Agers as Enhancers?

To enhance: augment, boost, enrich, add to

After I wrote the EWA posting on enhancers who were the “wind beneath my wings” (8/29/19), it occurred to me that my enhancers were leading very busy lives. Even so, they were able to augment, boost and enrich my life in significant ways. Encounters with enhancers were positive and intriguing. I began to think about the reality that perhaps agers might be in a very good position to become effective enhancers.

We agers have time to think and reflect upon ourselves and others. Time to see and think about qualities and talents in others to which we respond. Seeing and responding to their capacities and potential may augment, boost and enrich their lives.

I thought about what enhancers have given me and how they’ve done it. They:

noticed specific qualities/capacities in me that I hadn’t seen, acknowledged or used; they responded to them in both behavior and words. At times they’ve identified specific capabilities and ideas in ways I hadn’t considered

showed genuine pleasure in my company.

listened, asked questions, posed ideas that conveyed genuine interest and added to those I’d offered.

Now these things I could do, one way or another.

So I began to ponder more widely on how we agers, each with our own attitudes and capacities, might softly enhance others. We wouldn’t need to be perfect, but we could try, starting in little, safe ways.

My lifetime best friend is almost two years older than me. Her ARCs have taken much from her. Still, she manages to enhance care givers and visitors alike. Care givers as well as family reportedly leave her bedside feeling better than when they came. I don’t know how she does it, but it’s an example that it can be done, even with very limited capacities. It’s led me to think about ways to communicate appreciation of and pleasure in qualities in others, other than just telling them. Eye contact, facial expression, body language, touch where appropriate come to mind. But it all starts with an attitude of genuinely caring, noticing and appreciating specifics in another person.

Another outcome enhancers produced in me is incentive. Many times, even in my advanced years, I’ve felt the need to “live up” to qualities or potential others believed in and shared with me. I’ve had two situations in which encounters resulted in visible incentivizing

During an intake appointment with a physician, I was impressed with a specific question he asked while he was washing his hands that changed my patient-doctor relationship with him in a meaningful way. He asked what I wanted from this first meeting. That immediately changed my participation from cooperation to collaboration in this session and subsequently.   In my next visit I told him how what he’d said had made such a difference. Apparently he hadn’t been aware of its impact and seemed pleased to learn of it, said he’d use it more purposefully .

Remembering his reaction, I decided to give specific feedback to a physical therapist who had: been welcoming of data from me on specific ARCs that were affecting my participation, and created a remarkably useful form to keep track of expectations and activity steps (despite my short term memory ARCs). After giving him this feedback the same collaborative relationship I had with the physician evolved.

As recipients of others’ care and attention, we agers have multiple opportunities to give feedback to care providers when something fosters engagement (and also when it deters it).

As I have thought about my role as enhancer I have (as usual), been my own lab rat. I notice myself enjoying

becoming more aware of qualities and behaviors in others that resonate with me

desiring to respond to them in ways that reflect my appreciation/respect/engagement

aware of my body language, facial expression, eye contact and touch to communicate in appropriate natural ways.

Whether I am a ‘wind beneath the wings’ of others, I may not know—nor does it matter. It does however seem that it may a way for agers to give as well as receive, even as our capacities become more limited and dependencies grow. And for me to remain green and growing.

Fat Clustered in One’s Middle and Lost in Extremities – Winter Becomes a Different Experience

Reality and research agree that the total amount of fat and its regional distribution changes with age.   Total weight tends to increase as we continue to eat the way we always have, even as our basal metabolic rate for burning calories drops sharply and our activities decrease.

These fat increases relocate themselves to the abdominal area. But at the same time that we agers gain visceral fat, there are decreases in the insulating subcutaneous fat in our arms and legs. The non-scientific fat-in-the-middle explanation, as I’ve heard it, is that it’s there to keep one’s vital organs warm in the winter. Well that sounds as logical an explanation as any.

During recent decades I’ve very slowly lost weight, probably due to loss of muscle mass plus planning my meals to follow the sharp downward curve in my ability to burn calories (basal metabolic rate), and my decreasing activity. I was determined not to think of the needed changes in my way of eating as “dieting”. That felt too negative. And besides, this low metabolism and activity are ongoing.   Was I going to diet for the rest of my life?   I enjoy eating and there’s no way I was going to give up that pleasure. So, I just weigh in every morning and that keeps me shopping, cooking and eating reasonably for that day. I choose foods I like and prepare them in ways that still keep me looking forward to enjoyable meals. The result has been that my weight has come back down to what it was in my late 20’s, but my shape is no way what it was then. Instead my middle is disgustingly “thick” while my limbs have become scrawnier by the year. It’s a sort of a fat scarecrow look. Vanity, vanity!

Strangely enough, I’ve come to think that Mother Nature is at least partly wise. So even as I am disgusted by the fat in my middle, I’m glad it’s keeping my ancient vital organs warm enough that they function as well as they can. But why, I wonder, was it necessary to take away the insulating fat in my arms and legs? After all, they’re vital too! I guess they just carry on, hot or cold.

November is here!   My arms, legs and especially hands and feet, minus their fat layers (and with changed circulation I expect), are predictably and uncomfortably cool to downright cold. My feet feel like ice cubes, and once in bed, I’d prefer to disown them. And they take forever to warm up. Spring and summer seem an eternity away.

The winter wardrobe is back in use with its multiple layering of tops and heavier pants, socks and slippers/shoes. (I don’t go outside much these days.) Fleece and down are “in”. The thermostat is set higher. I’ve moved my recliner inches closer to a gas fireplace that has become the love of my life (and my cat’s too). And my quilts have been changed to the winter version. The electrically heated mattress pad is turned on so the bed is warm when I retire. Still I often feel cool.

But here I am complaining when I have so much that enables me stay warm. I know that in our city we have hundreds who don’t have a predictably warm place to live nor warm clothing and bedding, and even warm food. Time to think about passing along extra bedding and clothes as well as a contribution to an organization whose purpose and business is in helping these folks stay warm and fed. My dad was sponsored and helped by the Salvation Army when he left Sweden and landed with just the clothes on his back on Ellis Island and moved on up to New England to start his new life. That will be my choice.

Dealing With Distraction

One of the normal ARCs (age relate changes) affecting our cognition is the loss of control over our attention—the ability to focus on a single task and tune out distracting thoughts. Apparently, the circuitry gradually breaks down between two regions of the brain that had worked together to allow a person to attend to a single task and tune out other thoughts. And it too (like so many other) starts in one’s 40’s.

There was a time when I could focus intensely on a task without consciously having to prevent intrusion of other thoughts.   And at that time I also could count on my hands or my body to automatically take care of routine tasks or activities while my mind was free to go wherever it would, or needed to. It all happened so naturally that of course I took it for granted.

Now, a half century later, neither is true.   The most basic tasks my hands and body once could do without thought, now constantly require purposeful awareness and decision making. I’ve had to unlearn automaticity with them.   And at the same time my mind now keeps merrily flitting around to things that have nothing to do with the matter at hand. It’s a double whammy.

I tried reading about the underlying cognitive mechanisms creating this change, but most of the research was in discipline-specific language that was well beyond my ability to understand. However, in my reading I did learn that neurons and connections in the brain do keep on growing in some areas of the brain, even as we age. (But apparently not involved in attention/distraction). Now that‘s both encouraging and discouraging.

I decided to experiment using some of the strategies I’d developed in dealing with other changed capacities. Repeated use of the mantra “NOSE & TOES!” (thought loudly if that is possible), had been improving my balance when I was involved in turning maneuvers. And “CENTER YOURSELF!” worked if I remembered to think it when:

rising from sitting to standing or any bending-over activity and before taking the first step

lifting or carrying objects of any weight

I was about to be hugged.

My new anti-distraction mantras are: “FOCUS! FOCUS!” and “FINISH IT!” I’ve only been using these newly created mantras for a week or so, but they seem to be making a difference.   The tasks where I’ve been testing them are in the kitchen in meal preparation, clean up and all the other sundry tasks that pop up in this area throughout the day. And somehow, both my brain and I seem to be rather proud of the results. Life feels a bit more orderly and certainly the kitchen looks neater.

So far, I’m fortunate that I seem to be able to focus when I am writing or reading. (Here it is my ARCed short term memory that is the culprit creating havoc.)

Somehow my philosophy of “Sufficient unto the day. . .” continues to stand me in good stead. We’re engaging and managing. It is just more complex and challenging.