Last week saw me huffing and puffing on a perfectly flat path along the river, bones aching when I returned from a 3.5 miles hike (today’s photographs). My usual inclination would be to be demoralized. Particularly since I had been collecting stories of women my age and older, all of whom pulled off things physically a million times more challenging.
I was thinking of Ernestine Shepard who is a competitive body builder, trainer and model in her 80s.
I was wondering about Ginette Bedard who ran marathons at age 86 four years ago still. She did not start until she was 68 and has run 10 marathons since – good G-d.
I envied Jane Dotchin, a British woman now in her early eighties, who treks 600 miles with her dog and pony every year from Hexham, Northumberland to the Scottish Highlands.
Everything she needs, tent and food included, is in the saddlebacks, and she covers about 20 miles a day. Do yourself a favor and watch the short clip linked in her name above – it brings endless cheer.
Luckily, I had help fighting off demoralized thinking from two recently encountered sources. One is a a book by a contemporary social scientist at Yale University, Becca Levy. Her research, described at length in Breaking the Age Code, tackles how we internalize personal and cultural stereotypes about aging and how these adopted beliefs then have insidious consequences. The book lays out clearly how many structural factors contribute to ageism, but also how we can employ some simple mechanism so that we won’t fall for these beliefs and have them crimp our life expectancy. Here is an excerpt that succinctly tells what her focus is all about.
Her data suggest that activating positive age stereotypes for just 10 minutes or so improves people’s memory performance, gait, balance, speed, and even the will to live. I cannot judge if those are short term effects demonstrated in the lab, or actually extend to real life situations for the long run. I can confirm, though, that my other source of encouragement has captured what I have seen in my own context of aging and being surrounded by aging friends.
Here are the words of Simone de Beauvoir (from The Coming of Age, the obscuring American translation of her original title La Vieillesse, Old Age):
“Growing, ripening, aging, dying — the passing of time is predestined, inevitable.
There is only one solution if old age is not to be an absurd parody of our former life, and that is to go on pursuing ends that give our existence a meaning — devotion to individuals, to groups or to causes, social, political, intellectual or creative work… In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves. One’s life has value so long as one attributes value to the life of others, by means of love, friendship, indignation, compassion.” (Ref.)
Looks like we’re best served by marching some miles together with friends, passionately demonstrating for a cause close to our hearts. Connections and causes. Nature can wait!
Alternatively, it could be the cause. Some extraordinary lives were linked to nature – devoted to ecological research and saving the forests. Here is the spellbinding portrait of a woman academic who spent her adult life in a hunting lodge without electricity and running water in the Polish woods, sharing her housing with a 400 pound boar called Froggy, a lynx named Agatka and a kleptomaniac crow. Read the story here – it is guaranteed to make your day, another day towards old(er)age with a positive role model no less!
Simone Kossack with Froggy. What about all those clocks?
Music today is by another favorite activist who is still performing in her older years. Chaka Khan, Queen of Funk, and erstwhile member of the Black Panthers, will perform at the Hollywood Bowl, L.A. on July 26,2024!
Tell me something good!
(Song written by Stevie Wonder and originally performed with her band Rufus, heard a million years ago when I still attended live concerts…)
