Men Talk Articles - October/November 2006
Maintaining Men’s Health After 60 with Movement & Merriment
– © 2006 by Larry Johnson
I feel fortunate. I just turned 60, and I still have the “pretty good” health I’ve always had. My mother read PREVENTION magazine and did things like deliberately limiting sugar intake in the 50s, and until about age 30 I was a disciplined athlete. I took one of President Kennedy’s 50 mile hikes at age 14, and in basic training at Fort Sam Houston, I earned the first weekend pass by acing the PT (physical training) test. However, at age 40 I remember getting off a bus and running to make a connection. Suddenly I experienced why even in baseball, where you stand around much of the time waiting, 40 is old to keep playing professionally. Then there’s the rampant cancer in my family, and the respiratory difficulty I’ve had since junior high when exposed to certain kinds of dust and other toxins. Whoa, I’m having a rush of 60 years of experience maintaining health in the midst of life as we know it, even after 60. Here goes.
Do What Makes You Happy
I have loved telling stories to children of all ages ever since I started as an urban camp director in the late 60s. It’s why I took it into education and fought to make it a central teaching and learning tool. It’s also why I just took early retirement because such things have been squeezed from education as we know it. I find myself telling stories politically to bring education back, preparing to once again do “traditional” storytelling residencies in schools, and telling stories to drive my health-related e-commerce business. I’m also happy, slowly ice skating at least once in every state, and spending the time learning the better partner/lover communication we should have all learned growing up. WHAT MAKES YOU HAPPY? Focus on it so it drives your health to the better.
Laugh A Lot and Inspire Others To Do The Same
My dad, a natural trickster, loved the Proverbs in the Old Testament, so I grew up with A MERRY HEART DOETH GOOD LIKE MEDICINE, and with jokes and tricks done kindly in love. Dale Carnegie says a simple smile on the phone or in person raises your chances for success and the good feelings stemming from it, in business, relationships, teaching, recreation, and life. Now many health professionals are saying a SMILE or LAUGH releases healing and good feeling endorphins that charge your body and mind with better health. If you’re not being able to HAVE MORE FUN THAN YOU CAN TOLERATE with what you’re in the middle of in the moment, take a break. Find a quiet, secret place and just start laughing out loud. You’ll go back to the “war” in better shape and end the day in a healthier place.
Get a Good Night’s Sleep
Work and play hard and honest and fall asleep as much as possible in the arms of your lover. If extenuating circumstances call for reinforcements, consider herbal substitutes for sleeping pills, like VALERIAN AND HOPS. Think high quality for excellent sleep and health.
Eat for LIFE
When I’m using story to teach health, I take a piece of food through the chewing process and into the stomach. With graphic detail appropriate to the audience, some of that digested food assimilates into the blood to deliver life (or slow death, depending on the quality) to all parts of the body. Some just travels out as waste, or in a totally healthy system, as nutrients to create more life. There are plenty of places to go for intense information on food that really pumps your life up. For here, just for the sake of “healthstorming”, consider growing some of your own on carefully composted and non-pesticided ground, or down-size some of the dollar-expensive, health-cheap JUNK FOOD and put the savings into higher cost and quality food from the Co-op. Drink lots of the “water of life” filtered through, I’d say, a high end water purifier. You check the quality of the system once and avoid the ongoing uncertainty of which kind of bottled water is really very good. Then keep some good food bars with you at all times so if you’re in a hurry and tempted to downgrade your health with most fast food, POP A FOOD BAR. If you’ve carefully checked it out ahead of time, its healthier and actually quicker than going through the line.
Regular Exercise
There’s plenty written on this too. The key is finding something that suits you well enough so it happens. I went to a health club for a while, but I truly prefer to absorb my exercise into my daily life and to do things that pump less pollutants into the air. I cut logs into fireplace wood with my grandfather’s original crosscut logging saw. I cut the grass with a non-motorized reel mower, and I walk between bus or light rail as part of maintaining office space on whatever mass transit I happen to be writing on. I admit I’m still trying to create a natural way to do the stretching exercises my chiropractor recommends, but I think it will happen. You might want a health club membership or a good fitness video or a regular walk around the lake. Just find something that makes what’s definitely good for all of us FUN FOR YOU.
Do A Thorough Annual Physical
I started this at age 40. Maybe it was 50, and I’m getting better at taking the doctor’s recommendations, like for high cholesterol.
Actually, I had minimal difficulty cutting back or eliminating the sugars and starches because I had early childhood training. Coffee, a perhaps lesser known cholesterol terrorist, was the problem. I was born in Swedish Hospital and took coffee intravenously the second day there. When the other modifications didn’t do enough, I pulled out the earlier “athletic discipline” and went to one half pot of excellent coffee in the morning, rather than a full pot chased later in the afternoon by another one (sorry, we all have our addictions). Later in the day I drink tea, or take a RHODIOLA tablet, or drink a “no-sugar, no-carb” energy drink available through our business. I also take SAW PALMETTO regularly just to make the doctor feel silly when the prostate test turns up nothing. It wouldn’t be at all funny otherwise.
Cultivate The Happy Sense Of Childlike Wonder
I’m so sorry for a world that eliminates some or all of this from too many children, as well as most adults. The cliches are “stop and smell the roses, or the coffee (whoops)”, but please, go forth and multiply your own. Lay in the grass on a warm summer day and imagine figures in the cloud shapes. Talk serious nonsense and BE IN LOVE outside under the stars, or better yet, a FULL MOON. Tell a bizarre, kind, made-up story to your grandchildren. Ask the questions that are there even if no one else dares, and YES, say out loud that the emperor or empress has no clothes if that is in fact the case. I believe this must be part of what Jesus meant when he said, “Except a person become as a little child, he or she cannot enter the Kingdom of Heaven”, and whatever you personally think that Kingdom is, it’s got to be the HEALTHIEST PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE.
Larry Johnson is one of 100 or so men with that name in Minneapolis, but he’s the one who wrote this article. He partners with Elaine Wynne in KEY OF SEE STORYTELLERS which helps people find their own stories and use them effectively in work and daily life. He is also co-owner of EL ENTERPRISES which specializes in helping individuals and business build WHOLE AND HEALTHY SYSTEMS.