Being old(er) sucks

Are you as weary, disgusted and pissed off as I am about the unrelentingly dismal messages we’re bombarded with that equate getting older with getting feeble – and feeble-minded.

I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up!

Really?  Okay, some older people do fall, and falling is not good.  And not a joke. But that weird, whiney, clueless and off-putting woman in the laughable commercial is a joke.  (Actually, I suspect that the actress is cheesing it up.  She knows the character she’s supposed to be playing is a joke.)  Yes, some older people fall in their bathrooms.  But some older people run 10Ks.  Or, geez, walk the damn dog twice a day.

I get a low-rent magazine in the mail every month that goes to members of electrical coops.  In it this month was a full-page ad for a Walk-in Tub, a kind of vertical bathtub that actually looked pretty cool.  Here’s the copy:

Remember when…

Think about the things you loved to do that are difficult today – going for a walk or sitting comfortably while reading a book.  And remember the last time you got a great night’s sleep?

As we get older, health issues or everyday aches and pains and stress prevent us from enjoying life.  The next column offered a litany of  old people health “issues” – of all which, I just want to say, are preventable if one lives a counterclockwise life:  diabetes, lower back pain, insomnia, high blood pressure.

I am not being insensitive.  Really, I am not.  I am just saying:

You reap what you sow. (No, not always… but very often when it comes to health “issues” related to lifestyle choices.)

And, expectation leads to outcome.  I’ve written about this before, but it deserves repeating. If you expect aging to mean the diminution of, well, everything – energy, vitality, health, curiosity, the ability to “go for a walk and sit comfortably while reading a book”), then you actually (factually, scientifically) pre-dispose yourself to go down that road. If you accept all the awful stereotypes about what aging means, the ones popular culture surrounds us with, you become what you imagine you will become.  If you expect, instead, good health, useful work, engagement with the world, new adventures, you work to make that happen.

Because sure, we fall.  But absolutely, we can get up.

And then go to Pilates class.