You will be helping to build community for yourself.
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4.You will be doing something!
All of these points are essential in helping you to live well as you age and die well when you’re done aging.
These points are hard to list in priority because they are each so important on their own. Taken together I believe all of these things receive a synergistic boost from any combination with each other. Taken together, they certainly add up to more than the sum of their parts. Having said that I do believe that the most important thing we must do as we age is SOMETHING. Doesn’t much matter what, it’s a big wide world with lots of choices. The important part is that we stay engaged, keep doing, doing anything.
Do something to make your world better, improve the quality of life for yourself and others. Eat well, exercise, and do something with your mind to keep it active. This is my prescription for you and I believe it will get you as close as you’re going to get to an elixir of life. So I welcome you and invite you to join me in this exploration of aging with crowd wisdom.
I recently heard a story from a Ceremonialist about how, to prepare for a particular ceremony, people would tie thin lengths of coloured fabric to their body, wherever they had been subjected to hurt or damage. So for every broken bone, serious cut or burn, heart attack, serious bout of illness or whatever, you would tie a cotton piece around that part of your body. I had a beautiful image in my head of what I would look like as I danced in the subsequent ceremony, intended to celebrate my life and it’s trials. It was a great mental image I had.
In my fairly active young life to date I have blown out both knees, fractured my pelvis twice, once on each side, totally crushed my coccyx, fractured my wrist and various fingers and toes, had a heart attack, a pulmonary embolism, pleurisy, asthma, various bouts with pneumonia a couple of 3rd degree concussions, one accompanied by a serious skull fracture. I would have looked pretty colourful in my dance of life.
I am telling you all this not to seek any sympathy, but to illustrate what just one person can contribute to a body of crowd wisdom knowledge on aging and healing.
