Newsletter: March 2010
The missing newsletters:
you may have noticed it's been a rather long time between newsletters. There's a reason - a nice one. Read about it
Three days at the 2009 Australian Association of Gerontology Conference:
the research we presented and a couple of the things we learned [ more]
Getting Older: in Literature and in Art :
the focus of a Book Club we started last year [ more]
The 'nice reason' we have been a newsletter-free zone…
We have to go back a few years to explain - five years, to be exact. That's when we started Re-vision.
Re-vision began because of our interest in, and concern about, 'retirement'. It was a time when people's thinking hadn't caught up with the reality of their stretched out life spans. People were still retiring at 55, then wondering how they were going to spend the next 30 or more years. Or not retiring because they were afraid of 30 years in an undefined future.
Our work, as a consequence, focused on putting together 'What Next?' retirement workshops where people explored new interests, assessed their resources, thought about rebuilding their identities (who am I if I am no longer a....?) and so forth. We also worked with some large organisations on developing phased retirement programs and flexible work options for older workers.
That was all interesting and rewarding work, but it made us want to dig deeper. It became clear that decisions about work and retirement cannot - and should not - be divorced from other aspects of ageing. Where one lives has an influence; so does brain/mind health; so do our [often unstated] assumptions of what being older or old is meant to be like.
How to dig deeper? Well, why not write a book?
Some people talk about teaching as a way of learning. For us, writing has also been path to learning. It's the path Ann (Zubrick) and Jane have decided to take, and it is proving a perfect way to draw together our interests in - and, more importantly, our questions about - the second half of life.
Experimenting with this new direction - finding out whether it would, indeed, be 'the perfect way' for us to understand the changing landscape of ageing - is what we have been quietly doing these past 12 months. This is our 'good' excuse for the gap in newsletters. It wasn't slackness, as you might have thought!
The one downside to re-focusing Re-vision on a book is that Anne (Butorac) decided to become a silent partner in the enterprise. Instead she is working on an on-going evaluation of a national incontinence program and, of course, further developing with Rosemary Can and Kath Lyman, their marvelous craft gallery and café, The Old Bakery on 8th.
At the 2009 Australian Association of Gerontologists Conference…
Our paper: We have carried out a few projects for the City of Mandurah under the general theme of active ageing in the last few years. The purpose of the work in 2008-2009 was to encourage retirees living in Mandurah to return to work, at least part-time. This was the height of the skills shortage in Western Australia and local businesses were struggling to find staff. But we were also interested in the well-being of retirees themselves: it is well known that the social contact and stimulation of returning to work can enhance retirees' well being.
We pretty much failed to achieve our goal: we coaxed very few people back to work. The attempt, however, and the lessons we learned were valuable. Valuable enough that we were asked to present the findings (and our musings about them) to the AAG Conference. The 'speaking notes' are here [pdf file].
An aside [a hobby horse]: These are speaking notes. We did not use PowerPoint. We do occasionally, but only when warranted, which is rarely in our view, including for most other people's conference presentations. It certainly wasn't warranted here. This is a story.
We also provided a poster about the project. It has a couple of nice pictures on it, as well as giving a simple visual overview of the themes, click here [pdf file].
Some comments on the Conference: One of the nicest things about the Conference was that it attracted people from quite different backgrounds, personally and professionally, and the whole atmosphere was one of shared interest. No matter who one found oneself next to at tea or lunch, conversation was easy, interesting and informative. We have yet to contact all the people we want to follow up with, but we will!
A theme that emerged very strongly, for us, at the Conference was about expectations of ageing and being old. Our (and others') expectations inform so much of what we do and think as individuals and professionals, even if we are often unaware of them. Consistently speakers noted that:
- expectations by older and younger members of the public and the media are changing, but sometimes in strange and often in inconsistent, contradictory ways. What was consistent was the message that overall, beliefs and values have not kept up with the revolution in longevity;
- it is incumbent on us all - professionals and public alike - to continually ask ourselves what exactly it is that we imagine being older and old is like or should be like, given the great diversity of our lives and experience. In particular, how do we navigate between overly optimistic and overly pessimistic views of ageing?
- policy (by government and individual organisations) has an immense influence on expectations and, as a policy bureaucrat pointed out, " how expectations are set is critical because it is hard to recover from failed expectations". [our emphasis]
The 2010 AAG Conference is in Hobart and Jane will be attending for sure: she won the door prize for a free registration!
Getting Older: in Literature and in Art
The idea of a book club on the theme of 'getting older' came about a little accidentally. Ann and Jane, over coffee one morning, were comparing notes about the formal research literature we had been reading. It dawned on us that there was a whole other 'literature' - what humanists and writers might call real literature - of artists' and writers' wondering about ageing.
It is true, of course. The gains and losses that accompany people's older years have long been a subject for literature and art. Think of Rembrandt's self-portraits and Shakespeare's Lear. Latterly, we have Philip Roth's Everyman, John Mortimer's Summer of a Dormouse, Gabriel Garcia Marquez"s Love in the Time of Cholera, and Amy Tan's The Bonesetter's Daughter - to hint at the diversity in such writing. And films, too, seem increasingly intrigued by the subject: Up, Is Anybody There? Last Orders, The Bucket List, About Schmidt… some years back there was the unforgettable Babette's Feast… and so on.
Taking literature and art as a focal point seemed an interesting way of continuing some of the rich conversations we had enjoyed in our 'What Next?' workshops. But with a different slant. Instead of starting with 'me', we could start with Schmidt or Luling or Cezanne. And we have been doing exactly that.
A small book club meets once a month in our office in South Perth.
We've read stories from Vital Signs, a book of international short stories on ageing. It includes pieces by Alice Walker, Elizabeth Jolley, and Amos Oz, among others. Robertson Davies wrote a wonderful introduction to the collection in which he insists, and quite possibly proves, that curiosity is the essential ingredient to take into one's older and old years. Here's a taste of his argument:
I have grown old myself, and have opinions about it, and about my coevals. What ails most of them, and what has ailed them all their lives, is that they lack curiosity…
Curiosity comes in many packages. For some people it is simple gossip, but good gossip is fine stuff, and more people ought to jot down what they hear. Posterity will be grateful…
We want to know. We want to know unflaggingly and tastelessly, and if we dared ask out friends the questions uppermost in our minds we should probably be ostracized beyond hope of reprieve…
When we have lost our curiosity about the world, we have lost much, though not all. We have lost all when we cease to be curious about ourselves, for that means we have, indeed, abandoned hope.
In our group, we found that we read quite differently from one another. Some slow; some fast. Reading purely for the story line or digging deeply into the assumptions which inform the text. We had an intriguing conversation about whether or not we re-read books, when and why, or why not.
We had a 'poetry month' when we read and talked at length about some of Mary Oliver's poetry and even tackled the first of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets, 'Burnt Norton'.
This month's book is Alan Bennett's A Life Like Other People's.