BoomSpeak

Boomers are moving into to the now what? phase.

Our bodies are, shall we say, disappointing us on a more frequent basis. One day it’s an eye infection and the next day it’s a hitch in the hip (yes, another one). What’s going on?

If you were at the car dealer for routine maintenance they would simply tell you that it’s normal part wear. That’s right. Your body is just like a car. As the mileage rolls up on the odometer, life’s wear and tear starts to add up. The problem is that you cannot replace limbs as easily as putting on new tires or just changing the oil or the mysterious cabin filter that every car service rep will tell you needs to be replaced (for $75).

If you’re counting on one hand the number of aches and pains you’ve decided you can live with, then you know exactly what we’re talking about here. Sore knee? It’s not so bad that you stop hiking. Cataracts? Stop driving at night. For every ailment there’s an excuse to keep on moving. And that’s as it should be, otherwise we would never get out of bed.

Speaking of getting out of bed…that’s when you take inventory of what will hurt today. Worse, it could be when you realize there’s a new pain that was not there when you went to bed. I hate that.

What are we supposed to do about this sensation that we’re trapped in the now what phase? In the words (and cartoons) of R. Crumb, we just need to Keep On Truckin! Facing life’s challenges unbowed, we need to sustain that forward momentum, that optimism that characterized the baby boomer generation that still lives on, navigating the troubled waters of our current social and political upheaval, so that we just KEEP ON TRUCKIN!!

Phew! Did not realize the power of those words. It won’t be easy to exchange “now what” for keep on truckin, but what other choice is there? Resilience is all we’ve got going for us and that may be just enough to get us through the hard times brought on by our physical deterioration.

No other option. We can do this.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.

You know the age old question for retirees. What do you do all day? If you find the idea of being bored in retirement preposterous, this post might be for you.

My thinking on this subject has morphed since I started watching Astrid on PBS Masterpiece. The show features a brilliant autistic woman named Astrid who works in criminal records and is recruited by a detective to help solve crimes. It’s French with subtitles, which I hardly notice.

Her autism bugged me at first, but I grew more comfortable with it as the series and the characters evolved. Wouldn’t it be great if it worked that way in real life? You spend some time with a person, get to know them and maybe they don’t seem so damn odd after all. One can hope.

A common characteristic of people with autism is the special interest, which is an intense hyper-focus area that brings joy and helps them stay centered. To some, a special interest may come across as obsessive, but a few of us out here might be envious.

I’m talking about we, the people, who have too many interests and sometimes have difficulty focusing. As for me, I’ve spent a lot of time and dropped a fair chunk of change on things that interested me … for a while.

Retirement changes the game. The good news is we have time and hopefully enough money to dabble, and sometimes we’re like kids in a candy store. It’s exciting to think, what do I want to try next? But then you realize time doesn’t last forever, and it’s a fixed income, anyway, so you can’t get stupid with it.

I already have plenty of interests, but every now and then I’m tempted by some new shiny object. Sewing is one. I used to jump for it, but now that I’m older and wiser, I start thinking about the start-up costs, learning curve, space requirements, time commitment – and I get stuck.

Like Astrid, do I need something to stay centered? She inspired me to think about my current hobbies as special interests. Plural. These are the activities that have stood the test of time. Instead of spreading myself too thin, I want to make the most of what I know is sustainable.

One of the joys of retirement is that you can throw rigid schedules out the window, and I relish my laid back lifestyle. That said, it’s time to focus on my special interests in a more mindful way. Pay more attention to the details.

Donna Pekar is an aging badass (for real) who lives in California and writes Retirement Confidential.

We like them, don’t we, “things to do” scribbled on memo pads or the backs of envelopes, tapped into our phones? We log the birds we’ve spotted, keep track of foods to avoid, note which Lego sets we’ve given the grandkids the past few Christmases. Each December we flip through magazines with their Ten Best this, Ten Worst that, Ten Most Everything Else of the year, listings ephemeral as our resolutions.

“List, list, O list!” says the ghost of Hamlet’s father, sounding more like Walt Whitman revving up for one of his poetic catalogues than a specter in medieval Denmark. And though I realize the ghost is urging his son to “listen,” I can’t help muttering the line whenever life seems but one inventory or listicle after another.

When I worked at a bookstore decades ago we sold copy after copy of The Book of Lists, four hundred pages no one, it seemed, could do without. You could look up the most intelligent breeds of dogs, history’s stupidest criminals, the worst places to hitchhike in the U.S., even the most common misquotes from Shakespeare. (King Hamlet’s ghost was on that list, I think). The book went through several editions, sequels, spin-offs. They make quite a list of their own by now.

At my age, I’m supposed to have a Bucket List—languages to learn and world capitals yet to see, skydiving lessons to sign up for, friends and exes I should re-connect with. But there’s no roster in my head, no table of names or places, nor any set of bullet points reminding me of risks untaken. I have no great compulsion to etch my name among those who have scaled some fearsome cliff, no annal in which I’ve sought a mention. (I’d rather quaff a Guinness than try to make it into that book of lists.)

“Don’t make the national news,” my wife Sharon likes to say in concluding her list of reminders whenever someone in our family is about to travel. Much more adventurous than I (see skydiving, above, not to mention ziplining through the treetops of a national forest), she nevertheless is like me in preferring a place among the countless anonymous, those Z-listers far out of the spotlight, whole city blocks from the red carpet. No wonder, after all these years, she’s still at the top of my list.

James Scruton lives in McKenzie, TN

Just came across the umpteenth post about things that baby boomers grew up with that are now or soon going the way of the dodo bird. Things such as photo albums, faxes, voicemails, checks, cash, manual transmissions, fax machines, landlines, newspapers, and many more.

What’s the fascination with this? Is it misplaced nostalgia? Are any of us really going to miss couches wrapped in plastic or the yellow pages? The good China has been disappearing for a long time now and not many of us shed any tears over that.

Handwritten letters made the list and honestly it is astonishing that anyone would still take the time to handwrite just about anything other than a grocery list (and you can do that in Notes!). Shocker – only 24 states require cursive writing instruction. That means we are probably no more than a decade away from school kids thinking that cursive writing is a foreign language.

Ever wonder why when you fill out medical forms there’s a space for home phone and a space for mobile? Who has a landline still? Boomers, of course, and we’re the ones filling out quite a few medical forms these days.

When my mother reached 100 years of age, she wanted me to help her make a list of the events and technology she witnessed in her lifetime. No luddite her, she mastered email at age 94. Computers, cell phones, rockets that orbit the earth, self-driving cars – she had seen it all. But she started out her childhood with a hand-cranked Victrola (and late in life admitted she put the cat on it once…maybe twice).

I only mention her amazement at what she witnessed in her lifetime because baby boomers can and should be equally astonished at what’s transformed our world in our lifetimes. Now we stand at the cusp of the artificial intelligence technology that will transform medicine, science, capitalism and climate. Honestly, many of us are more fearful than optimistic of what AI can do, but it’s here and it’s out of the box.

Nothing left for us to do but make lists of things we grew up with that are biting the dust. You go first. By the way, the illustration of the dodo bird was created with….AI.

Jay Harrison is a writer and creative consultant for DesignConcept. His newest mystery novel, Rio Puerco Demise is available on Amazon. His first mystery novel, Head Above Water, is also available on Amazon. But that’s not all. You can also purchase the Best of BoomSpeak on Amazon.