FreshStepping

A big birthday

I'm going to see a friend tomorrow. He just had his 50th birthday last week. He was SO grumpy about it.  That was really funny. He was so grumpy that he was refusing to have anything to do with the barbecue that his wife was organsising.  He siad "Its just another day. I won't make it any different.  I don't want to celebrate"  Well he always celebrates so by not celebrating he was making it different. He was even more grumpy when I pointed this out to him.

Its just a number and its all completely arbitrary.  Why does it make a difference being 18,250 day old instead of 18,249. In fact that sounds so cool I might just keep expressign my age in days.  There would be much more opportunity to celebrate then,  Why, I'd have a 10th anniversary every ten days, a 100th birthday three times a year.  How different would our concept of time be if we measured it this way.

Well that just goes to show how arbitrary it is.  So however you measure it we get older.  However getting older just happens.  You can choose how you react to it.  You can choose to be grumpy and spend all that energy grumping around.  Or you can choose to be positive and just get on with your life.  I know what I choose!  How about you?

Getting insurance

We've had a real issue with the business insurance this week. Our renewal quotes were all too expensive so we gave ourselves a month to sort it out. I can't believe how complicated its been. Then finally at the 11th hour today I was filling in an 11 page form, when we had already given the compnay all of the information that was on the form.  Well, you can imagine how that made me spit. Its just SO ineffective!

Anyway on page 2 they asked for my date of birth. I stopped writing and thought about this. I am buying insurance for my business contents, my house contents, employers liability.  My age has no bearing at all on the risk for these things, so I left the box blank.

I have been doing that an awful lot in the last 20 years. Its sort of been my own personal crusade against age discrimination even before the laws were made. I haven't quoted my age on my cv since I can't remember and I avoid giving it to anyone or quoting it on forms unless I feel it is stricly necessary.  Why oh why do they need to knwo how old I am?  If its not justified then I don't tell them.

I see that this is one way of removing the stigma that can be attached to age, whether that is older or younger. If people don't know how old you are then no preconceptions will be formed.  So lets look forward to a more ageless future and join with me in not quoting your age unless its really necessary.

We just don't care any more

I was talking to a woman yesterday who was saying that now she's reached the age that she is she just doesn't care any more.  "So my hair is grey, what does that matter.  I don't have to try so hard as I have nothing to prove".

That is such a liberating feeling.  The confidence to be yourself.  That feeling of most things being right with your world so you are not swimming against the tide, continually trying to fix things, always striving for the next good thing that must be done.

The benefit of being older is that we can attain a calmer and more settled state of mind. A lot of our battles and challenges are in the past.  We've done all the caring for others, climbing the greasy pole, keeping up with the Joneses.  Now is an opportunity to spend more time with ourselves, to focus on what we want for a change.  So sit down, cuddle up to your cup of tea and look at the world with fresher ideas about what it can deliver for you!

He's just a boy

Today I was chatting with a colleague who had left a job because he was too young.  He'd been told that he could not be promoted into a particular role as he was too young and hadn't been there long enough.  So he gauged that the level of confidence in his obvious abilites was too low for him ever to make progress and left. Big mistake for the firm as they lost his expertise and drive.

However as we grow older we need to take care that as well as not falling prey to the stereotypes surrounding age (as in older) we also do not typecast the young. Its so easy to say "Oh well when I was 28 I wouldn't have had a chance at a job like that so I doubt that this person can do it".  The world is changing so fast that what was undoubtedly true then (whenever "then" was) probably does not apply now.

I believe that whatever someone's age or experience they can only conclusively be shown to be able to or to be unable to do a thing by being given a chance. As long as we continue to make arbitrary rules surrounding age and experience we can hardly be surprised when we don't get offered something because we are older. I say give youth a chance!  Then ask for our own chance.

Reverse the signs of ageing!

We talk a lot on our Fresh Steps course about the enhanced value of exercise as we grow older.  We know that we start losing muscle as we get over 30 and that regular training with weights can help to offset this.  One of the benefits of building muscle is that it is a metabolically active tissue.  This means that it uses calories. So if you have more muscle you are making better use of the food that you eat and can eat more.  Having better muscle tone also helps to prevent injury by keeping all of our joints in a stable state.

I have just also been reading some research from the US that shows that resistance exercise, using weights, can actually reduce the signs of ageing in muscle.  This small study showed that a 6 month resistance training programme changed the genetic expression of muscle to that of a younger person. 

This study measured the genetic messages for mitochondria in the muscle tissue.  Mitochondria are the power houses of any animal cells. They are the tiny organs inside the cell that actually use all the raw materials that we put into our body and convert these into the energy that the cell needs to function.  As we grow older some of the genetic messages relating to mitochondria become scrambled and as a result the mitochondria don't work properly.  The muscle tissue then doesn't get the energy that it needs and it starts to decay.  This results in the muscle wastage that we experience past 30.

What this study found was that after a six months of programme of resistance exercise, the genetic messages for the mitochondria found in the older subjects more closely resembled those found in the younger subjects.  What this means is that there is a fundamental change in how the muscle cells are controlled at the genetic level.  This is very exciting news.  We did not previously know that we could affect genetic messages with exercise.

What we don't know is whether its the genes themsleves that are changed or the mechanisms that allow them to do their work inside the cell. More work in the future may well answer that question.

So the message is clear.  Exercise is good for you at an even deeper level than we had first thought.  Here is the link to the original paper in the Public Library of Science.

When I grow up..

What do you want to be when you grow up?  I bet you were asked that a lot when you were younger.  But at a certain point in your life people stopped asking. Obviously you had reached a point at which you were considered to be "grown up".

So I propose that you actually start asking yourself the question again. I don't feel as if I have ever really grown up. I still feel as if I am sort of trying life on for size and maybe at some indeterminate timein the future I'll reach a state called "grown up". I'm still avoiding getting there as it seems like it might be a sort of boring and staid palce to be. Somewhere with not enough room for fun, somewhere that everything is settled and no changes can be made, no room for changing your mind or trying something different. I'm also fearful of the fact that it might be a place with too much resposnsibility and not enough time to play.

So if, like me, you don't really want to grow up then push it back further into the future and ask yourself again what you'll do when you get there.  What do you want to do when you grow up?

See the world

Today I saw an article about an 80 year old who is walking around the world.  He says "When you get into retirement don't just sit in the chair, watch TV, drink the beer and eat the sandwiches so that you can't then get out of the chair.  Get out and see the world".  What a fantastic attitude.  He's been walking for 18 years and visited 66 countries.  That certainly put my globe trotting into perspective! And he wants to learn to play tennis before he reaches 100.

This guy is a great inspiration to all of us.  OK maybe walking around the world isn't exactly your thing.  However there is a big world out there and even if you choose not to walk around it there are many things that are out there just waiting to be discovered, many experiences, people to meet, things to do.  And you don't have to go to 66 countries either as a lot of what you might want to do may be just down the road.

Here's a link to the story.

Get out there! What are you waiting for?

Barcode celebrations

I was in John Lewis today buying some habadashery.  Sorry quick aside here - just to say what a wonderful word habadashery is. It rolls off the tongue and for me evokes an aladdins cave of sewing bits and bobs.

Anyway - as I was saying....I was in John Lewsi today and the scanning machine couldn't read the bar code on some reels of thread.  Before you ask - it was bright orange thread for some of the silk I brought back from India last year.  The assistant tried several times to get it to scan. Then the only choice is to type in the number. She couldn't see the number cos it was in really small print.  She was wearing glasses and was undoubtably younger than me. I could read the print without too much difficulty.  That made me feel good.  Not at someone else's expense. just that even though I was older (and do not wear glasses) my sight isn't as bad as I might have thought it was.

Someone told me the other day that she's been noticing her body decaying since she was 30. Well if mine has been falling apart since then its worth celebrating being able to see the tiny bar codes on the reels of thread, I think!

What else gave you cause to celebrate today?  What are you going to do for that celebration?

Keeping up

I've been away walking in the Lake District with friends this weekend.  We bashed up Fairfield through frequent squally hail and snow showers.  It was quite hard managing to walk in a straight line through some of the gusty wind with the hail lashing painfully in your face.  I have never walked very fast so although we were often walking in a group chatting, there were a lot of times when I was walking at the back of hte group.

This doesn't worry me at all, I have learnt that I don't need to keep up with everyone else in the party. This has only come though with the benefit of age. I know that I can keep going at my speed all day. I know that this rate of travel has got me successfully to the top of a 5,900m volcano in Peru so trudging up a Lake District peak is small beer by comparison (although we never under-estimate the power of the weather to turn a stroll into a serious expedition).

So when you are facing challenging times in your life ask yourself - what else have I achieved that is bigger than this?  How did you do that?  What did you learn from that achievement that you can apply to your current challenge? Do you really have to keep up with the Jones's?  We can all put ourselves under too much pressure to keep up.  You know that your way of doing things will get you there as it has done through the rest of your life.  Don't be pushed into competition with others (unless that is what you really want).

My pressure cooker

If there was one item of kitchen equipment that I would save from a flood it would be my pressure cooker. I love it. Its so versatile and a great energy saving tool. I can make almost anything that has to be heated on the hob in half the time - nutritious stews in half and hour, warming soups in ten minutes or so.  And when I'm not using it as a pressure cooker, its the biggest pan that I own!

Tonight I've been cooking up two batches of soup for the freezer. Red soup and orange soup.  One based on tomatoes, mixed beans and pesto and the second carrot, sweet potato and butter beans.  Unfortunately as I was making the second lot I noticed that the valve is no longer sealing properly. This meant that it didn't get up to pressure and therefore I had to cook it for longer.  I think that I have a spare valve in the kitchen drawer so I'll easily replace it.

One of the great things about growing older is bringing along all our old ways with us, like my pressure cooker. I don't have many friends under 30 who have one.  However there is always the danger of getting trapped in those old ways and not being willing to move on. I love my pressure cooker but I also love my microwave.  Sometimes in life we need to take a hard look at the way we do things and ask ourselves if it isn't time for a change. Being older we are no strangers to change. We've already seen a lot of it and know how to deal with it. Also we know that we don't need to make radical change to see a result. Just tweaking things can give the desired outcome. I just need a new valve not a whole new pressure cooker.

What old habits and ways to you need to tweak?  What small changes can you make tomorrow?