Aging is not something anyone can avoid. It comes with a lot of blessings, getting to see the world change or to see a new generation of people with new inventions. It also has its disadvantages; your body can fail on you, and there is nothing you can do to go back to the younger energetic years. The best one can do, is age successfully and this way you will not have any regrets.
According to me, successful aging is mostly about remaining physically fit and capable of doing things for yourself even though not as good as when you were young. With age, comes gray hair, weak bones, poor vision, low muscle strength and so many other changes in the body. The first thing you judge someone by when guessing their age is their appearance. One look at someone’s skin or thinning hair and it will be possible to tell their age bracket.
In this modern era, new inventions exist on ways people can try to slow down the aging process. There are options for people to get hair implantations to hide their balding. Medicine has also given people the option of getting anti-aging injections, for example, Botulinum Toxin, commonly known as Botox. All these are ways for people to avoid looking aged. Even with age, people still do care about their appearance and how their peers or other people view them, hence all these efforts.
However, even when one manages not to look old, they still cannot go back to being the young people they were once. Aging successfully in terms of physical appearance has more to it than hair and the skin. Age affects even your bones, muscles, hormones, circulatory and respiratory system, the entire body. The only way people can avoid or at least slow down these effects is by the lifestyle choices they make right from when they are young. Most of the times lifestyle changes made when someone is old do not make much difference. These changes include exercising regularly, maintaining healthy BMI levels, reducing alcohol consumption, avoiding smoking and most importantly maintaining a healthy diet.
Successful aging is also about someone’s cognitive abilities. As a person ages, their memory, attention, psychomotor speed all tend to reduce. Reduced psychomotor speed means that an individual takes more time to process the signal, respond and execute a response. Study shows that older people cannot ignore irrelevant information when required to concentrate on a specific task. That indicates difficulty in paying attention by older people. Tasks involving encoding and retrieving information or memorizing new information also become difficult when a person ages. Research indicates the entire memory does not get affected by age since things people have practiced over the years are not easily forgotten.
Cognitive aging can also get reduced by making good lifestyle choices right from when people are of a young age. When some people think about aging, they worry about losing their mind or forgetting everything they have experienced and learned in their lifetime. People must acknowledge the importance of thinking about how they want to age right from when they are young and this way, better decisions will get made.
Sadie and Bessie
Both Sadie and Bessie Delany lived a long and healthy life. Neither of them got married, and they refused to install a telephone in their house since they preferred more personal methods of communication. These two women are the definition of aging successfully in my opinion. Their lives were not completely similar since they had different personalities although brought up in the same way (Delany, S., & Delany, E., 1994).
They lived at a time when the Jim Crow laws got enacted and they being black people the laws affected their lives. Both Sadie and Bessie had different ways to cope with the racist society. Sadie played the dump and manipulated the society, and Bessie believed in confrontation no matter the cost. They both came from a family that believed in helping anyone that needed help regardless of their race. Their family motto was, “Your job is to help somebody.”
Bessie Delany
Physical Aging
Between the two, I think Bessie aged more successfully, and she would be my example on how I would like to grow old. Bessie and her sister exercised and ate healthy meals all through their life. They knew right from when they were young how they wanted to age, and they chose a healthy lifestyle. With these choices, many things that come with age got slowed down or rather prevented. As explained by Whitbourne S. & Whitbourne B. (2010), healthy living has a great impact on aging. In making these choices, Bessie reduced her chances of suffering from diseases such as diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cancer, arthritis and heart-related diseases.
According to Whitbourne S. & Whitbourne B. (2010), the cardiovascular efficiency in a person’s body reduces as they age. Components of the respiratory system also get affected by age, and it becomes difficult for the chest walls and lung tissues to expand and contract accordingly. It also gets to the point that the ability to control the bladder for some people is difficult. The recommendations for all these health conditions and how to prevent them is to exercise and eat a proper diet. Exercise enhances lipid and cholesterol metabolism whose high levels are harmful to the body. It also benefits the respiratory system by strengthening the chest wall and other respiratory muscles. Indicators show that the majority of people who suffer from heart-related disease especially due to high levels of cholesterol would have avoided that by constantly exercising throughout their lives.
Productivity
According to the theoretical perspectives of aging, the most popular model explains that the engagement with life is one of the components. People who still remain productive in their old age and maintain relationships with others are considered to have aged successfully. Throughout her life, Bessie participated in civil right protests. When her mother got ill and needed home care, Bessie had to stop working to take care of her and her many brothers and sisters. In her retirement years, a journalist, Amy Hill, interviewed her during her 100th birthday. Even at this age, Bessie could still narrate about her life experiences. She was active despite her old age, and she still maintained a positive outlook towards life. Bessie was not the kind to follow the law without questioning it. When the Jim Crow laws got enacted that mandated segregation in all public facilities in terms of race, Bessie did not comply with them easily. She once drank water from a ‘white’ fountain just to check whether the water tasted any different from that of ‘colored’ people (Delany, S., & Delany, E., 1994).
Cognitive Aging
Bessie happened to be the second practicing black female dentist in New York. She treated both rich and poor patients equally despite their race. It may be because of her knowledge in medicine or her being a smart woman, but the choices she made in her life contributed to her successful aging. One of the components of successful aging is being able to maintain high cognitive function. In her older days, she could publish a book together with her sister that became a New York Times bestseller for six months. Most people by the time they are ninety years old suffer from memory loss or find it difficult to pay attention, but this was not the case with Bessie.
According to my understanding, successful aging is about the state of a person when they get old. If someone is still physically and cognitively able at their old age, they have aged successfully. Although Bessie and Sadie grew up the same way, Bessie’s more aggressive ways are more appealing to me. She took each day of her life like the last and tried to make a difference as much as she could.
References
Delany, S. L., & Delany, E. (1994). Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years. Dell.
Whitbourne, S. K., & Witebourne, S. B. (2010). Adult Development and Aging: Biopsychosocial Perspectives (4th ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.
