The oldies who really know how to have a golden age
An 87-year-old tennis player, a skydiver who’s nearly 90 and a triathlete in his 70s . . .
IN TODAY’S final anti-ageing pullout — part of the Mail’s month-long Good Health For Life series — we share some life-affirming insights from a group of happy, healthy and successful older people who feature in a new book about how to live your life to the full in later years. If they don’t inspire you, nothing will!
The SAD and sorry y onslaught of false e teeth, withering skin n and narrowing career r options, followed by y death as the ultimate full stop. p. Ageing is bleak.
even road signs for the elderly show a couple hunched over, one with a walking g stick, vulnerable as they can be.
Well, those are the stereotypes s anyway. Blatantly ageist or sadly y truthful? As the milestone of 40 fast t approached for us both, and a few more grey hairs began to appear, we decided to find out.
Four years and 50 interviews later, we e can say with some authority that old d age is rarely defined by any of those e grim myths.
In fact, during the course of our r research — first for our website, Bolder, r, and then for a book — we discovered d that ageing can be inspiring and d inventive and even, gasp, fun.
Our interviewees were all over 70. One e of them fell in love and married aged d 82. Another swims a mile in the e Mediterranean every morning aged 85. 5. Nearly all of them are still working or r creating in some way. So many of them m cite the happiest age of their lives as s now, not then.
We both have more than a decade of experience working in glossy y magazines and, for us, the process of meeting our subjects was refreshing. g. Our interviewees were often far more e comfortable in themselves than many y of the models we had worked with who o were a fraction of their age. We embarked on this project because old age looked like an unhappy place to us, and we wanted to understand the reality. Now we’ve seen it.
And though our fears haven’t been dispelled entirely — ageing inevitably has its hindrances and its hiccups — there has been a shift, because we’ve seen the other side of those stereotypes.
It’s a good job, too: this year there will be a million new septuagenarians alone — more than ever before.
Living until 90 and beyond is soon to become the norm, rather than the exception.
The best part of it all? Now that we’ve stopped to listen, there’s so much to learn.
What follows are some of our favourite lessons, in the words of the people who learned them. MUFFIE GRIEVE, 87, from Ontario, Canada, has been playing tennis for more than 70 years. She says: I DON’T consider my age a factor at all. It was never traumatic to me to be 30 or 40 or 50 — it just doesn’t worry me. As you get older and become a success at something, you gain tremendous confidence.
You know yourself and what you want, and you have the ability to say no to things.
The only negative is that your body does sometimes let you down, but you just have to pick yourself up and charge on. Of course, there have been trying times. When I was 62, I had a brain tumour.
I found out quite fortuitously on a business trip, when I got out of a car and couldn’t walk in a straight line. I had major surgery and spent seven hours on the operating table.
But no one goes through life without problems, you just learn to deal with them.
I have a very positive attitude about everything — I only do positives.
Bertrand Russell, whom I’ve always admired, wrote about worrying as a useless negative. Instead, he advised looking at the problem and deciding what you can do about it.
If you can do nothing, forget about it. It’s probably my mathematical, logical outlook, but I’ve always been like that.
A lot of how you age is to do with genetics. having said that, I am careful with what I eat — I don’t like sweet things, which is fortunate. Tennis and golf keep me active, plus I walk a lot and go to Pilates classes.
I also enjoy the odd martini and a nice glass of wine. My next goal is to break a score of 90 in golf.
Yes, we do live in an ageist society, but it is changing. More people are staying active: you see older people out skiing, golfing, swimming and travelling. They aren’t lying around letting the world go by.
Attitudes are shifting, but there is a definite cult of youth.
My life motto? Be positive — and never give in.