HW Praxis #29 - Be thankful for birthdays despite your age, indeed because of it. Many others have not lived to see your age. Life is a gift and your birthday is your opportunity to be thankful for it.
There have been a slew of birthdays in my family, including my own, and I've come to really view them in a different light. Then I started to wonder which of my ages was the best, and sure, certain, that it wasn't the one I was having. After all , we all wish we were younger, right?
Well, apparently not. According to this poll, fifty is the most popular age.
According to a recent Harris interactive poll, the magic number is 50...Not surprisingly, younger people chose younger ages. Echo boomers, ages 18 to 36, thought the perfect age was 38. Gen Xers, ages 37 to 48, wanted to stay put at 49. Baby boomers, ages 49 to 67, thought 55 was pretty awesome. While mature adults, ages 68 and older, were happy to hold steady at 67.
Fifty? What is going on here? As I'm approaching that number ( clawing my way against the flow of the too-slippery surface of space-time continuum), my emotional self wants to hide under my bed when I hit that number and eat ice cream until my brain shuts down. Apparently there's an angle here to think fifty a non-calamity:
“You have almost every opportunity,” says Barbara Becker Holstein, a psychologist with a private practice in Long Branch, N.J. “You’re young enough to be famous or start an organic farm and still have the muscle tone to work eight hours a day. You’re old enough to have wisdom but young enough that your parents are still alive so you have a generational experience. If you’re tired, you can ask the young man on the bus to get out of his seat for you. Or you can date the young man. The more I think about it, the more appealing it is.”
Holstein says all of the recent medical – and cosmetic -- developments have also helped to give 50 a facelift.
“I really think 50 is the new 30 to 35,” she says. “For a woman, you can stay stylish and fit and maybe get your hair dyed or just do a little [cosmetic] tune-up and feel, ‘Wow, this is great.’ In terms of childbearing, you can basically say forget it or if you want a baby at 50 or 53, you can get your hormones juiced up and go for it.”
I think this trend of enjoying later years, rather than youth, is really healthy for the nation. By looking forward to more of your life and seeing the possibility in the moment, regardless of what some calendar says, opens us up to new realities. And we have huge examples in our life of those who are older doing incredible things. Check out RUSH, my favorite band. They're all in their 60's and still touring, and so is the band Who. So with those folks running around a stage when in the past they would be in a retirement home, it sets the bar for how active we can and should be. In the end, its just a number.
And, in this special birthday episode, I give you the gift of coffee news - (HW#2 - Coffee is good for you):
"A study of South Korean coffee consumers found moderate drinkers are less likely to have signs of blocked arteries than people who drank no coffee — or those who drank five or more cups a day.
People who drank three to just under five cups a day of filtered coffee were the least likely to have evidence of heart disease, Dr. Yoosoo Chang of Kangbuk Samsung Hospital in Seoul and colleagues found.
It’s one more piece of data in a growing body of studies that suggest a few cups of coffee a day can be healthful. Federal advisers have recognized this, suggesting that new federal guidelines on what to eat include an okay on moderate coffee intake."
HAPPY BIRTHDAY - DRINK COFFEEEEEE!
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