#aging Archives - The Retired Alchemist

Did you know that April is national humor month? I guess it makes sense since the month starts with April Fool’s Day. Humor improves our overall well-being and enriches our lives. Yet, as we get older, we laugh less. We take ourselves too seriously. According to Psychology today, the average 4-year-old laughs 300 times a day, while the average 40-year-old only laughs 4 times a day. I wonder how often the average 64-year-old laughs a day? Not enough.

I think that most of us want to laugh more. I want to observe the funny side of life, because it is there…. buried under the responsibilities, commitments, worries and hardships of life. It is still there. Humor is healing. When people are grieving, they need moments of laughter to keep their world from crashing in.

For a large portion of my career, I worked as a nurse in an emergency department. You see some of life’s deepest heartbreak within those walls. You have to learn how to hold the hand of someone that is experiencing life’s worse nightmare and yet, not take it home with you. It is not your nightmare to carry. One way healthcare workers learn to cope is through laughter. Because, honestly, you see a lot of humorous stuff walk through those doors too. So, we learn to balance the pain with humor. Isn’t that the same as life in general? We need to balance the pain with humor. But if we don’t laugh enough, that balance gets tipped in the wrong direction.

Laughter is good for your health

The literature has identified numerous health benefits to laughter. Psychology Today claimed laughter and a sense of humor as one of the top 24 main signature strengths a person can possess. Research suggests that laughter has the potential to:

Improve your immune system. Positive thoughts release neuropeptides that help fight stress and illness. It is like laughter is the dimmer switch that you can turn up to increase the immune system response.
Relieve pain. When you laugh, your body releases endorphins, which help relieve pain and create a natural sense of well-being.
Increase personal satisfaction. Laughter can help people cope with difficult situations. Since laughter is often shared, it also has the benefit of connection to others. The University of California, Berkeley did a study of long-term couples and discovered laughter to be one of the universal aspects that held their relationships together for so long.
Decrease stress. Laughter reduces cortisol, the hormone associated with stress and anxiety.
Improve cardiovascular health. Laughter increases blood flow and oxygen intake, both of which benefit your cardiovascular system.
Improve your mood. Laughter can help decrease stress, depression and anxiety and make you feel happier. When you laugh, your body releases serotonin (a natural antidepressant) and dopamine (the neurotransmitter that helps us feel pleasure).

“Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.”
Lord Byron

How to laugh more

Just hang out with kids for a little while if you need a good laugh. They are the experts on this, obviously, since they laugh over 300 times a day. They approach life from a lighter side, and you never know what is going to come out of their mouths. When our boys were small and we were on a car trip, we passed a beautiful snowcapped mountain rising up to the sun. One of the boys, excited to share his knowledge with us, stammered, “I know what that mountain is. It is, it is, it’s… Mount 7-Up!” He was on the right track. It was Mount Shasta. Smile. If you are a boomer, you probably remember Art Linkletter’s show, Kids Say the Darndest Things. If you need to laugh, go watch a few reruns of it. Better yet, hang out with a child.

Being around pets is also a great way to get a few laughs. Bonus if they are your grand pets. They are like grandkids in that you get to enjoy them without all of the work and responsibility.

Son #4 has a cute golden retriever puppy that has given us quite a few smiles and laughs in the last few months.

Carefully choose what you look at and read. I get our local newspaper on-line and make a point to read the funnies every morning. Having raised four teenage boys, I can really appreciate the humor in the comic Zits, and the comic Pickles helps us see the humorous side of aging. Try following a comedian or two on social media. I follow Ellen Skrimetti’s IG site, justskrmetti. Choose funny sitcoms and movies to keep you positive and smiling. Personally, I do not watch the daily news because it is so depressing. (Don’t worry, the news still seems to find its way to me, so I am not totally in the dark.)

We have to be able to laugh at the changes aging brings. (Unfortunately, I do not know where I got the picture on the left so I cannot credit it…hopefully I don’t go to jail for that.)

Hang out with humorous people. We were in a commuter van recently. Like a true baby boomer, at first, I was skeptical of the young driver with a bandana and dread locks. We all chuckled cautiously at his first few jokes, but by the end of the ride, we were all smiling and sharing in his banter. He may have been working the tips, but he was positive, fun, knowledgeable and making the effort. We got off that bus in a much better mood than we started. Laughter and a positive attitude just might be more contagious than COVID. (And we did leave a bigger tip than we normally would.) It helps you laugh more if you are with others who are willing to laugh at life and themselves.

Seek out the humor in life. Sometimes it just takes being more cognizant of the humor around us. Being aware and noticing it. Once you start doing this, you will see more of it. Smiles and laughter will be closer to your lips. I seem to be more aware of humor when I travel. Maybe it is because I am not rushing with my head down plowing through my day.

The bike on the left is permanently parked in downtown Sarasota. We laughed when we went to Luckenbach and saw their population sign. Seriously???

We made a detour to Jerome a couple weeks ago when we were in Arizona. It used to have a thriving copper mine but now claims to be a ghost town. Of course we had to eat at the Haunted Hamburger. Bonus that it had a good burger and a great view of the Verde Valley.

My take

If you have been reading my blog for very long, you have probably noticed that I try to keep it positive and light. I try to be optimistic and search out the joy and beauty in life. Why not? The alternative is to be a grumpy old person, and no one wants to be around that person, including myself. But being positive and upbeat is not the same as being humorous. It is not the same as having a good ole belly laugh or even a smile and a little chuckle. I need to laugh more.

We all have concerns. Things we worry about in the depths of night when we can’t sleep. No one gets away from life unscathed. Or, as they say, #$@% happens. It is all too easy to sit with a scowl and wait for the next shoe to drop. I have to constantly choose not to focus on these things. I believe that we should arm ourselves with joy so that when problems rear their ugly heads, and they will, we will be filled up and better able to deal with them. It is kind of like being prepared with a full tank of gas. So, I am making a commitment today to see the funnier side of life. It sure beats the alternative.

“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside us while we live.”
Norman Cousins

It takes years to become who we really are, who we were always meant to be. I received the height of compliments recently from a lovely you lady at the wedding reception. She was beautiful, smart, thin and had the world ahead of her. “I want to be like you,” she said. Of course, she didn’t mean it literally, but rather she saw something she wanted in her life. Never mind that she already had a couple drinks… I will take a compliment where I can get one.

Why would a lovely young woman in her last year of college, with her whole world ahead of her, want to be like a woman in her sixties with crow’s feet and silver in her hair? It gave me a new appreciation for where I am at in life right now. Much as I would like to think so, it was not me she wanted to emulate. It was more about becoming a woman who is happy and comfortable in her own skin. An older woman who is not afraid to dance and belt out the words to a favorite song, regardless of what others think. It is about becoming who we are and loving it. I know because I was that young woman once. I would look at older women who seemed to have it all together and think, that is what I want my life to be someday.

I graciously thanked her for the compliment, but what I wanted to tell her is that you cannot rush the process. Growing up to be yourself takes years. She saw four grown-up sons who are handsome, intelligent, talented and thoughtful. What she did not see were the years of giving up your own needs, dishing out difficult discipline and sleepless nights on my knees. She saw a nice, comfortable home in the country. What she did not see were all the years of scrimping and saving to pay for it. She saw a woman who had finished a successful career. What she did not see were the years of climbing out of bed to an early alarm clock to trudge off to work, leaving a mildly sick child with someone else while I went off to the hospital to care for seriously sick people. She saw a loving, fun, creative husband. What she did not see were the years of compromises, the arguments that sharpened us, or the times of putting the other first that it takes to build a marriage of 42 years.

It reminds me of the story of the Velveteen Rabbit when the wise old, worn Skin Horse on the toy shelf answers the Velveteen Rabbit’s question, “What is real?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.” “Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit. “Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.” “Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?” “It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
Margery Williams

The gift of the 3rd act in life

I listened to a TED talk by Jane Fonda recently, titled Life’s Third Act. She addressed the fact that we are experiencing a longevity revolution, as people now live 34 more years than our great grandparents did. That is a gift of three more decades! We don’t want to live our 3rd act, that starts after your 60^th birthday, in depression and emotional decline. Fonda states that the human spirit continues to evolve as we age. She uses the metaphor of aging as a staircase, with an upward ascension of the human spirit, that can happen regardless of physical challenges. This is a change from the current metaphor of aging as an arch or bell curve; you are born, peak at midlife and then spend the rest of your life declining. While our physical bodies continue to follow this bell curve, our emotions and mind do not need to. Instead, Fonda describes a powerful sense of well-being that people often experience in their 3rd act of life. She claims that you become more yourself as you age. When we are younger, we are the subjects and objects of other people’s lives, but in our 3rd act we can redefine ourselves. It is an opportunity to let the human spirit flourish and in doing so, we become whole. We become Real. And we become an example to younger generations of the beauty and value of this 3rd act in life.

It takes years of living to file down the rough edges of ourselves. But eventually, over time, it leaves a smooth patina that is mellowed, happy and grateful for every day. Now is the phase of life that we reap the rewards of all the sacrifices and hard work. It takes time to learn to accept, love and honor our true selves. We don’t have fresh skin, firm underarms, or silky hair anymore, but we have something so much better. We have the beauty of age. A strength that runs deep in our veins. We have become stronger than we ever thought we were capable of. We have lived through some tough periods in our lives and we are still here. We are still breathing and laughing and thriving in the sunset of our lives.

On the home front

June 21st marked the first day of summer. There are several rituals that signify the beginning of summer for me. One of my favorites is my first trip to the Farmers Market. I needed some more basil plants, so I set off on Saturday morning to visit our local Farmers Market. It is a feast for the senses.