Aging Gracefully: Vital Tips for Health and Happiness


As I age, I am finding things that I didn’t know could affect me. First is how I eat and what I eat. Diet and how much is important. I find I need more fruits and veggies as I age and less junk food. I also am finding what I eat affects my energy levels and how I feel each day.

Exercise is another thing. If I walk some, I feel better. Stretching my legs and keeping moving helps. If I tend to stop and lay around I feel worse. S0, movement is vital as I age. To help on this point I took up bowling normally twice a week now one day in a Senior League and the other with some friends, I made, where I live. Yet in the end, it helps, but, still I find there are some other things, I need to do, to keep going, as I age.

Reading is vital, whether for education purposes or for entertainment and pleasure. The mind is a terrible thing to waste was an old saying I heard long ago as a child. I still believe in that one folks. The more you know, the more you can protect yourself and advance yourself and your pleasures. Seems, to me all need to remember these things as we age, for when we fall off the cliff, so to say on any of the above, we tend to slowly go downhill in the life we live so to say. Our way of life and how we live it effects us in all ways. If we slow or do not engage mind and body, we lose the functions at times, and we begin to deteriotate as we go along.

I face the above possibilities, greater than most, being a Disabled Veteran. I suffer from back injuries of 6 herniated discs in my spine, PTSD also in two forms from childhood and service. How do I overcome, well I push through pain, or mental anguish, and look for a horizon of blue skies and smiles and laughter. We can’t always find such blue skies and laughter, so we must at times create them on our own to keep going. I am now 69 years old and live in a 55 plus community and I have seen others, older than me, who are happier than I, for sure. I just want to live my senior years I have left being engaged, participating in life and laughter if I can. As I told my mother when I was a child, when I do die, I hope it will be with a smile and some laughter on my lips.

The next problem with aging is a simple one folks. It is the loneliness factor many of us feel as we get older. We tend to isolate more, engage less and find ourselves spending more time alone than ever before in our lives. We read more, we do things like walking alone, we build puzzles and try to entertain ourselves more. We also as we age, tend to avoid others, who tell us to shut up, or calm down, or stop laughing. we avoid those who don’t like us for whatever reason, or who we dislike due to their actions or words. Now I know many say, I am wrong for doing so and I should just let these comments roll off my back and just keep going instead. But, for me, like I think, many others, if I can’t be me, and laugh, talk and enjoy, I am not staying in that crowd. I don’t care about the reason someone says for me to shut up, calm down, or don’t laugh, I just know, if I can’t do these things, I feel out of sorts and like I am not wanted in said groups.

I have said this before to others and I shall say it here and now, I am me, who else can I be? We are the accumilation of our experiences in life. Each of us react the way we do, due to what we have lived through. We enter each situation with the prior experiences we have and what worked for us in each situation. we reach back mentally and emotionally, look at the present and react accordingly to the current place we find ourselves in, we protect ourselves in this way and that my friends is just a fact of human nature.

Under today’s society in America and our current culture, men and women, are very careful, parinoid and cautious. We do not want to be abused, taken avantage of as we age. Nor do we wish to be taken for the money we earned or as fools. Add in the current anger in the political climate, and in this country, that is currently festering and wham, we have a mess to live through and we do the best we can. Also as we age, if you are divorced, or widowed, you tend to compare who you meet, to whom you had prior in your life, as your partner, wife or husband. When they don’t live up to those standards, styles or ways, you tend to walk away, going not for me. So, in the end ladies and gents, we end up alone, because we are unwilling to accept people who are different. So life tends to get lonelier as you age. It’s a fact, especially if you are a widow or widower. You spent many years with the person you lost, it was comfortable, it was loving. So, you tend to seek someone that is as close to what you had before. And as I can tell you, no two people are the same, so it it like Tom Cruise’s Mission Impossible! These are just my thoughts and ideas and beliefs on May 9th, 2025. I wish all the best, i always do.

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