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Category: Older People

Visiting the Memory Café ; Embracing better Dementia Care

Visiting the Memory Café ; Embracing better Dementia Care

Visiting the Memory Café and other Dementia Care Activities       Evidence-based Interventions for Care Homes Edited by Caroline Baker and Jason Corrigan-Charlesworth. Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2017, ISBN: 9781785922527 £16.99 They can be few families who are not affected by an individual who is engaging with some degree of significant memory loss. For some the prospect of old age is rather haunted by the possibility of having to embrace dementia. Understandably we fear the loss of our memory and its instrumental part…

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Confused Angry Anxious? Why working with older people in care can be really difficult and what to do about it Bo Hejlskov Elven, Charlotte Agger and Iben Ljungmann Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2017 192pp ISBN: 9781785922152 Positive Communication Activities to reduce isolation and improve the well-being of older adults Robin Dynes Jessica Kingsley Publishers 2017 200pp ISBN: 9781785921810     A part of each one of us fears getting older because we see some of the consequences of age in our…

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The Age of Potential

The Age of Potential

An address given to the pupils and Staff of Bishop Wordsworth School Salisbury Cathedral Shrove Tuesday 28th February 2017 I wonder what your perfect age is? What number would be your choice? Perhaps that number – your ideal age – uniquely individual as it will be reflects something of your relationship to time, your priorities and values. Your ideal age might also reveal some of our fears and even prejudices about age. They are rare people who are able to…

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Jim Birren

Jim Birren

REMEMBERING JIM BIRREN   One of the towering figures in gerontology has died : James E. Birren, founding Director of the Andrus Gerontology Center, at the University of Southern California, died at the age of 97.  His achievements were extraordinary   Foremost among these, is creation of the Andrus Gerontology Center at USC, as well as the Leonard Davis School of Gerontology.  His books and other publications are extensive, and many distinguished gerontologists have been  nurtured by Jim Birren.  To get just a…

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The Quest for meaning in later life

The Quest for meaning in later life

P. G. Coleman, D. Koleva and J. Bornat, eds., Ageing, Ritual and Social Change: Comparing the Secular and Religious in Eastern and Western Europe. Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2013. Pp. xviii, 283. Pb. £19.99. ISBN 978-1-4094-5215-7. This volume is a compelling and authoritative contribution to the literature that seeks to understand our quest for meaning in later life. The twelve essays, carefully organised and edited, make a significant contribution to our understanding of the nature of ageing in…

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CONFUCIUS AT SEVENTY

CONFUCIUS AT SEVENTY

  “At fifteen I was committed to learning. At thirty I took my rightful position. At forty, I was no longer totally perplexed. At fifty, I began to understand the unfolding of my true nature. At sixty, I was in harmony with contradictions and ambivalence. A seventy, at long last, I may follow my heart’s desire without going astray.”   -Confucius at the age of Seventy  

Looking your Age??

Looking your Age??

DO YOU LOOK YOUR AGE?   Last month my wife and I were on a Road Scholar trip in Europe and we were having dinner with a Japanese woman.  We got to talking about age and she asked how old I was. “Seventy” I replied, thinking of Gloria Steinem’s apt phrase, “This is how 70 looks.”  Our dinner partner said to me, “No!  You don’t look 70 at all,” and I instantly felt a tinge of pride at my good…

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What is Age?

What is Age?

  “Age puzzles me. I thought it was a quiet time. My seventies were interesting and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age…   We who are old know that age is more than a disability. It is an intense and varied experience, almost beyond our capacity at times, but something to be carried high.”   -Florida Scott-Maxwell, The Measure of My Days  

Seeing beyond the immediate: listening and learning alongside older people

Seeing beyond the immediate: listening and learning alongside older people

From 1998 through to 2009, I had the privilege of working with many hundreds of older people in an Almshouse charity. We lived together in rather splendid seventeenth-century buildings which were surprisingly adaptable for modern use. I remember meeting one frail older woman on her admission for care into our community. This move was for her and her children a last resort but keeping her at home with part-time support was simply no longer safe or feasible. When I met…

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PABLO CASALS ON AGEING

PABLO CASALS ON AGEING

  On my last birthday I was ninety-three years old. That is not young, of course. In fact, it is older than ninety. But age is a relative matter. If you continue to work and to absorb the beauty in the world about you, you find that age does not necessarily mean getting old. At least, not in the ordinary sense. I feel many things more intensely than ever before, and for me life grows more fascinating.

Understanding Age? Face the Future….

Understanding Age? Face the Future….

It has been a great pleasure to offer a Forward to this stimulating contribution the literature on old age by the delightful William Cutting Foreword – (Face the Future. Book 2. Challenges, Joy and Faith for Seniors)   Like many of you reading this book I am thankful for my satellite navigation system.  It is one of those advances in technology that has helped us all to move with confidence to our desired destinations.   However I regret the loss…

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you will greet yourself…..

you will greet yourself…..

LOVE AFTER LOVE   The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome,   and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you   all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take…

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THE ASTONISHMENT OF AGE – learning from Jung

THE ASTONISHMENT OF AGE – learning from Jung

  When my friend’s mother developed dementia, he was discouraged that each day she seemed to be losing so much. Then he remembered a saying from Taoism: In the way of learning, each day we gain more and more. In the way of the Tao, each day we have less and less.   So often we go through life, hoping that enlightenment is “right around the corner.” Somehow, like a mirage on the horizon, the future recedes and remains out…

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Memories

Memories

  We, unaccustomed to courage exiles from delight live coiled in shells of loneliness until love leaves its high holy temple and comes into our sight to liberate us into life.   Love arrives and in its train come ecstasies old memories of pleasure ancient histories of pain. Yet if we are bold, love strikes away the chains of fear from our souls.   We are weaned from our timidity In the flush of love’s light we dare be brave…

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Remembering Maya Angelou

Remembering Maya Angelou

  I started my blogging life in 2008 partly as a way of capturing my experience of a sabbatical in America. In the spring of that year I spent a month in Washington DC followed by three months in Chicago. It was a rejuvenating and very significant time. I managed to get over to Washington for the annual American Society of Ageing conference and here is my blog from that day. I kept the rather incidental comments about  the conference and…

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the costs of trying to avoid the inevitable

the costs of trying to avoid the inevitable

 From todays Church Times James Woodward on the costs of trying to avoid the inevitable Should We Live Forever? The ethical ambiguities of aging Gilbert Meilaender Eerdmans £11.99 HUMAN beings generally desire life. Most of us are grateful for the good gift that is our life. Like other animals, we pass through a life-cycle from birth to maturity and then towards death. Every human society is organised to manage the changing desires associated with this life-cycle, which passes through distinct…

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New Year Resolution: Embrace Change

New Year Resolution: Embrace Change

  hammered gold and gold enamelling An aged man is but a paltry thing, A tattered coat upon a stick, unless Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing For every tatter in its mortal dress, Nor is there singing school but studying Monuments of its own magnificence; And therefore I have sailed the seas and come To the holy city of Byzantium.   O sages standing in God’s holy fire As in the gold mosaic of a wall,…

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A Lack of Soul?

A Lack of Soul?

  AGEING AND CARE OF THE SOUL   Thomas Moore has described the fundamental psychological problem of contemporary life as a lack of “soul.” As Moore understands the problem, “soul” is not exclusively a religious term but rather “a quality or a dimension of experiencing life and ourselves. It has to do with depth, value, relatedness, heart, and personal substance.”   Moore tells of a case of a young woman in distress, with ambivalence about being a woman. She was also…

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Growing Older?

Growing Older?

BEDE GRIFFITHS: THE MONK GROWS OLD Father Bede Griffiths was a a Catholic monk who spent most of his life as a “Christian Yogi” in India, where he expounded the unity of world religions: “(Father Bede) said at the age of 85 he begged to differ with those who think that life is all over at 40, and that from then on we go downhill… Father Bede insisted that the time from age 40 on is what life is all…

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AGING AND THE TRANSITORINESS OF LIFE

AGING AND THE TRANSITORINESS OF LIFE

In old age something special happens to reality. Its hardness is softened by the  experience of transitoriness. Persons who once seemed indispensable die. One after another disappears — parents, teachers, onetime superiors first, contemporaries next. One has the feeling that a former generation has come to an end and that the following, one’s own, is beginning to crumble… The danger in which aging men and women find themselves is that of capitulating to transitoriness, of having no more future, of…

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