A Vital Brain Still With Us

This is something I have noticed about me and many other people I know. The mature brain of we seniors is capable of accomplishing new things, new good habits and we have potential to enhance

our lives to way beyond what we thought we would be able to do at this age. Every chore or activity we take on at this advanced age in numbers is a new challenge. Challenge we can do and we can do it well.

I have read reports that say the brain has its own strengths and the mature brain is organized different than the younger brain and it continues to grow and develop.

When we were in Florida in 1982 for a dance competition, I was performing in with my dance coach; the first night we saw these old ladies who were competitors with their dance teachers, in the bar having a pre dance party.

I looked at them and I thought they were about in their senior years and possibly late sixties or even late seventies. I thought how wonderful these old girls were to attempt to compete. The next day when the competition began, I saw these gals all dressed up with gorgeous hair, gowns and smiles. Their faces were lit up with the joy of performing, before an appreciative audience and you never saw ladies dance like they were as good as Ginger Rogers, Cyd Charisse and any dancing star that was prominent then.

I thought to myself, I hope I can when I am that age; do half as well as they danced and won many trophies and medals. Other than that, they were proving the old adage wrong that old people sit around the TV set, nosh, and do nothing all day.

Now thirty years later, I am one of them. I am an old lady senior who keeps herself occupied and alert by doing things. True, now I am having a knee problem, but that will hopefully be resolved soon. So I write online stories, which takes a large amount of time and research to get the facts straight. I hope to continue on with some dance lessons and maybe in 2017 to try and compete in a competition with my coach. I try to go to a mall now and then to browse and shop. I keep up on things, events and read books to increase my mind power. I have email pals and fans all over the country via the Internet and we trade thoughts on being seniors and what valuable assets we are to ourselves, our families and our communities.

So I do not watch TV all day, only at night, the abbreviated versions without commercials of my two soap operas and I also watch at dinner, a show called The Five all about current world events. I am trying to compile some of my stories into a book and even find time and strength to dust all of my rooms filled with dance memorabilia, photos, doo-dad ornaments and framed letters to me about my articles. This is the ultimate chore, since I frame everything and anything that pertains to my writings and my dancing photos of long ago dance events and also dozens of my grandchildren.

There is a book by Mark Walton and it is all about the brain and the seniors who do well with it in the senior years. There is going to be a PBS show (check your location for time and day soon) about this book and its theory on our aging brains which many be aging into a different spectrum of real ability and advancement of ideas, thoughts, happenings and accomplishments

So Mark says in his book, “this gift, the brain is with us for the duration of our life and they have observed surprising leaps in mental abilities of men and women who successfully reinvented themselves in midlife and beyond.” How wonderful for those of us who never believed we will now have the opportunity to try this and know there is much left for us to do on this Earth and we still have lots of time to do it, excel in it, love it, grow with it and most of all LIVE IT.

There is a saying that states “you can repair the world.” Let us add to it and let us say we can repair ourselves and continue to live a life with anticipation of happiness, of hope for new events in our life that we can accomplish and most of all that we take care of our health.

As I thought about the old lady dancers in 1982, how wonderful they looked, acted, were and they had enhanced and delightful lives, even in their eighties and some were in their nineties. How about a dance category for Seniors Who Are Acting Like They were not Seniors, a dance division. Then all of us real seniors could show the audience that to become and live to be a senior is quite preeminent, superior, unrivaled and exquisite. We have the mature ability to still achieve.

I have been invited to write the Forward chapter to a book being compiled now by my dancing friend in Steilacoom, Washington State about his ninety year old dancing partner Mary Petersen and her dancing starting when she was seven. Steven Behr, a Wellness Educator is her partner and he will be seventy-five. They have gone to Hawaii for thirty years each spring and they teach the citizens there to dance and Mary and Steven do exhibitions and showcases there and are loved by all. So they in their own way ‘repair’ the world too. Mary has since passed on a few years ago.

We can all enhance our senior lives every day in every way and we too can repair ourselves and restore our confidence in being elegant seniors in everything we do and attempt to do. There is a saying, “do not look back on the road, and go forward.” I say walk down the new path with the knowledge you can hold your own with everyone regardless of your now age. The journey is awaiting you with open arms.