I return to the book: The Gift of Years by Joan Chittister. She writes about immediacy.
Here’s what she says:
‘Act your age’ can be useful advice when you’re 17; it’s a mistake when you’re 77. When we start acting old, however old we are, we’re finished. If we’re really old when we start acting old, it’s even worse. Then, acting our age is a terminal illness. We wear ourselves down to the point that we may be breathing but we are not living.
The fact is that there are no particular activities proper to being old in the same way that there are certain activities proper to all the other stages of life. It is proper between the ages of 6 and 22 to get an education. It is proper to have children and raise a family between 22 and 50. It is proper to phase down a professional career sometime between 65 and 70. But then, after that, the only thing that is peculiarly proper to getting older is whatever is going on at the moment.”
If life is really for the living, then the trick to living well is to learn to live it fully, to soak it up, to reveal in it”.
When we fail to meet life head on, we fail to live it fully.”
Life is not simply what happens to us, . . . life is also what we ourselves make happen.”
No, we can’t do everything. Yes, we may well get tired more easily, get exhausted more quickly. There are, of course, some things that would require so much effort that we should rather be doing (something) more enjoyable, less physically strenuous things. Certainly, many of the old friends with whom years of companionship made us real comfortable are gone. And some things are indeed beyond our budgets. But none of those circumstances justify substituting breath for life.”
It is time now to begin again, to become new, to find ways to enjoy life, to seize every opportunity to be an exciting, interesting, significant person. We owe the world the best of ourselves . . .”
“A blessing of these years is that they call us to go down deep into ourselves to discover everything we are. Now. Right now.”
Yes, maybe Joan’s words are a bit “idealistic” but some days she gives me just the push I need to shake off apathy.
After a long career in nursing--I was one of the first certified gerontological nurse practitioners--I am now a writer. My writings center around patients I have had over the years that continue to haunt my memory unless I record their stories. In addition, I write about growing older, confronting ageism, creativity and food.
My memoir, "Stories from the Tenth Floor Clinic: A Nurse Practitioner Remembers" is available where ever books are sold.
Getting Older: Charting the Uncharted 
1 comment