Undergoing the latest hi-tech cataract surgical procedure not only brought back my original eyesight but also allowed me to be free of reading eyeglasses. At my ripe age of 80 reading and writing have so far kept me away from age-related dementia.
This therefore presents an opportunity for “retired” minds like mine to retrofit wasting lives to pursue meaningful challenges.
As modern society focuses on how to best facilitate the aging process, one should not forget that the older population still has an invaluable contribution to make to society.
I’ve seen much value in my friends in their 70s and 80s who are still active as lawyers, doctors and businessmen. I’ve also seen a lot more value in the exemplary work and life of my Jesuit high school teacher who is 10 years my senior.
The wisdom gained from the personal experience of living through events such as World War II, Martial Law, the succeeding bloodless revolution and the current campaign to eradicate prevailing corruption in almost all levels of Philippine society cannot be learned from secondary sources alone.
Most of our current voters or leaders have no personal experiences of those things, but older Pinoys do. Unfortunately, all of those horrible situations could still come back. Even if they don’t come back, we have to be able to plan and warn on the basis of the experience of what they were like.
One way to be relevant is to speak out and write blogs. Oldies need to make a difference - changing youth’s rotten perspectives.
I am inspired to put words down because there is the potential for connection. That connection doesn't necessarily need to be validating; It's nice if the connection is with others who are on a journey similar to mine, but it's also okay if it's with people who disagree with what I'm saying. More than anything, I'm interested in learning, staying sane and spreading the latest on sickening developments that are being unearthed for young sane people to finally act on.
The lives of active seniors I know seem to support the work of a psychologist named Ellen Langer, 67 and the longest-serving professor of psychology at Harvard, who is showing that the effects of aging is closely dictated by the mind.
Langer and her colleagues published in Psychological Science a study that showed that essentially demonstrated that placebo was a health prime, a situational nudge.
They had two groups of subjects go into a flight simulator. One group was told to think of themselves as Air Force pilots and given flight suits to wear while guiding a simulated flight. The other group was told that the simulator was broken and that they should just pretend to fly a plane. Afterwards, they gave each group an eyesight test. The group that piloted the flight performed 40 percent better than the other group. Clearly “mind-set manipulation can counteract presumed physiological limits,” Langer said. If a certain kind of prompt could change vision, Langer thought, there was no reason, that you couldn’t try almost anything. The endgame, she has said many times since, is to “return the control of our health back to ourselves.”
The challenge I pose to my aging peer group is to THINK YOUNG. If not ACT YOUNG, perhaps you can DO YOUNG also.
