Making your later years more fulfilling

The great advantage of being older is that you have learnt enough to make your later years more productive, more fun and more fulfilling than all the other years put together. But you have to work at it.

Maybe this is a time for relaxing, doing what you want and “taking it easy”. Nobody wants you to make your last quarter-century tough; you have probably had enough work to do in your life. A bit of time to yourself and to see your children and grandchildren is reasonable reward for what you have done for the family.

Planning your later years is not a matter of more work. It is a matter of making your time more enjoyable. You have so much to offer and so many people want to learn from you. You are now the guru of the family, the person who makes sense of all the struggles of youth and the battles of middle age. To help others surmount their problems and find a way to improve the world benefits you as well as them.

What makes old age such fun is trying to keep up with technology and modern thinking, while guiding the next generation so they do not lose the best of the past. All through history, the young have depended on their parents and grandparents for help. That help is in greater demand today than ever before.

As our inventions and discoveries have made life more comfortable and much longer, they have contributed to our having to think less for ourselves. That is the price of instant solutions and online encyclopedias. A society that does not promote thinking goes forward blindly, and blind steps forward lead to a fall. What is it that seniors should develop?

Leverage technology for communications

The essentials for the years when your children and grandchildren are growing up start with communications.

In the busy world we inhabit, visits are not always possible or frequent. Children today have almost too much to do and can forget the filial piety that was a feature of their parents and grandparents’ time. Learning how to communicate quickly and well is a good start if you want an interesting old age.

Those who are not computer savvy should take a simple course to familiarise themselves with the keyboard and screen. It may seem complicated, but the fundamentals are quite easy and once you have mastered them, you never forget them.

Even if you are not keen on mastering computers, you should consider the advantages of being able to write a short email and get a reply, usually very quickly. Even better is the ability to Skype, so both parties can see each other. For a small monthly fee, you can Skype among several people and create a virtual party. You can’t hand the cake round, but you can share the jokes and laughter.

Understand other parts of the world

Another “must do” for older people is to study the parts of the world they do not know. You need not be rich or mobile to do this — just switch on the television. There are so many programmes to choose from: Wildlife to gardens, amazing countryside everywhere, magnificent houses, churches, mosques and other buildings, history presented in a new and exciting way.

Why learn about the world when you are getting near the end of your life? Because it is a wonderful place and it would take 10 or more lifetimes to explore it. You can do all that from your armchair today. You can even keep your mind alert with puzzles, from breaking news to quiz programmes — anything so long as it makes you think a bit harder than you have ever thought before.

The wise keep learning

I was taught my interest in life when I was very young — not by teachers in school, but by craftsmen in the countryside, at the carpenter’s bench and in the fields. They were wise people who did not stop thinking as they got older. They actually thought more. They did not give up on modern technology; they learnt about it, studied it, tried to improve it and above all worked out what it was for.

My best lessons came from people helping to relate what they knew and did, to what I was going to learn and do. They did not lecture me about their lives; they helped me see where their generation had gone wrong and where, right. They taught me that appreciation of life is something you create for yourself, not a solution you get from a book or university course.

This is the great challenge for older people — to try to put a meaning to life. When you are young, you need a purpose, an aim, something to strive for. Mostly these are practical matters of survival, providing for a family and having, educating and bringing up children — at least, they are at the beginning. Then the nest empties and what has been our primary purpose disappears.

As children, we were given toys and construction kits to build our own world. As seniors, we have the biggest toy of all, our planet. Isn’t it time you tried to see what you can make of it?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: John Bittleston is Executive Chairman and Founder Mentor of Terrific Mentors International (http://www.terrificmentors.com).