Aging

How To Time Travel Safely 2: Into the Future

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When I was a pastor, I watched parishioners who, as they got older, seemed to be paralyzed.

  • They hung on to jobs that were too much for them.
  • They hung on to their big houses, when they couldn’t take care of them.
  • They hung on to their cars when driving was no longer safe for them — or anyone else.

These were often people who had made good decisions all their lives.

I used to think that they refused to look at the future.

Now, as I face aging myself, I see that the real problem is getting stuck in the future. They had looked ahead and saw nothing but decline and death. They believed that there was nothing they could do to make it better. So, they did not come back to the present to take action.

That is the problem with Mental Time Travel. We feel the impact of past or future events with the same intensity as if we were there.

James Baldwin wrote:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed,
but nothing can be changed unless it is faced.”

We can’t change the fact that we will decline and die.

We do not have control over when we will die.

We do not control how we will die.

However, when we time travel to our last day, we can ask, “What can I change now that will make a difference on that day?”

I have seen people make significant changes in the last years, months, even days of their lives that made a difference in the end.

Here are some examples:

My mother loved her house, her garden, her community. On the night my father died, she said to me, “I’m going to move into a retirement community.” She faced the fact that she was declining. She would not be able to live alone much longer.

With the help of her children, she cleaned out her house and sold it. She, had never lived more than 15 miles from her birthplace. Even so, she moved across three states to a retirement community near one of my sisters.

There, she moved from independent living to assisted living to the memory unit. Each time she moved, she divested herself of what little she had left. When she died, she left behind a chair, a dresser, and two shelves of books.

I remember her as someone who calmly and courageously faced the fact of aging. She was a model for all of us.

I knew a man, who hid his vulnerabilities under bluster and bragging. Yet, as he was laid low with cancer, he opened up his heart to his wife, his children, and others. It softened their memories of him. For me, he is an example of how it is never too late to change.

There was a woman who spent much of her life in bitterness. She had no friends and she often alienated the relatives who tried to love her. Having to live in a nursing facility did not help.

One day, this woman changed. She was warm, grateful for a visit, interested in her visitors, and she had dropped her usual complaints about the world. She remained that way for the rest of her life. It changed the way everyone remembers her.

My mother’s Alzheimer’s disease used to make me despair about my future. Then, I started working with a doctor who recommended, The End of Alzheimer’s, by Dr. Dale Bredeson. That led to The Alzheimer’s Solution, by Drs. Dean and Ayesha Sherzai.

I am convinced that, even if I can’t completely prevent cognitive decline, I can make changes in my life that will slow it down. I’ve gone from despair to a feeling that I can do something. Plus, I feel better and sharper than I have felt in years.

If we don’t face the fact that we will decline and die straight on, we will be stuck there in despair.

If we do face the fact of decline and death, we can make changes now.

It is never too late to change things, even if it is just our attitude.

I’d like to hear from you.

Who are good examples for you?

What decisions have you made because you have faced your future?

Time Travel Safety Tips: 1 The Past

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I recently discovered that Time Travel is a thing. I mean a thing that scientists study; Mental Time Travel, that is.

It’s kind of a big deal. Scientists study our ability:

To go back in time and learn from experience.

The ability to go ahead in time and plan for the future. 

These scientists look to St. Augustine (354-480 CE) as their precursor. He said:

The past is present as memory.

The future is present as expectation.

What is happening now is also present.

In this post, I want to write about how to go back to the past. Soon, I will post about how to go to the future. And then, how to stay in the present.*

How to Go Back to the Past

Yes, traveling back in time means remembering.

But, it’s different from the way you remember your mother’s maiden name or the value of pi. Those memories seem to be stuffed inside some neurons in your brain.

If you close your eyes and remember:

  • What it was like to sit down at the family table
  • What your mother’s pie looked like, what it smelled like, and how it tasted
  • Then add guests from her side of the family

The visual, hearing, olfactory, and emotional parts of your brain light up the way they would if you were there eating that pie at that table with those people.

In a very real sense, you are traveling back in time.

I have been doing a lot of time traveling lately.

It’s what people do in the Third Half of Life.

I found there are right ways to do it and wrong ways to do it. I’ve been doing it wrong. I am learning to do it right. 

You may have tips of your own. I’d like to hear them.

The wrong way to do it.

If you have read stories or seen movies about people traveling back to the past, you know the danger of getting stuck there. That can happen to us.

The two great dangers of Time Traveling in the past are nostalgia and resentment or regret.

Nostalgia holds us in an idealized past. Nothing in the present or the future will ever measure up to our glowing memories of things like: 

  • A happy childhood.
  • The year you were captain of the high school basketball team.
  • Back when anything was possible, and you dreamed about backpacking in Europe, or starting your own business, or becoming an artist. 

 

Resentment holds us in the grip of past times when people wronged us:

  • When mother forgot your birthday.
  • When the coach took you out right before you could have won the championship.
  • When someone else’s decision narrowed your choices.


Regret holds us in the grip of times past when we did wrong:

  • That first lie you told your parents.
  • Missing the basket that could have won the championship.
  • Not spending enough time with loved ones who are now gone.

We all know that the cure for resentment is to forgive others The cure for regret is to forgive yourself. But how? 

I am not much given to nostalgia. But the way I am learning to travel in the past strikes me as a good way to overcome nostalgia and it helps with forgiveness, too.

The Right Way to Travel in the Past

I got these ideas from the wonderful book, How the Light Gets In: Writing as Spiritual Practice, by Pat Schneider.

Close your eyes and see a door. It is a door you know. Some examples:

  • The door to the first house you remember.
     • The door to your elementary school.
     • The door to a friend’s house.
     • The door to a house of worship.
     • The door to a bedroom.

Close your eyes and see the first door that comes up for you.

Now, open that door, and step inside. What do you see? What do you smell? What do you hear? Whom do you meet? 

You can also close your eyes and look into a deep well, and see a face reflected in the water. Whose face do you see? What do you remember about that person?

Practice this kind of remembering. You could write down what is on the other side of the door, or what you remember about the face in the well. Do it deliberately for a while and, soon, the past will arise unbidden.

When I do this kind of time traveling, there are certain images and times that keep coming up. They are almost always on the farm where I grew up. They are not idealized. They always have manure or mud in them. I remember my mother scolding me. I also remember her pie.

I open the back door to our farmhouse and see my mother in the kitchen stirring something on the stove with one hand while trying to read a book with the other. That’s definitely her.

I look into a deep well and see my maternal grandfather’s face staring back at me. It looks a lot like the face I see in the mirror.

I open the door to the bedroom I shared with my brother and remember hearing the distant train whistle blowing in the middle of the night.

Each of these are like  threads that, if I pull on them, will release moments, days, and years with all their drama and feelings. The memories seem to unfold like a movie of my own life.

The more I go back to these places and people, the more I see them without anger or shame or longing. I just look. I see myself and others as if I were in an audience watching a play on stage. I might be caught up in the story, but I never confuse my observing self with what is taking place on my mental stage. I can watch without nostalgia, resentment, or regret. I can just let these moments be. I can learn from them. I can also let them go. 

One of the most famous books of the 20th Century was, In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust. He says that his several-volume work all flooded back to him when he broke open a warm pastry one morning. The aroma reminded him of visiting an aunt when he was a small boy. She always served the same pastry.

I am not as good as Proust at traveling in the past, but I am slowly learning. By using these two practices, I travel back through the years. I learn from the past without getting stuck in nostalgia, resentment, and regret.

How do you safely travel backward in time? What do you remember?

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It’s Good to Suck at Things 2: When We Suck At What We Were Once Good At

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“We fall down and we get up.

We fall down and we get up.

We fall down . . . and we. . . . get. . . .up!”

You may remember this song, “We fall down,”* sung by Bob Carlisle,  but even if you don’t, the refrain is all you need for background music while reading  this post.

One of the realities of this Third Half of Life is that we fall down; sometimes literally.

I fell not long ago walking across a parking lot after dinner with my sister and brother-in-law. As we got to their car, I did not see that I was stepping off a curb. I went down. I didn’t hurt anything but my dignity, but my cochlear implant processor and my glasses went flying.

I have difficulty with depth perception in low-light conditions. I was a little off-balance because of a bout with vertigo a couple of weeks earlier. Probably the Guinness I drank with dinner did not help. I fell down, but I got up.

So, there you have my organ recital. I can’t see, hear, or walk as well as I used to. I suck at things I used to be good at. This happens to all of us if we live long enough.

When it happens, we have three choices:

Denial

Despair

Defiance

Denial The best way to deny that you have a problem is to blame it on someone else. Have you ever said something like this?

“Everybody just mumbles these days. Even the ones on TV.”

“They keep shrinking the print on everything.”

“Why doesn’t the city fix the sidewalks? They are a menace.”

“All these young doctors ever talk about is losing weight. I want them to give me pills, not a sermon.”

Ironically, we most likely go into denial because we are afraid that reading glasses or hearing aids will make us look like old coots. Yet, when we talk like this we sound like old coots.

Denial can be kind of funny – until it kills us or someone else. Think about Prince Philip’s recent accident. He was lucky he did not hurt anyone.

Despair

Despair is never funny.

Despair is often accompanied by depression — another thing we tend to deny.

Despair is a decision to stay down after we fall down and not get up again. When it becomes clear that what we are eating and drinking is killing us, or at least limiting our ability to tie our shoes, we choose to believe that we cannot change. Instead we put on the slip-on shoes and find pants with an elastic waist. We accept that there is a whole list of things we cannot do anymore. We spend thousands of dollars on medications. More tragically, we become more and more isolated and lonely as we lose our eyesight, our hearing, and our mobility.

Yes, we may have to learn to live with some limitations. However, most conditions can be improved with some help and some effort. Sadly, when we start to suck at things we used to be good at, too many of us just despair. We fall down and don’t get up.

Defiance

Defiance is different from denial in that it begins with admitting that we now suck at what we used to be good at. Defiance means facing what is changing in our bodies.  It is different from despair in that it means learning what our alternatives are. It means doing the hard work of getting up after we have fallen down.

One of my heroes is  a friend who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. He not only goes to physical therapy, but does the exercises his PT prescribes.

Another is a physician and social activist who, in his 80’s, began to lose his ability to speak clearly. He goes to a speech therapist and then carefully speaks in a way the rest of us can understand.

Another hero is a woman who decided when she was 60 years old that if she did not lose weight, she wouldn’t make it to 70. She has lost more than 70 pounds and is still learning how to change her eating and exercise habits to get healthier. Since I’m married to her, I am much healthier, too. By the way, she just turned 70, but does not look like it.

That’s what defiance looks like from the outside looking in.

Here’s what it feels like on the inside.

Last Thanksgiving, my 13-year-old granddaughter sang a song for our family gathering. It was an Italian art song she sang to audition for a place in a performing arts high school. In the unbiased opinions of three of her grandparents, she was startlingly good.

The fourth grandparent had no idea. Through my sound processors it sounded like someone singing on a telephone. I know that some people who wear cochlear implants hear music in all of its richness. Most of them are musicians whose brains already know how to hear music. I am not a musician. I despaired that I would ever hear music again. I also denied that I wanted to. My cochlear implants helped me to hear and understand speech remarkably well. I told myself that was good enough. That day, however, I decided that I want to hear my granddaughter sing. I want to hear her brother play the viola that he is starting to learn.

I now have an app for people like me. Several times each week, I play games that reward me for choosing the lowest note from five options. It also gives me points when I determine whether a two-note sequence goes up or down. I was able to do that after “graduating” from a series of exercises that helped me hear the difference between a trumpet and a piano. Yes, my hearing was that bad.  Now I am moving on to listening to 60’s music on Spotify. It helps if the songs are already stored in my brain.

All this takes time, effort, and energy. I am often mentally exhausted afterward.  Nevertheless, I can now hear Petula Clark sing “Downtown” and Glen Campbell sing “Gentle on My Mind” at least as well as I first heard them over my tiny transistor radio. Best of all, I feel like I am getting up after being knocked down.

So, what are your stories? How have you fallen down? What are you doing to get back up again?

 

* The story of the origin of this song is worth reading.