Senior, Living Life with a Purpose
How do we get to live our lives when we reach our senior age? Should old age scare us? Are we going to live alone and lonely? Well, let’s not focus on fear and stop thinking of stressful situations. Instead, let’s think that since we are already old and our children have their own families, we have already fulfilled our responsibilities of giving them an education so they can live a brighter future…because we’ve already achieved that. It’s time for us to enjoy life, living in the comfort of our own home with our growing family, finding new hobbies and job, meeting new friends… Really, there are a lot of things that we can get ourselves busy with.
Take the case of Ebert. Watch his video below and be inspired. Realize that in becoming old, we must be ready to face another chapter in our life. Yes, we can continue living life with a purpose.
Video from Cyber Seniors Corner
Transcription: Hello, YouTube. My name is Ebert. And today I’d like to talk about the change in lifestyle when you become an older citizen. For most of our adult life, we are involved in developing our career. We are involved in higher education. We are involved in setting up a home and taking care of children, educating them. And then there comes a time when we retire. We are not the same leading member of the community as we used to be. And with some of us as it was with me my wife has passed away. So at that time, when this happens to us, the question is what you do next? It is important, I think, as I have found out that you find a new meaning and purpose in life. I was very much committed to the work I was doing in my professional life. So I’ve continued to do that on my terms, maybe 4, 20 hours a month. That gives me a sense that I’m still producing in some way.
I think it’s important to maintain some kind of contact with other people. When we get older, there’s not the same opportunity probably, but there are things we can do to maintain contact with people. I have just gotten into the computer world. I couldn’t even, didn’t even know the keyboard and a typewriter until I was 18 years old. I have a family in Australia, a family in Illinois, Guelph, Brighton, and I can talk to them on Skype and we can have good conversations.
Being a senior citizen in that stage of your life, you have lost much of what you had before. But at the same time, you’re not involved with responsibility. So it can be a present, a pleasant and a sort of freeing time, when we are able to do some of the things that we’ve always wanted to do but never could. I have a friend who started taking piano lessons when she was 81 years of age and she’s now 84 and finding it very, very satisfying.
No matter how old we are, we do need a purpose for getting up in the morning. And that purpose is not just to take our pills, but that purpose is to do something which we find pleasurable or satisfying.
