My wife recently had a 654 birthday party. Sixty five is her birthday year. Four is the number of years we’ve lived in our current home, a place that we have done a lot of redecorating (inside and outside) work on to make it ours. Lots to celebrate.
She invited a big group of friends to help us celebrate these two events. About 50 people joined in, bringing their favourite dishes to share and lots of good wine and champagne, to go along with the salmon we served and the great birthday cake deserts.
Most of the folks who came are in their sixties and seventies. We have been lucky to connect with so many vibrant older people. The conversations were lively, focusing on recent or planned travels to far away places, involvement in various community activities, and sharing pictures and stories of families, especially grand children and great grand children. Many of our guests stayed well beyond the advertised closing time of the party.
The next day my wife got lots of phone calls and e mails telling her how much fun the party was and, most interesting, how excited people were to meet others they didn’t know. One said she really likes our parties because she gets to know others outside of her social circle. She even encouraged us to have another party soon.
Get the picture? Older folks, yes, but still energised and engaged with life.
At the party my wife gave a little thank you talk, telling people how much she liked having them join our celebration. When she finished I also thanked them for coming. In the process I asked them to think of the celebration as belonging to everyone who was in the house. After all, we are all still alive and able to have birthdays to celebrate. So many others have died before reaching our older aged lives. We, the living, have been given an extraordinary gift, to still be on this blue planet and being able to enjoy the days, months, and years that we still hopefully have before us.
The group then sang happy birthday to my wife and we all dug into some yummy cakes. I found myself in several discussions that were triggered by my comments about all of us still being able to celebrate birthdays. Some said they had never thought about the gift they had been given, living well into their sixties and seventies and still going strong. They thanked me for helping them get in touch with this realisation.
One woman told me she had spent much of the afternoon before coming to the party with a group of women friends who made her sad. Their conversations were about the past, the physical and mental problems they are having, the mistreatment they feel from family and neighbors, and on and on. She said she was exhausted by the end of the afternoon, listening to her friends. She said she felt like they were getting ready to die. She thanked me for the energized, happy time she had at the party and, in particular, for providing a one hundred and eighty degree opposite reality from what she had experienced that afternoon. She even vowed to reduce the amount of time she spent with this group of women friends and to purposefully seek out people like those she met at the party who are preoccupied with being fully alive rather than getting ready to die.
I think I gained more out of the experience than anyone else. The strong and meaningful feedback that I got from some of our guests was great to hear. It has confirmed my focus on making each and every day as positive and meaningful as possible.
Life is a gift. Long life is an extension of that gift. Recognising what we have been granted and valuing this extraordinary gift is important. It is a special blessing. The more aware we are of this blessing the more likely we will choose to live as fully as we can.
By Mike Milstein. Read more here.
marg79538 - 8 years ago
most enjoyable, especially the comments about the birthday party. well done I am 91 and I appreciate this privilege and enjoy doing all sorts of things.