Endure And Adore What You Can Accomplish As A Senior

Five years from now, hopefully, we will be here to continue doing fabulous things with our life, regardless of our age.  I am 81 and nine tenths now. I hope to live to be a great grandmother maybe in 7-8 years.when my older grandsons marry and have a child. I want to get my ballroom dancing book published on Kindle. My first teacher from 1977 and I are still friends. He is in Maine and I am in Maryland and we are co-writing a book on ballroom dance. His part will be on the professional viewpoint and mine will be on the amateur viewpoint. So far I have had since 4-6-16- as of today, one hundred eighty articles published on the online site called Fairfax Station. This site is run by AOL and therefore at this age, I have a job writing for them. Pretty nice for my age. I also write for the Rene dance site online and have done that for 6 years and before that for 17 years for a dance magazine and for 2 years for the Fred Astaire website. The engaging and smart editor of my Patch site brilliantly realized that a senior still had lots to write and say and gave me this forum for my thoughts. Young people are very sagacious and she or he has a keen sense of judgment, and she or he knew that an old lady senior had a great deal of new and old things to talk about. This shows that I will be doing great things five years from now and will continue to do so until and beyond senior days. I was thinking about five minutes ago (7 A.M.) what will I write about next for my (I call it mine) site. Then out of nowhere, an email arrives and I almost deleted it before reading it and it quotes something I wrote for a site that my email pal Prill Boyle from Connecticut also wrote for, before I wrote my little piece. When I saw that she had written hers, I joined her and this was in March. The title of it was “What will you be doing five years from now?” Of course, Prill is twenty years younger than me, so she has lots to consider what with her husband soon to be retiring and a ninety some Mom living nearby her. I on the other hand at twenty years her senior (no pun intended) think a bit differentl. Mom and Dad are gone, the children are grown and I have four grandchildren. So at this age, you think that perhaps, if you are fortunate, you will become a great grandmother in your time. I however, am now, a great, great aunty of 2 children, a little boy Stephen and he is joined by a sister Charlotte from my great niece. So that is kind of pretty cool as the kids say, being a great, great aunty. If someone asked you at this time, regardless of your now age, what you will be doing or hope to be doing in five years, I bet I would get plenty of different answers. Of course, it will depend on your age, financial status and of course, your health. Five years goes by plenty fast, especially as you get older. When you are a kid, you wait to become a teen, then you wait to learn to drive a car, then you wait to be able to take your first legal alcohol drink, to vote and to move out of Mom and Dad’s house. Of course, in my time, you lived at home until you married. You never moved away to an apartment even if you could afford it. Young men and young women stayed and lived at home and if they went away to college, they usually came home to Mom and Dad, while they were attempting to get a job. Even then, most of us stayed and lived at home. It was cheaper and easier. That was the style and the norm for the nineteen fifties and sixties. After that, things changed. Young people moved out, whether married or single. For me at almost when I become 82, I still have dreams and aspirations of doing new things and doing some old things again. We do not as seniors want to sit around and watch television all day, nosh on sweet foods, and do no exercising. We need to be active and even when aching, they say to do some. So I am pretty active especially with the fingers and the brain in writing these articles on life when I was young, on life now as a senior and all about ballroom dancing from years ago and from now. We still go some Sundays to the dance studio, doing social dancing. I and we dance pretty darn good still and most of the Sunday crowd are seniors. Yey and Bravo to seniors who do not sit all day in front of the television set. Dr. Elaine Husni, MD, MPH and Vice Chairman of Rheumatology and Director of the Arthritis and Musculoskeletal Center at Cleveland Clinic says “a mistake is made to avoid exercise instead of making appropriate adjustments for the condition of Arthritis if you have it.” We also need to keep our minds active and I do that by writing and more writing. I write for several online sites and hope to put many of my ballroom dance articles into a dance book in the coming of 2013. All of this keeps the mind and thoughts in an intellectual mode and that is very important. We should keep on learning and doing and accomplishing with anything that we may desire to do at even this senior age, we are in. Reading books, doing crossword puzzles, using the computer, writing down your ideas and thoughts for now or from the past; all this keeps the brain active and alive. Ballroom dancing is another source of brain use. Most people think you only dance with your feet; ballroom is made up of using your mind for the various steps, routines and movements. There is the old, cute saying when you are taking a lesson and you put forth the right foot instead of the left foot. The teacher will say “not that left foot, the other left foot.” That is a dancing joke of sorts. Sometimes you feel like you do have two left feet when you first learn dancing; however, you soon learn you do not have two. You have one of each and they will eventually move the way you tell them to move. Seniors now are more capable of perfecting and achieving great accomplishments than they ever dreamed they could. You have to try different styles of hobbies to see what suits your purse and your desires. There are always inexpensive ways to try new things. In dancing, you can learn by taking what is called group lessons. In these lessons, there are about eight to ten persons in the class, all learning at the same time. You trade partners and learn to dance with others, you may not know. Sometimes, that is pleasant and other times you wish you could just come and dance with the person you came there with to gain the knowledge. If you find that hard, then you can pay for a private lesson which costs about three times as much for you and three times for your partner. If that is feasible for your purse, then do it. It is probably the best way to achieve your goal quicker. If that is not suitable for you, then you can learn at the less expensive way and you will absorb at a slower pace, but you are in no hurry at this senior age. Whatever is easier for you that is your decision. When you put the question to yourself, what would I like to be doing five years from now, think long and hard and besides being healthy, think of the hobbies you would like to attain and to do with great realization and success. I have written about the seventy-nine year old lady in California who wrote me several years ago, that she started to ballroom dance at that age because she read my articles in a dance magazine and received the courage to start them. So she did and she became very adept and proficient doing it at this later age. She went on to compete with her teachers and danced in many studio showcases showing off her skills. By then she was eighty-three and still going strong. I am now almost less one year of her seventy-nine year old stage. I want to start at this stage coming up next week, to become more involved with dancing, as I have been on a hiatus with my aching knees and receiving some Cortisone shots. Next week, I am going for a few sessions, three or four at the most to receive from a physical therapist some exercises to strengthen my back and knees. Then you will be hearing about my new accomplishments in ballroom dancing and my desire to maybe, compete with my teacher in a competition next June 2017, hopefully, the number will be good luck and I will attain my new dream. When the asking is what you want to be doing five years from now, I will say, “besides still being around, I would like to be a dance competitor and win a few more awards to place alongside of the dance trophies and medals I have from twenty years ago. Those old trophies need some new neighbors to sit next to them and I hope to give them some next year.” Think about it and write a list of what you want to be doing or accomplishing or relaxing about in the next five years. It can be three years, not five, whatever you think it should be. Remember the old saying, you are only as old as you feel, let us change that to you are only as young as you want to try and become. Some women try to look younger than they are and they dress like they are teens. Be what you think you want to be and you will have the stamina to be successful and happy doing that. I love sayings and I quote them and the authors quite a lot. Here is one I just made up. “Endure what you have to and adore yourself enough to live happily for the rest of your life.” That is an Elita original saying, just created right now for this article. elita sohmer clayman Fairfax Station Patch