You can't do anything about the length of your life, but you can do something about its width and depth.
- H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)
Since Mencken's time medical science has learned how to extend even the length of a person's life. Yet despite all these possibilities to expand and enhance their lives, not many people go out of their way to do it. The ones who do tend to believe that everyone does. However, the evidence does not support this conclusion.
While we tend to live longer than the generations before us, that is more often because medical science has found ways to keep us from dying than because we as individuals have taken the proper measures to live longer.
The depth and width of life of many people aren't receiving much attention either. With television and the internet serving as forms of entertainment now, more and more people use them for that purpose rather than to make their lives better, richer, fuller. While many people use TV and the internet as rich resources of knowledge, they become time wasters for those who simply want to waste theirs.
Other people believe that their lives will be better if they spend money--on furniture, home, vehicle, addictive or illegal passtimes, entertainment, whatever money can be spent on that they have seen advertised or that they have heard about.
Expanding the depth and width of our lives is not about spending money, but about investing time and energy. We grow by doing, not be watching, by making not be being made.
Our brains and bodies are constructed to work, to exercise, to stretch and work their way around problems and projects that we have not overcome before. They atrophy when they are not exercised regularly.
Growing old to a more advanced age than our ancestors is not such a great thing when living longer means suffering from senility and a creaking body for more years than they did. Joining fellow patients lining the walls of nursing homes for years at a time just to catch a glimpse of someone doing something different is not an enhanced old age.
We need to teach these lessons to children and adolescents before they lose their desire to stretch their minds and bodies to continually become more than they are.
Bill Allin
Turning It Around: Causes and Cures for Today's Epidemic Social Problems, striving to make our older generations into wiser and healthier seniors.
Learn more at http://billallin.com
rate
email
print
link to this page
Comments: 16
Not only the lack of good long-term care, but the lack of emphasis on life-long learning, "giving back", and meaningful hobbies.
Too many people still have the attitudes of our industrial past - that retirement was the short period of rest between exhausting work and death.
Retirement can now be twenty years or more. It has to be made meaningful.
I think in many cases we have been fooled by extending the age for retirement and social security etc. because of the numbers showing we live longer now. Without a life plan to be healthy those extra years we have to wait, we may not get to enjoy them the way we planned, and are counting on our genes. I wish I had worked less when the years had started to add up and did more, than worry about what was in the bank. I still have done a lot, and am not done, but those earlier years when my kids were younger could have been better spent I think. I worked too hard, and didn't laugh enough....... ;-)
Good article Bill.
Your writing is refreshing, and enjoyable to read. Thank you for this wonderful article.
I think some of us here on Gather could stand to stretch their minds and bodies a bit more. Maybe then they wouldn't be so snipey.
I fully agree that the parents and schools are falling down on the job to keep our youth interested, active and inspired. The rise of obesity in children is reaching an all time high. Candy and soft drink machines in the schools certainly do not send a healthful message to the students.
I wish more parents and grandparents were able to read this article, Bill. You have expressed it well.
I have not read much of anything from Bill Allin prior to this, but this article, on its own merit, is pretty good in my lowly opinion... as a stand-alone.
Was it a veiled slam of someone and I just failed to get that? Someone enlighten me, I'm only on my second cup of coffee this morning.
Lori, Bill is a good writer; some folks are just running out of people to pick on, while others have an obsession for following Bill around and making nasty comments on all of his articles.