Revisiting and Revising Our Memories

I was recently sorting some photographs and came across this picture of my parents, taken in 1999. For years I had felt only sadness when I looked at this photograph, as it was taken just a few days before we put my father into longterm care due to dementia-related problems. We all knew what was going to happen that week, all of us with the exception of Dad, that is. So, in spite of the fact that it is a lovely picture of two happy people, all that I could feel was the sadness of knowing that everything was soon going to change for Dad and for all of us.

A few years ago, I decided to put this photo on my fridge door. Each time I noticed it, I chose to look at the warm smile on my father’s face, the laughter on my mother’s, and the closeness between the two of them.  

That’s what I now see, and I love this photo.

Sometimes it just feels better when we rethink and revise our memories, choosing to focus on the positive elements. We are not forgetting the other feelings; we are simply making a conscious choice about what we are going to see first, what we wish to highlight, and what we chose to place in the shadows.

You could live a long time . . .

In reflecting on her life expectancy, Lyndsay Green says, “I know that the average life expectancy is rising dramatically and I fit the longevity profile. I’m already 60 years old; I have no major health issues; and I come from long-living stock. So, barring a killer disease or an accident, I am likely to become old, - maybe even very old.”

She entitled her 2010 book You Could Live a Long Time: Are You Ready?  She interviews forty elders, combining their accumulated wisdom with her own research, in order to “identify the practical decisions and techniques that would let me make use of their advice right away. I was feeling the wind of age on my back and wanted to get moving.”

Green examines her own anxieties about aging and explores her own misconceptions about growing old. “What the elders taught me turned my thinking on its head. Their most important lessons are almost all paradoxical: they run counter to our society’s obsession with staying forever young, and to my own assumption that I must fight aging at all costs. Instead, aging well depends on acceptance, sometimes even an embrace, of the aging process.”

One of Green’s misconceptions was that “My old self would be just like my young self, only greyer and saggier.” However, as she rethinks this idea, based on the company of elders and their families, she comes to realize that she will need to cultivate new strengths and new find new strategies. “I realized that I had better start now to develop what I was going to need.”

My workshop, entitled Retire to the Life You Design^© will help you get started on planning the rest of your life in three key ways:

• Identifying your core needs for personal fulfillment

• Using the Six Circles of Life for achieving balance in your mind, body, and spirit.

• Exploring numerous and diverse leisure and volunteer activities that match your interests and skills

• Finding ways to create meaning and leave a legacy

This workshop will help you to connect you connect who you are with possibilities for your future. Through our process and tools, you begin to create a plan to retire to the life that you design yourself, a retirement unique to you.

My next workshop will be held

Saturday, November 9, 2013

9 a.m. – 4:00 p.m.

New Location:

Pemmican Lodge

102 5 Ave S, Lethbridge AB 

Cost $97.00 includes:

55-page workbook and

Retirement Dimensions™

 For more information or to register, contact:

Barbara Cavers @ 403.553.2973

Email: bcavers@la.shockware.com