Tag: seniors futures. seniors development

A Seniors’ Day Out

We’re all in our 70s, about 33 of us, going for a day in a city famous for seafood. We mainly wanted to eat a whole array of seafood, a favourite for this group. We grew up in the same town and went to the same grade school and high school, so there is a camaraderie among us brought about by years of growing up. Now, we are growing old together. Though some of us live in other parts of the world, we try to be home in our village, and when we are around, we get together as much as possible. 

Today, we were off to Roxas City, about three hours from our place in Iloilo. We decided to go early as most of us woke up early anyway. So, at 5 in the morning, we gathered in our town center, and there, two vans provided by two in our group waited for us.

Off we went, and one of the valuable tips I’ve learned is to have a bag of jokes to entertain everyone in the van. You will have so much fun. To energize the group further, bring a collection of old songs. Download it on your phone. They will remember their old days when you play the songs and enjoy singing along with the recording. More stories will come out of their memories. Make sure you have your battery pack. 

When planning this trip, most of the group who had been there before told us of some of the challenges they encountered. These guided us in our choices of restaurants. Knowing that most in our group were diabetic, many brought snacks, so there was enough food and drinks in the van. 

We only planned for lunch but seeing how early we arrived in the city, we proceeded to a restaurant on top of a hill big enough to accommodate us and serve breakfast immediately. We found one attached to the Convention Center. It was raining, and they immediately prepared the table and food for us because they had enough staff. Some staff even carried umbrellas for those in our group who braved the drizzle to take pictures.

The hilltop Cafe Terraza ended up as the perfect place for us. We enjoyed our breakfast and rested a bit while the others went to take pictures. Many started bringing out their pills and randomly sharing stories around the table—a great start to our day.

The restaurant for lunch, Coco Veranda, is on the beach, and you can enjoy watching the waves as you eat when the weather is fine. The weather prevented us from doing this, but it did not diminish our fun in being together and enjoying each other’s company.

Days before we left on this trip, we contacted the restaurant manager of the chosen place and outlined the dishes we wanted to enjoy. Also the time we wanted it ready, so when we arrived, they were prepared for us. After they’d served the food, silence reigned as we delved into the different seafood dishes. We had fun tasting some of our favourites and some unusual dishes. 

The trip is complete with picture taking. We are advancing in age, and a few pass on each year, so we enjoy each other’s company when we can. 

We saw the oldest bell in Pan-ay and went to Banika market, where they sell the best-dried fish. More picture-taking and buying, activities we always relish and do with gusto.  

We all enjoyed the trip, and the group wants to plan another soon.

A Senior’s Memory-A Poem

The tremendous power
Of memory unearth
Life’s incredible wealth
Fill the minds of Seniors

A Senior Reciting Rhodora

I thought of my friend,
Who recited Rhodora
A poem we learned when
In high school

That night my sister and
I searched the internet for all
The classic poems we’ve learned
Through years of literary exposure

Longfellow, Emerson, Gray, Allan Poe
All came to mind
With Shakespeare’s sonnets too
Even Flanders field inserted itself

Words came back
More to my sister than me
She has always been the literary
In the family

And feelings came as memories claimed
It made me wonder why some I remembered
And others I could not
Like the poem Rhodora
Our friend recited

Our minds are tricky,
Playing with our memory
Some things we remember and
Some we forget

Indeed our memory we treasure
As Seniors think they start fading more
But it’s because our memories of yore
Crowd our minds with so much lore.

Lessons My Garden Taught Me

Patola with Fruits. Copyright: aesta1

Little did I know that starting this garden would yield not only produce but lessons that I keep learning every day.

I started this garden because I love to putter around a garden early morning with my cup of coffee in one hand and a song in my heart, looking at every plant’s daily changes.

As the garden progressed, things kept changing. The changes are not only in the plant’s growth but also in people directly or indirectly involved in the garden.

I was the only one interested in having this garden. I had no idea I started something several in the family love to be involved in. So, this is the first lesson I learned. At that time, my husband and I were still working and could not take substantial time to be in the garden. Other family members took the lead, and I gave up designing and landscaping my garden.

The first time this happened, I resented it. However, I was realistic enough to know that time was not with me. Other people have the interest, the workforce, and the time.

Because of this, the garden expanded and grew beautifully. Different people used it for their interests, so the garden became a series of beautiful memories. At one time, sunflowers filled it, becoming the setting of celebrations and photo opportunities.

These days, plots of different kinds of vegetables grace it, yielding produce for our consumption and the market. The garden is now earning little to defray its maintenance and development expenses.

Black Beans and Corn. Copyright: aesta1

One of the lessons I have learned is that a garden requires time and presence. In the Tropics, where plants grow or die fast when not watered, you must keep your watch or lose some expensive plants. Until the plants take root, you must give them care.

When the plants start producing, your job is not over. They come in abundance that you can hardly harvest them at their peak. There’s a time when they’re just suitable for cooking. Not too ripe or mature and not too young. The gardeners also told me that with some plants, you couldn’t leave the fruits to mature on the vines as that would stop them from growing new shoots. When the plants are healthy, the produce is so abundant that you can’t eat them all, so you need to share or sell them. I was appalled one day when I spent hours harvesting string beans, and all the vendors paid for it when I sent it to the market was a little less than $2. So two hours or probably more of my day was only worth that much? I was discouraged, but the benefits of eating fresh produce gave me hope and a new resolve.

Squash and Okra. Copyright: aesta1

There is satisfaction in having your garden. Every morning, I watch for new blooms, shoots, or fruits. In the tropics, it is fast to grow native varieties. Aside from eating fresh produce, I get to help others. One of these vendors comes regularly, and she picks the vegetables she would cook and sell for the workers at the irrigation close to us. She has eight kids and a husband who cannot support the family. But this lady wanted all her kids to go to school and earn degrees later. So, she does whatever she can to achieve her dream. She picks up what she wants and gives our gardener a fair price when she comes. Sometimes, she has only so much money, and she would tell us she’ll share more next time. Do I bother? No, I am happy that this person works hard to improve her life and that of her children.

So, we keep investing in the garden, giving us produce and joy. We couldn’t be happier.

Focus on the Positive

The other day, I got a call from a friend. She asked me how my summer was, to which I replied, we had so much fun with the family together, but it was tiring with so many late nights, drinking, eating, dock time in the sun, and hanging out.

Summer Experience

Immediately, my friend reacted. You had so much fun, but….why the but? I got a bit defensive, but I fully understood her question and her reaction. She waited for my answer, which was a stumbling explanation of something I needed to face within me. I wanted to evade the question, but my friend did not want to let go. 

My friend and I talked about the way our minds work. The judgments we often heard had largely conditioned us and had allowed this conditioning to influence our thinking. We had not freed ourselves from it. We had been unaware of such a way of thinking that we went through life doing exactly that.

This conversation with my friend triggered a reckoning on my part of how my mind worked. Why couldn’t I savour the positive experiences? Why was my mind prone to thinking about the negative?

There were so many positive events that happened in my life which I hadn’t turned into positive experiences. I had experienced these positively but had judged it afterward, and they had become so-so with the negative judgments weighing upon them. When asked about it, that negative judgment was the first thing that came up.

Why was this so? 

Because we never savoured our positive experiences for fear that it would make us less good, it never stayed with us as much as the negative judgments did. We never revisited these joyous moments, so what stayed with us were only the negative comments we made about the experience. Thus, we grew up full of negative judgments.

Even around us, we listen to the news, and we often hear these comments, “too little, too late.”

There is so much focus on the negative as if these negative sell more than the positive. The focus is mainly on the negative.

It’s time we turn this around. My friend and I discussed what we could do about this propensity for negative thoughts. These are some of the things we decided to do.

First, understand better how the brain functions and rewire it for happiness. There are many articles and videos on the brain as people start understanding how the brain works. This development is a significant plus to our collective consciousness.

Second, clean up little by little the traces of negative thoughts we have accumulated. These traces of negativity require a thorough cleaning but not to worry. Face them as they come. I have many of these, and when they manifest themselves, I revisit them and savor the positive experiences sans the negative judgments. Then, I say goodbye to them and never again revisit them. I leave them to the past where they belong.

Third, savor positive experiences. Many of our experiences are fun. However, we remember the negative judgments people around us made or our negative judgments of aspects of that experience because of how our minds worked.

Fourth, build gratitude. Every moment you think about your life, think of the many things you are happy about it. We will always find many things. As we practice doing this every day, gratitude becomes the pervading feeling in our lives.

Fifth, surround ourselves with positive influences and tune out the negative. Some people make you feel happy. Be with them and limit your interaction with people who tend to be negative in their judgments. Enjoy life. There is so much positive around us when we focus on them.

Finally, forgive. Let go of the hurts that we have harbored for years. They have affected us adversely for so long, and that’s enough. We now leave them where they belong. We are new beings now, and these things no longer have any influence on us.

I was glad that my friend brought this negativity to my awareness when telling her about my summer experience. I then revisited my summer experience and savoured the fun we had as a family, the sharing be it of books, music, or movies we’ve watched recently.

I focused on the positive and the fun and enjoyment we’ve had. I realized how rich and satisfying the experience was and appreciated every moment of it.

Introducing Seniors Futures

617 million are 65 or older. This data was first published in 2015 so the numbers have gone up. This is projected to increase to 1.6 billion by 2050, about 17% of the world’s population (An Ageing World, National Institute on Aging).

Because there are so many Seniors now, interest in what engages them and what interesting topics catch their attention have gone up. We Seniors should be happy and get engage with these interesting discussions.

This significant development on Seniors bring with it joys, wisdom, opportunities and plenty of challenges as the body starts its decline and the mind wanders off to memory lane.

There are many opportunities as well. I don’t think I can think of any other periods in history most comfortable for Seniors to be in. To go out, we have our own driver, Uber or Lyft. Any good we want to buy can be delivered straight to our doors. We have all kinds of researches on Seniors being done and medical professionals and caregivers to take care of our health.

This is the most significant area this site will highlight so Seniors can be on top of these recent development and understand its implications and applications to their own lives.

Not many of us lived healthier lives as we got into the challenges of our times so we now experience the results of that. We can’t hide them. The lines and contours show them well. Thus, this site.

Seniors Futures is a site conceived to dig deeper into the developments Seniors grapple with. From Finance, to Travel, to Grandparenting, to Health, to Style, Seniors face many new developments that can overwhelm them.

This site helps to make sense of all these developments and discuss some of these more thoroughly in more understandable ways.

I am Mary Norton and I have a Ph.D. in Organizational Development. I have seen in my work how many Seniors are now leaving the workplace. Lost after the structured life in the workplace, many walk around listlessly hoping someone would engage them.

Before, the engagement was there with the job, they had somewhere to go and something to do. Now, some find meaningful ways to respond to the new reality. Others, get lost and are unable to make sense of this new context.

As I am a Senior now, I get more interested in what my friends and colleagues share about ageing and growing old. Moreover, I go through these developments myself and like many of my Senior friends, we laugh at it many times as we share many of our Senior moments. At the same time, we worry about what the future holds. We get upset at things we don’t understand or find hard to understand.

In addition to the new reality, new technologies come and leave us unable to use many of its features. Just read the news on how predators on the Net prey on older people. It is upsetting.

The younger ones find these developments fun and make their lives easy but for us, Seniors, just finding our way to using many of these new technologies take several sessions with grandchildren.

So, to respond to this worry, we discuss these matters, read on these and seek confirmation in our own experience. This is what we want to share with you in this site.

This is not a scholarly site nor does it contain expert medical advice. No, the posts here are just the sharing of Seniors of what they go through. We hope that you will get involved more actively by making comments or sharing your own experience in the matters discussed in some of the posts.

It is our hope that we can build a community of Seniors willing to share and contribute to the discussion. You are invited to share and be part of our community. Your experience will be valuable to building a knowledge bank for Seniors.