Light Up Your Life To The Fullest You Can

Seniors now days dance, drive, golf and do more. Many volunteer their time helping needy kids to learn to read and to learn to love reading. Many seniors still work out of necessity and do their jobs well. Many like Rene and I write and try to encourage everyone to dance. Rene Zgraggen use to write and managed a glorious website, where I wrote a monthly column for the  six years.   Rene also teaches dance and shows us oldsters that dance can enhance our lives. Rene is a glorious senior and proud to be one. So am I. My late friend of fifty-nine years Virginia L.Woerner said in her next to last note to me July 2011 that she was proud of me for being a senior who was active. She said many who she knew were quite inactive. She did ceramic work and gardening and so she too was an active senior.

I love angels. Now I know there are no real ones, but it is still nice to imagine that one looks over our shoulders and helps us to cope, to succeed and to be healthy as we can. I made up an expression. This is it. There are angels with golden hands. There are angels with golden feet and there are angels with golden words. I complimented my hair stylist (formerly known as hairdressers) and told her when she finished doing my hair and it looked especially wonderful, that she was an angel with golden hands. Her eyes teared up and she thanked me and said no one ever said that.

So, we who dance have golden feet (even though many of us have hammertoes, bunions and etc. from dancing) and it is well worth the fantastic times we have dancing. We, who write and express ourselves about our dear dancing desires and devotion, are angels with golden words.

People like Steven and Mary are golden seniors when they go to Hawaii and present dancing shows to people who may never have had the experience of viewing a dancing exhibition or even to learn a few steps. They have done this for thirty years and they fly from Washington State every spring to Hawaii. Mary is 90 this year and Steven is in his middle seventies. Mary Petersen and Steven Behr are their names and I am proud to know them via the email and the internet.

Let us all become golden seniors (as my columns have been called for over twenty years.) We will remain golden folks and show other people that seniors are alive, well, happy, healthy and delightful. LET'S DO IT AND I MEAN DANCE! If you are inspired to do other things beside or in place of dancing, that is excellent too. Anything you accomplish is truly an achievement and a realization. Dennis H. Myers, the physician assistant I use as my main medical person said this to me recently “we have the choice to make a choice in our life on doing things.”

Choice means a selection or a preference. We can prefer to be sedentary in this our golden years; or we can select something we prefer to do and then go ahead and do it, regardless if it seems unattainable. We have the choice to at least try something new and it will bring a new light to our life.

In this coming season of many Christmas lights adorning our homes, our stores, our malls and the additional Chanukah lights of the menorah lit for eight nights for that holiday; gives us a plethora of lighting sources to brighten our neighborhoods. Some people choose a simple decoration of a doorway or window with lights, others choose to light up the whole lawn and driveway with many lights and other prefer to just let the Christmas tree which is all lit up to be seen in the shade less room and it shows beautifully from the street. Whatever you choose, light up your life, anyway you see fit.

When I was a young girl, there was a popular song called “You light up my life.” It was sung by the daughter of a well-known singer Pat Boone and his daughter Debbie became a hit vocalist with the words and music of this song being sung so brightly. It was sung at many local weddings as the song of the evening because it offered hope about love, light and the future.

In Sonnet 47 by Shakespeare, the translation of it goes like this: My eyes and my heart have reached an agreement and now each does the other favors.” Your eyes and your heart are usually in agreement and the eyes see the beauty of light or lights and the heart feels the serenity of the shining illumination.

In this coming holiday season of December 2013, let us all brighten up somebody’s life with kind words, sweet meaningful greetings and as Mary and Steve said a lot while in Hawaii “Aloha” which means hello and goodbye. There is a Hebrew word which is “Shalom” and that too means hello and goodbye.

Hello to good moments and goodbye to bad thoughts and boredom

You light up my life is indeed what ballroom dancing meant to me.This was my choice and as Shakespeare said my eye and my heart have reached an agreement. You too can reach an agreement and it does not have to be ballroom dancing. It can be any source of pleasure you receive with any hobby or activity you choose to make your life more pleasant, more meaningful which will increase your happiness, your peacefulness and your heart feeling quite satisfied. Light up your life with living life to the fullest.