AGE IS ONLY A NUMBER

 

A series of essays….

HERE’S TO THE JOY OF LIVING A FULL LIFE AND THINKING YOUNG

Courtesy of GettyImages.com

….as seen through my eyes!

By: Jacqueline E Hughes

Mom always had a simple rule for her four kids that allowed us to beat the odds, keep our sanity, and overcome many adversities. I suppose one could call it, mind over matter. She believed that your mind could out best your physical self by the shear willpower one places behind their mental ability to convince themselves that an opposite reaction holds greater validity. At best, she could be quite a good teacher at having willpower overcome physical obstacles.

I think it was because Mom didn’t drive and Dad worked away from home for most of the week that her survival instincts while raising the four of us necessitated a unique balance between reality and spirituality. Her charms shone brightly out of the necessity of having to survive just like her own Mother who left Ukraine seeking a better life while in her early twenties and proceeded to raise thirteen children in her new country, the USA.

We walked to perform many functions, even in the middle of the frigid Indiana winter months, such as grocery shopping while pulling the Radio Flyer through the snow in order to bring our basic acquisitions home. Literally shaking in my fake-fur-top boots, lips turning blue, Mom would tell us to stop shivering and instruct our brains to embrace a warm, inner peace, allowing the sun to shine down through the top of our heads and penetrate our bodies with its warmth. Amazingly, my five-year-old brain could concede of this notion and I would stop my shivering for the amount of time it took to run into the manufactured heat of our cozy kitchen.

Applying some of these same principles into my teen and adult life, I’ve often found them to be helpful and inspiring just as Mom’s spirit and character endeared her to everyone who met her. She taught me how to take charge of my life, reach out for anything I wanted and go for it, whether it be good grades, talking with others and making new friends, or interviewing for a job and feeling confident about securing it.

Considering that the mind is truly the most powerful asset we possess as functioning, intelligent beings, we learn throughout our life that if we can control its power through shear will, we can accomplish many things: weight management, learning a new skill, standing tall in our own beliefs, and how to control our own shivering whether it be out of fear or our bodies fighting back from the cold. 

Just as a house comes to life when filled with many people — we ‘Baby Boomers’ are filling the ranks of the senior population and creating a necessity for new products, ideas and ways of thinking, and the adjustment of how aging is perceived. Cavalier Boomers retire with an attitude of ‘now is my time to break the norm and begin to live.’ Understanding that new adventures can be just around the corner, along with the lifting of harsh COVID-19 rules, the mind is allowed to roam free, once again. As delusional as it may sound, it might be healthy to pretend you’re younger than you really are.

Markus Wettstein, a psychologist at Humboldt University of Berlin, conducted a study this past April where he concluded that “People who feel younger are healthier and remain healthier over time.” If you’re not yet in that feeling young frame of mind, you may want to think about engaging in physical activities (for example, pickle ball) to combating negative ageist stereotypes. This may include eliminating the word OLD from your primary vocabulary. Especially when there are so many ways to feel YOUNG! Inserting mind over matter may be a brilliant ticket to success when it comes to combating the aging process.

You might begin by asking yourself, “How old do I feel?” Research shows that many adults feel a few years to decades younger, and this may be a good thing. Most adults are not guided by the small aches and pains of aging, but rather disallow them to take over their lives. By doing so, they are allowing their chronological age to become just another number. 

I’ve always found that a sure way of feeling younger than you are is to hang-out with younger people. Perhaps it’s with grandchildren making TicTok videos together. Or, it may be within your workplace where you make a choice to have conversations with younger coworkers and catch-up on current events and ideas. Living in or near a college town is a must for me. Here one can take advantage of various programs and classes, enjoy the art scene including exhibitions and play productions, or simply take a walk around campus and soak in the surroundings. 

Now that I fit into the category of ‘older adults,’ I insist on believing that how I feel about my age has been changing for the better over time and adults, in general, may be feeling younger than their counterparts in the past. Interestingly, I know I have my Mother to thank for my current and healthy frame of mind. Many of my generation are allowing the sun to shine down through the top of their heads and are accepting that age has nothing to do with how good we want to feel about ourselves. The thing is, we must want to feel good about ourselves and block-out those ageist stereotypes as much as feasibly possible. 

So, each day I remember climbing a mountain in Ireland several years ago to keeping my shoulders down and back straight at all times. I refuse to curve my back and slump into an old age I am mentally not identifying with. Right now, age is only a number to me. If I remain feeling healthy, joyful, and adventurous for many years to come, I know I will have been doing something very powerful in my life.

Thank you, Mom, for teaching us that a younger subjective age can be correlated with better overall health and all we have to do is believe in the power of mind over matter; a unique balance between the gentle denial of reality and the acceptance of who we truly are or want to be.

Copyright © 2023 by Jacqueline E Hughes

All rights reserved

REMINISCENCES

 

A series of essays....

EACH GENERATION RECORDS ITS
CHERISHED MEMORIES VIA CURRENT TECHNOLOGY 

....as seen through my eyes!

By: Jacqueline E Hughes

Our mission, as we chose to accept it, was to bring the boxes of video tapes upstairs from their two-year long isolation period in the basement to be played, scrutinized, and labeled. And, I know what you’re thinking—yes, we do have a VCR player, kept in good condition, just for this very purpose.

You see, we are the protectors of the bulky, Hollywood-style, VCR movie camera that all of these tapes were derived from. And, if truth be told, along the time we were starting our little family, 8mm reels originally captured the images of our celebrated life-changing events and marking time together. Most of these reels have been transferred to VHS tapes. Overwhelmed by the daunting task of modernization (transferring the VHS tapes onto DVDs), these tapes have remained ‘as is’ for years. I don’t think the iCloud is remotely prepared for all of the ‘stuff’ Baby Boomers have saved for future generations!

With our oldest daughter and family, the other portion of our ‘little bubble’ these days of pandemic and self-preservation, coming over for Thanksgiving last week, we decided to sort through miles of tapes a few weeks earlier and precisely mark what lives on each one.

It’s interesting what retirement, a major move back to Michigan, cautiously existing through Covid-19 with long spans of time to utilize, and the inevitable march forward into a new decade of life (both of us turning seventy in November)—will produce from us. Considering our recent journey back into some of the most remarkable/memorable times of our lives via long neglected VHS tapes, this adventure turned out to be one of the best trips we’ve taken in a long, long time!  

Taking the plunge into the deep, dark waters of reminiscence, we found ourselves consumed by our emotions as we wound our way through the thick sea grasses of mental impressions retained and revived. We remained in this state for nearly one week, nourishing ourselves with food and sleep as needed, and coming-up for air only long enough to label each viewed tape with its timely contents; each precious recollection a superimposed image brought to life on our flatscreen television.

Instantly, our grown children appeared as toddlers and adolescents and looking almost identical to their own children as toddlers and adolescents in real time. Even their clothing and hairstyles back then only slightly blurred the margins of time that surround our grandchildren, today. This experience was as irrational and surreal as a dream while having the disorienting, hallucinatory quality of turning the world upside down and then right side up again in a matter of moments.

I guess that’s how it should feel when you ram so many years of life and circumstances into a condensed period of time. The protective walls that surround logic and reality began to shake as innumerable visions passed through us and clouded our present from our past and projected possibilities far into the future. I don’t think we were quite ready for all of this.

The shredded pastels of birthday wrappings commingled with a thousand images of reflective Christmas papered packages bedecked with ribbon and bows being ripped open and tossed about by two adorable blond girls over the years. We rewatched important celebrations and milestones in our lives over and over again with daughters aging from birth to late teens all in the span of this one week.

With the directorial precision of Lana and Lilly Wachowski in Cloud Atlas, a philosophical take on a soul’s journey into different timelines, with each timeline being altered with certain actions of the humans it goes through, we rediscovered our family’s existence through a sci-fi take on our own innocent souls. As we observed time’s passing, Dan and I agonized over the fleeting stages of youth, but were energized by the numerous triumphs displayed by maintaining a positive family coexistence.

We sat plugging tape after tape into the black box as we ate meals and drank mugs of rich, black coffee in the comfort of our living room; one hand nourishing a different machine all while linking the past to the present.

Countless birthdays; Christmas mornings; first walks through kindergarten classroom doors and then celebrating a momentous collection of academic achievements; basketballs, golf balls, volleyballs, and tennis balls kept rhythm with parental heartbeats as they bounced across the screen; a procession of piano and guitar recitals; numerous improvised plays performed in the grand foyer of our Victorian home, all worthy of a Tony presentation; parade after parade of elaborate dance recitals; trips from tent camping in the Upper Peninsula to our condo years on Sanibel Island, Florida, to European adventures with a fourteen and an eleven-year-old, and the bright, shining faces of grandparents, aunts and uncles, and close friends, many who are long lost to us in life but will never be forgotten in our hearts and memories.

Here, I must tell of having almost lost our youngest daughter due to a ruptured appendix when she was only three-years-old. The tapes failed  to show our agony and frustration after three surgeries and nearly four weeks of hospitalization. Instead, they revealed our various degrees of joy as this tiny person began to recover and flourish once again.

Even though their ‘interest timespan’ can be one TikTok video long, our grandchildren had fun seeing  their Mom and Aunt as children about their own age. Their reactions to the past were interesting to observe.

Dan and I exceeded the patience of most people that week or these video tapes would still be buried in the dark recesses of our basement. Now that we know what we’re looking for, we can separate the family segments from old television programs and full-length movies recorded off of HBO and Showtime. Seeing their murky quality compared to HD today makes me realize that we did the best we could with what technology had to offer back then.

Just as I have been moving and filing the thousands of photos I’ve taken over the years onto USB flash drives with high gigabyte counts, I should be able to do the same with our video memories. Unharmed by surface scratches, unlike a CD, this might be the ticket to transporting them to our children and grandchildren for safe keeping.

Dan and I enjoyed our daily reminiscing parties complete with ooh’s and aah’s, some tears, soft  laughter and wonder, and oodles of heartfelt commentary. It feels good to take the time to sort out our life together after so long. Refreshing the memories of living life day-by-day opens all options going into our future. Maybe it is time to pick-out a lite-weight travel trailer built for two and decide on where to go, with whom to visit, and how long we wish to be gone. You know—the possibilities are endless!

Take good care of yourselves and others as we ride out the coronavirus. It’s important to be smart in order to stay healthy. Wear a mask for goodness sakes!

Copyright © 2020 by Jacqueline E Hughes

All rights reserved