The Come Alive Project

Tag: Senior lifestyle

  • Energy Bite 398 – What is Your Legacy Project?

    After your retirement begins, and the initial “fun things” you wanted to do have worn off, what will you do the rest of your Senior Years that will be meaningful to either yourself, others, or both.

    Many of us will just retire, do those fun things for a while and then get bored, listless, lethargic. Some of us will ask ourselves “is that all” while other will ask “what next”. So many say “is that all” and start the serious physical deterioration that comes with age. They will become the stereotypical Senior and start digging that deep pit to despair and lack of hope for an Active future, or just wallow in boredom while their body starts into a premature decline.

    Others will have something in the back of their mind that they have wanted to do but never got around to, and leave a legacy behind them that is on a different path from the one on which they spent the majority of their productive years.

    A legacy project is something you do or create that you will leave behind you, and that you do to fulfill some sort of PURPOSE for yourself and gives you a reason for living alive.

    You may have wanted to take up golf. You may have wanted to “save the world from (you pick it).” “I’ll do (again you pick it) when I retire and stay active and do things.”

    You may have wanted to take up painting or write a family history. You may want to do something just for yourself, something as diverse as learning to skydive or learning a new skill and putting it to use.

    Sure, you may have wanted to do it, but when the opportunity presents itself, most people don’t. They give themselves excuses like “I’m too old now”, or “I can’t, it’s too late in life to do it”, or something similar.

    Then the body starts wasting away and the mind starts deteriorating and the project that you had your heart set on, dies with your attitude and age.

    Take a moment while you’re reading this and ask yourself: “What was that ONE THING that I really wanted to do when I retired but never got around to it?” It doesn’t have to be something that saves Humanity. It doesn’t even have to be anything big. It just has to be something that YOU wanted to do that you never did.

    My own legacy project is still a work in progress. I planned for The Come Alive Project to be a vehicle to get a message of Health, Fitness, Personal Energy and Active Participation in Life, to active Senior men and woman, and to get that message out through speaking, writing, blogging, and workshops. My original plans were to create a Senior Lifestyle Retreat Center and provide seminars, classes and retreats for active seniors who genuinely wanted to discover the Fountain of Youth within them, and were willing to take the time and effort to learn and participate.

    I have been doing the blogging for over a decade. I have done a number of talks and workshops but not on the scale that I originally planned. Instead of having a separate retreat center, I did the workshops in churches and rented facilities. I started doing all that at age 70 and it took a major lifestyle change to get in a position to where it was even feasible for me to start.

    I will continue to do workshops as we move beyond the COVID “thing” and get away from ZOOM and other artificial environments. I have done talks to groups on ZOOM and I have not adapted particularly well to that format. I will continue to do ZOOM presentations when asked.

    Not everyone will want to create a Legacy Project but it can add some pizazz and PURPOSE to otherwise non-eventful, even boring, senior years. And don’t forget, having a PURPOSE in life is a major marker of Longevity and Happy Aging. Give it a shot. You might find it will help you discover your own Fountain of Youth.

    Thank you for reading.


  • Energy Bite 348 – Finish Strong

    I’ve been brainstorming some ideas about the best way to begin the New Year as we move into the final quarter of 2020. The thinking gave way to writing and I decided to use some of the writing for this weeks article. Change my first person sentences to fit YOU.

    2020 has been a unusual year and we still have three months to go. We have all been affected in some way by a the Covid 19 “thing” as well as naturally disasters and other outside happenings that we don’t have immediate or individual control over.

    So I decided to make 2021 one of my best years ever, to make it into a legacy year of productivity and activity. As I wrote above, I was brainstorming the best ways to begin the New Year and create that legacy year. We all plan ahead for that great New beginning on January 1st, don’t we. Why wait? Why not start now?

    So, what if, instead of waiting until New Year’s Day to start that legacy year, I could end up final quarter of 2020 with so strong a finish, that by the time January 1st rolled around, I was already well on my way into that legacy year.

    What if I got my body into such good condition that I had the physical energy and enthusiasm, at age 80, to follow through with all the plans.

    What if I came up with new thoughts for a new direction that would make the previous years look like amateur hour. What if I didn’t wait to January 1 to implement plans, but instead started them in a big way during the last quarter of this year.

    What if I made my attitude so positive that by the time the New Year started, I became unstoppable.

    What if I learned everything I needed to learn in the next three months so that I didn’t have to wait until later to start doing the new things I want to do in 2021.

    And what if I used the rest of THIS year to make it all happen, no matter what our circumstances may be on New Years Day.

    So as I said, I’ve been spending the last week or so brainstorming answers to those questions and figuring out ways to make 2021 happen the way I want it to.

    I know that I can take the next several months getting my own physical, mental and emotional act together so that I am fit to take on 2021, no matter what individual or collective circumstances we face when January comes around. A physically fit person with a positive mindset is much more likely to survive changes and face what comes with Courage, Strength, Energy, and Enthusiasm.

    By taking steps right now and finishing strong, I will be  building momentum, mindset, habit and discipline to be well on my way when the New Year arrives.

    Remember Muhammad Ali’s famous admonition to “start fast and finish strong”. Adjust that philosophy a bit and start 2021 “fast” and finish 2020 “strong”. And, as for circumstances, I am reminded of what Bruce Lee so famously said, “Circumstances? Hell, I make circumstances!”

    Thank you for reading.

  • Energy Bite 347 – The Three Stages of Flabbiness

    At age 80, I am searching for ways to “put more life back into my life”, a way of eliminating the boredom and malaise that emanates from this “quarantine” that we are enduring, and to find a way to re-generate the excitement, energy and enthusiasm that is a part of my life, as we come out from under it.

    To that end, I found myself reading a fascinating book called The Doorstep Mile: Live More Adventurously Every Day by Alastair Humphreys, a British Adventurer. I recommend that you read it and maybe even implement some of the ideas and concepts you will discover within the pages. (Note: I am not an affiliate and do not make a commission or receive compensation if you choose to buy the book).

    The chapter reproduced below (with permission) stood out as reiterating some of the principles I have written about in these Energy Bites. I think you will find it interesting.

    From the book:

    THE THREE STAGES
    OF FLABBINESS

    There are three stages of flabbiness in life, I realised years ago. The unsettling epiphany led to me deciding to walk from one coast of southern India to the other, through Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Kerala.

    Each stage of flabbiness is more restricting and stifling than the one before it. They creep insidiously over me like vines until it takes one hell of a struggle to escape their clutches. If ever I feel the saggy symptoms of flabbiness snuffling up on my life, then I know it is time to make some changes or hit the road. Only once I acknowledge the problems am I able to take the first small step towards fixing them and getting back on track.

    The first stage of flabbiness, and the easiest to fix, is physical flabbiness. It begins when busy schedules, dark winter days and eating too much win the devil’s footrace against the part of me that knows that exercise isn’t a waste of time but actually makes me more efficient, alert and happy. Despite knowing this, at times I am still sufficiently idle to let my standards slip and my fitness slide away.

    Fitness is like chasing a shoal of fish: difficult to get hold of, so easy to lose. If I don’t go running for a few days, I feel cooped up and ratty. Leave it a few more, and the habit is broken. I know I need to run. But I can’t be bothered. Flabbiness has begun to set in, slowly, invasively, like cataracts. Before I know it, I am easing out my belt buckle and blaming my sloth on the effects of age.

    The second stage is mental flabbiness. Give up exercising, stop forcing myself out the front door for a run, and inevitably my mind starts to sag too. I used to feel alert and inquisitive. I used to read lots of books. But one evening I come home tired. Flopping down onto the sofa, I reach for the television remote instead. I realise how pleasant life can be if I stop thinking about it.

    It is much simpler to exist than to live. I’ve got a dishwasher and a coffee percolator and I can drink at home with the TV on. I flick round and round the channels until I have frittered away enough of my life that it’s time to go to bed. If I don’t snap out of this quickly, then I’ll soon be on a slippery slope towards the third, terminal, stage of flabbiness: moral flabbiness!

    Each day brings me closer to my death. No matter how aware I am of this, it is sometimes difficult to believe my days are numbered. I burn carelessly through weeks, even months, unable to restart living fully.

    I don’t know when I will die, so putting important things off to an indeterminate date in an un-guaranteed future is pretty daft. There are so many places I still want to see, so many interesting people to meet, so much to do. And there is so little time. Before I know it I’ll be dead, and what a bloody waste that will be if I’ve just been arsing around.

    By the time I have succumbed to the debilitating onslaught of the first two stages of flabbiness, I am already well on the primrose path to moral flabbiness. Not only have I conceded my physical health and settled for candy floss in place of a brain, but I have also accepted that this is good enough for my life.

    This is ridiculous because I know that I am happiest when I have a sense of purpose. Instead, I have become comfortably numb. I have decided that scrolling through social media with a Chinese takeaway is sufficient return for the privilege of being born – healthy and intelligent enough – in one of the wealthiest, most free countries on the planet.

    I have a passport to explore the world. I will always be able to find some sort of work. I will never starve to death. It’s hard really for me to come up with any decent excuses.

    The choice is all mine.

    Life is too brief and too magnificent to tiptoe through half-heartedly, rather than galloping at with whooping excitement and ambition. And so I explode with outrage just in time. I need to get back into the wild. It is time to live deeply once again. It is time to sort my life out. This can be done in two ways. I either jump in the nearest cold river for a bracing swim, or I make a plan, set a start date and, come what may, begin.

    FROM: Humphreys, Alastair. The Doorstep Mile: Live More Adventurously Every Day (pp. 132-135). Kindle Edition, PC.

    At the end of the chapter, Humphreys asks you to evaluate your own symptoms of each stage of flabbiness that are an early warning of a deeper malaise. Perhaps you have found yourself in one, or all three of these stages of flabbiness as we slowly emerge from the cocoon of quarantine.

    Thank you for reading.