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    Live It Up Before You are Too Darn Old: Grappling with maturity and growth
    Live It Up Before You are Too Darn Old: Grappling with maturity and growth
    Live It Up Before You are Too Darn Old: Grappling with maturity and growth
    Ebook161 pages1 hour

    Live It Up Before You are Too Darn Old: Grappling with maturity and growth

    By Glen Greenway

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    About this ebook

    Glen Greenway's latest book, Grappling with Maturity and Growth, has one thing in common with his previous books: an engaging writing-style, humour and loads of practical advice to guide you through the ageing process.

    Middle-age is a time when people start to realise that everything they had always known, is changing.
    That's when they start to mature and grapple with the questions about how to deal with the realities of retirement and old age.
    From changes in the body and mind, employment, finances, relationships, lifestyles, to the shattering of preconceived ideas, Greenway skilfully and expertly guides you towards not only coping with, but reinventing your life as a retiree.

    Grappling with Maturity and Growth is the ultimate survival guide for people of a 'certain age'.
    It outlines Greenway's holistic approach to ageing with your body, mind, soul and finances in tact, and enjoying the process.

    With sound, well-researched action steps that can be implemented right away, Grappling with Maturity and Growth will help you face maturity with loads of energy, motivation, inspiration and a fit, healthy body and mind to ensure that you will enjoy your golden years to the fullest.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGlen Greenway
    Release dateFeb 6, 2015
    ISBN9780620632928
    Live It Up Before You are Too Darn Old: Grappling with maturity and growth
    Author

    Glen Greenway

    Glen Greenway is a retired Headmaster (Biology and Science teacher) with some 50 years of experience in education and life in general. He lives in Johannesburg.Married to Brigid, the couple have over 100 years of teaching experience. They have three daughters. Glen has written several books with different genres. "My Changing Body" is written in English and Zulu and is aimed at teenagers who need to know about puberty. He has also written "Tristan and the Kruger Millions" about a troubled, frustrated boy who has to battle with his own personal demons. He is sent to a traditional boarding school in South Africa, where he has to live without the loving influence of his mother. He soon finds that he is bullied and victimised by ghastly forces of evil. At the same time he is empowered by supernatural witchdoctors to fight for good against the chilling, nightmarish forces that haunt him. With his girlfriend, Storm, and outlandish pal, Bongani, Tristan is grabbed by the throat and yanked along for a hell of a scary, spellbinding ride with all the compulsion of a thriller set in the hostile wilds of Africa. With chance meetings with man-eating sharks, charging rhinos, and lightning storms that flay the parched earth, Tristan's is so surprising and strange that it leaps into an enchanting realm of its own. Encounters with chilling ghosts, the mysterious Kruger Millions, thrilling legends, hideous Egyptian cobras, dark monsters and slavering wild dogs make for a spellbinding read from first page to last. His latest book "Live It Up until you are Too Darn Old" is a book filled with practical advice and is suffused with wisdom and humour. Glen Greenway has used his life as the model from which to craft this book. The truth of living this life in the best way we know and can, has been stated. We have been given free will to choose our responses to what life and all its abundant opportunities and solutions, has to offer. Much research has been done and many positive and helpful suggestions are proffered. The information on fiscal responsibility is most useful. Remember that our lives are these gigantic mirrors that reflect back exactly what we project forth. So this is a relevant book that underscores the necessity for taking personal responsibility for one's life and choices, for making the most use of our blessings and gifts and for being grateful to God for this opportunity to find out who we really are and to where we are going. It should be read and inwardly digested by all adults over the age of 21.

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      Book preview

      Live It Up Before You are Too Darn Old - Glen Greenway

      One sultry summer’s afternoon, I lay on my back near my pool, gazing up into the Highveld skies over Johannesburg – watching magnificent, anvil-shaped clouds slowly and menacingly metamorphose into the mother of an ominous thunderstorm. My fertile mind was led into connecting this hazard to my impending old age threat which, having recently turned 70, was just around the corner.

      What was I going to do with myself? Where was I going to live? What would I do with my motor car? How was I going to survive financially, and how would certain decisions influence my life?

      All these imponderables flashed through my thoughts. How was I going to cope, in general?

      My name is Glen McIntyre Greenway and at work as a teacher, I was given the reference moniker of GMG, for convenience sake. And so that is how I appeared on all timetables, staff notices, and other documents. My mind turned to using my GMG nomenclature as the title for a book on old age and that’s how I came up with the title GRAPPLING WITH MATURITY AND GROWTH.

      I thought that this was a pretty cool title, for as one enters the final years of one’s life there is a lot to of stuff with which one tends to grapple. One does not just want to slide gracefully into a vegetative state, ennui and nonentity. (I don’t know about you but at least I don’t!)

      These last fading moments of one’s life are characterized by the final stages of maturity and rather than become a depressed, fat, thumb twiddling slug trying to kill time, I saw maturity as an opportunity to grow!

      And so, if you will bear with me, the following treatise is all about how I think one should go into the dark ageless night. Let’s look at some of the ways in which famous people saw old age.

      William Shakespeare, in his play As You Like It, described ageing as follows:-

      At first the infant,

      Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;

      Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel

      And shining morning face, creeping like snail

      Unwillingly to school. Then the lover,

      Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

      Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,

      Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the bard,

      Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

      Seeking the bubble reputation

      Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,

      In fair round belly and good capon lin’d,

      With eyes severe, and beard of formal cut,

      Full of wise saws and modern instances;

      And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

      Into the lean slippered Pantaloon,

      With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,

      His youthful hose, well sav’d a world too wide

      For his shrunk shank; and his manly voice,

      Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

      And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

      That ends this strange eventful history,

      Is second childishness and mere oblivion;

      Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

      Oscar Wilde said that the …tragedy of old age is not that one is old, but that one is young. Then Eleanor Roosevelt commented that the purpose of life, after all, is to live it, to taste experience to the utmost, to reach out eagerly and without fear for newer and richer experience.

      Jonathan Swift stated that Every man desires to live long, but no man would be old.

      Perhaps, the most pertinent way of looking at the problem from my point of view, was voiced by the famous and eloquent Welsh poet Dylan Thomas who urges one as follows:-

      Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rage at the end of day!

      What a wonderful way but to go out with a bang!

      As was advocated in the wonderful film, Dead Poet’s Society – Carpe Diem or in English, Seize the Day!

      My call to you is to seize the day and take these fine poetic words to heart.

      Always remember you have within you the strength, the patience and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.

      Harriet Tubman

      Turn yourself into a PERFECTLY OPERATIONAL OLD PERSON who blends into MIDLIFE TRANSITION and finally LATE ADULTHOOD. There needs to be a mammoth re-frame to the events in old age, with a comprehensive transformation of game plan. Take advantage of the fact that you are not old but chronologically gifted. Most elderly people cannot take general rules and use them to their advantage, but the structure that this book can give to their lives, can only be beneficial. The following diagram makes these transitional stages easier to understand:-

      The final stages of LATE ADULTHOOD are what we are particularly interested in. What do these stages have to offer us?

      •    Changes in status of BODILY and PHYSICAL CONDITION

      •    Changes in CEREBRAL functioning

      •    Changes in status of PERSONA and SOCIETAL LIFE

      •    Change in the acceleration of BEREAVEMENT and DYING

      The early Chinese intellectual, Confucius, said that There is nothing as certain as change and boy, are we oldies not now faced with change with all its distress? Oldies keep reminding each other that, You have to be tough to be old! No one likes being rocked out of their comfort zone, but there is nothing we can do other than get used to it! Let’s list some of these changes and stages that we have to undergo in slightly more detail. We need to look at them in more detail go see what steps we take to alleviate them and how we can achieve this:-

      • •    CEREBRAL DECLINE?

      • •    SENESENCE?

      • •    BAD HEALTH and FEEBLENESS?

      • •    PREDETERMINED WEAR and TEAR?

      • •    SELF-IMAGE MORALITY?

      • •    DEMENTIA?

      • •    HEALTHINESS?

      • •    SUFFICIENT TAKE-HOME PAY?

      • •    MORTALITY and WIDOWHOOD?

      • •    ACTIVITY or WITHDRAWAL?

      When you were young and fit and able, no one ever told you about these things, did they? Suddenly you find that you have to be independent and purposeful to be old! Your PARADIGMS ARE SHIFTING and what can you do about it?

      Remember that it is OK to be dissimilar and that it is all right to stand apart. Take a little time to mull over what you assimilated into your being and had drummed into you in Nursery School. Take a pencil and a piece of note paper and scribble down what your teachers drummed into you in kindergarten.

      In your current brand new novel hour of old age hardship, if you hark back to those things that were inculcated into you – those fundamental watertight principles that set you up for life – you will go a long way towards surmounting the new teething troubles in your life.

      Knowledge is not found at the apex of the academic mountaintop, but right there in the bare bones of the sand pit in the play area.

      Think back to the tale of that Oriental Eastern Price who had a fabulous jewel embedded in his forehead and yet he spent years and years of his life looking for riches. A little child had to tell him where his riches really lay – right there in his forehead! Such are the grand riches that you gathered in the sand pit – the riches that will go a long way towards pulling you through your old age by making you a fully functioning old person:-

      Image No. 1

      • •    Share everything

      • •    Play fair

      • •    Don’t hit people

      • •    Put things back where you found them

      • •    Clean up your own mess

      • •    Don’t take things that aren’t yours

      • •    Say you are sorry when you hurt someone

      • •    Wash your hands before you eat

      • •    Flush

      • •    Warm cookies and cold milk are good for you

      • •    Live a balanced life – learn some and think some and draw and paint and sing and dance and play and work every day

      • •    Take a nap every afternoon

      • •    When you go out into the world, watch out for traffic, hold hands and stick together

      • •    Be aware of wonder. Remember the little seed in the Styrofoam cup: The roots go down and the stem goes up and nobody knows why or how, but we are all like that

      • •    Goldfish and hamsters and white mice and even the little seed in the Styrofoam cup – they all die. So do we.

      • •    And remember the Dick and Jane books and the first words you learned – the biggest word of all – LOOK! With acknowledgement to Robert Fulghum

      How did your list compare with Robert Fulghum’s?

      The great Mahatma Gandhi queried whether old age was a second pitiable childhood. But we are all united in an identical humanness and we need to grapple with ourselves before death. We are in the middle of an UNREALISED POSSIBILITY and we need to know how to deal with this conundrum in our old age!

      THE OLD AGE KICK OFF

      In your game of coping with the prime of your life, start by understanding that the supreme endowment of all, is the gift of life. You are there to revel in a life-filled situation and that this should keep on right into your final zenith. Don’t just stop because they gave you a grand 70th Birthday Party and after all the speeches, they all forgot about you again.

      Live to the greatest potential that you can possibly achieve, as the unique being that you are! Bring to mind that you are lucky, because you have reached the stage of life where the whole shebang comes with a lifetime guarantee.

      Embrace life to the fullest and the rest will slot into place naturally. Realise that you are an irreplaceable being and hold onto that matchlessness with every fibre of your being. Gain knowledge and unearth your distinctiveness. Develop it to its fullest and don’t ever, ever lose your sense of fun, and realise that only YOU can decide that you desire to live in full HUMANITY.

      COMMENCE AT THE EXISTING MOMENT AND START WITH YOURSELF!

      Considering the following words of wisdom and pull yourself towards yourself. What do you have to

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