Life in progress

Tag Archives: Ageing


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#SoCS – Meme + Memory

Sitting at the dinner table yesterday with my 22-year-old son, I mentioned the spider meme ( https://lindaghill.com/2016/10/12/one-liner-wednesday-i-thought-we-were-roommates/ ) I came across months ago that I found very funny, and he laughed at me. When I asked why, he said I was too old to be saying words like “meme.” So today I decided to look up the origin of the word.

Turns out it was first coined by Richard Dawkins in his book, “The Selfish Gene” in 1976, but he shortened it from the Ancient Greek word, mimeme, meaning “imitated thing.” (Wikipedia link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Dawkins#Fathering_the_meme ) HA! I can now say to my son. Though if I’m too old to say the word, how old does that make me? Still feeling a little weird about that.

Getting older is weird though. We have memories which give us the wisdom not to repeat our mistakes (with any luck) and yet our memory, or our capacity to remember, decreases with the shrinking of our brains. As much as I don’t like this, it’s inevitable. I either accept it or I fight it – fighting it takes so much more energy.

Having said that, I can fight it to some extent by continuing to learn and challenge myself. I wonder, often, if people who refuse to change their mindsets, form new opinions, or think they already know everything worth knowing lose their memories faster. I had an aunt who was very set in her ways. When she made a decision, she stuck with it no matter what. It might have been that she just hated making decisions so she got them over and done with as quickly as possible. But her decisions also were very predictable, because she never changed her preferences. She was stuck in a certain time, probably her childhood or early adulthood. I’m not sure I was born when she stopped trying new things. I always knew her as completely focused on the way things should be.

And, of course, the memories she shared never changed. The stories we all hear from our older family members are inevitably told as though they’ve never been told before. The polite thing to do is sound surprised, no matter how many times we’ve heard them. I wonder if people who are closed-minded have a narrower memory. Something my ever-learning mind will likely look into one day.

Now that I’ve veered totally off-course from my original intent for this post, I’ll have to go back and change the title. Coming up with titles for posts is hard, isn’t it?

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Stream of Consciousness is for everyone! Click the link to see how you can join in today: https://lindaghill.com/2016/11/11/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-nov-1216/

 


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One-Liner Wednesday – Gettin’ Old

You know you’re getting old when you start thinking life’s too short to do things, like watch a movie, twice.

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Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. To execute a ping back, just copy the URL in the address bar on this post and paste it somewhere in the body of your post. Your link will show up in the comments below. Please ensure that the One-Liner Wednesday you’re pinging back to is this week’s! Otherwise, no one will likely see it but me.

As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday (SoCS), if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.

Unlike SoCS, this is not a prompt so there’s no need to stick to the same “theme.”

The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are:

1. Make it one sentence.

2. Make it either funny or inspirational.

Have fun!


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One-Liner Wednesday – Self-Consciousness

There’s nothing more angst-inducing than meeting an old friend after 30 years when you’ve gained x number of pounds…and aged 30 years.

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Anyone who would like to try it out, feel free to use the “One-Liner Wednesday” title in your post, and if you do, you can ping back here to help your blog get more exposure. As with Stream of Consciousness Saturday, if you see a ping back from someone else in my comment section, click and have a read. It’s bound to be short and sweet.

The rules that I’ve made for myself (but don’t always follow) for “One-Liner Wednesday” are as follows:

1. Make it one sentence.

2. Make it either funny or inspirational.

Have fun!


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Re – SoCS (Return, Reach, Re-read)

Return. The word is going through my head over and over and mostly because I wish my eyesight would return to normal. At this particular moment anyway. It keeps going blurry and then for a few days it’s fine. I need to keep track of what I eat, perhaps. Or how I sleep. Or how many hours I spend looking at a computer screen.

Reach. Add an E at the end and you get Re-ache. What my shoulder keeps doing. First it’s fine and then it re-aches. Wow, I’m stretching with that word, aren’t I?

But I’m just complaining.

Still, it would be nice to be able to return to the full health I had even ten years ago. Living in the past can be a pain in the rear-end at the best of times. Especially since we can’t go back – we can only move forward. Forward to what? Hey, there’s another reason to stress.

I think about living in the moment often. I think about it more than I actually do it, because it takes practice. To actually BE in the moment, to fully concentrate on what I’m doing, whether it be breathing or typing or washing dishes, is easier depending on what I’m doing. It’s much easier for my mind to wander if I’m performing a mundane task. But when I write I must fully concentrate. In fact, trying to pull me out of this concentration is like trying to yank out a tooth with a pair of chopsticks. Not easy.

I read somewhere yesterday, a quote from an author who said that writing is not an escape from reality, but rather a plunging into it. I’m really up in the air on this one. Yes, a good piece of writing, whether fact or even fiction, can express reality in ways that we sometimes don’t want to face. But writing about one reality isn’t necessarily the reality that the writer is living in. Did that make any sense? I hope so.

Maybe I need to re-read that quote. 😉

Badge by: Doobster at Mindful Digressions

Badge by: Doobster at Mindful Digressions

A Stream of Consciousness Saturday post. You can join in too! https://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/09/05/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-september-614/


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Stream of Consciousness Saturday – Ages (Can’t Keep ’em Separated)

Today is one of those rare days when I have no idea what I’m going to type. So I’ve decided to type into my thoughts rather than type what I’m already thinking.

The coffee is hot, the morning is pleasant as I sit at my kitchen table, watching the squirrels in my back yard search for places to hide their nuts. One, I see, has been in my flower pot. Ah well, the flower’s already dead.

I’m supposed to me talking about age. I remember a time when there was no way I’d have been content to just sit at the table and watch the squirrels. But we go through phases, don’t we? So energetic when we’re young. I consider myself lucky to still have energy – to be able to move with close to the ease I was able ten years ago, though the aches and pains seem to linger longer… linger longer. That’s just weird. Anyway, where was I?

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Fred, as crazy old Maurice from Beauty and the Beast

In four short days I’ll no longer have three teenagers – my eldest, Fred, turns twenty years old on the 2nd of September. That tiny little baby I used to hold and rock to sleep to the beat of heavy metal (he LOVED The Offspring’s Keep ‘Em Separated. With Chris it was anything Metallica, and Alex, well, he’s Deaf. As long as it had a beat…) now drags himself through the door at all hours of the morning after partying with his friends. Has much changed? Nah.

 

This was posted as part of SoCS. Find the rules at the click of the link and join in! https://lindaghill.wordpress.com/2014/08/29/the-friday-reminder-and-prompt-for-socs-august-3014/

Badge by: Doobster at Mindful Digressions

Badge by: Doobster at Mindful Digressions

 


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The Sandwich Generation

I am truly of the sandwich generation. On one hand I have my kids, two of which who, even though they are growing older, will probably never be out of my care because of their special needs. On the other hand I have my octogenarian mother. She still lives alone, and can take care of herself quite well despite the fact that her memory is beginning to go, although she doesn’t drive much any more. Farther than two minutes away requires that I pick her up and take her where she needs to go. Her biggest problem is that she’s lonely. It is the cause of most of my problems as well.

To give a little background, my mother moved to Canada with my father and their two best friends. My mother is the only one of the four still alive. Adding to that, she decided to follow me both of the two times I relocated, so she keeps leaving all of her other friends behind as well. I am now all she has, being an only child and being that all of our extended family is in the U.K.

My dilemma arose today when I wanted to go back to Kingston for the day to do some research for my book. My mother didn’t want me to go, because she is fearful for my safety. In the end I agreed to come back to town before it got dark. What does this mean? At the age of 49 I have a curfew that is even earlier than the one I had at 16.

While I feel that I should be allowed to “grow up,” she is so worried about being left completely alone that, whenever I have to drive out of town (I go to Kingston regularly anyway for the kids’ specialist appointments) she is immobilized by fear until I get home. The last time I went to a movie without telling her, she left no less than 14 messages on my answering machine.

It’s difficult enough to struggle with having a life of my own outside of being a mother, and that’s what I am, 24/7, unless they are with their father. Apart from two weekends a month I am raising them single-handedly.  But having to answer to my mother as well is close to intolerable.

I had hoped that writing it out might show me a solution, but it seems there may not be one. Being of the sandwich generation is far from appetizing.