AGING GRACEFULLY SINCE AGE HAPPENS? OKAY, BUT …

If you’re not aging gracefully, are you doing something wrong?

A cursory glance around the modern landscape, from fillers to peels, lifts and lipo, I wonder if the age deal is an emotional reaction to aging, or a fear reaction.

You get into your sixties and start looking like your grandpa and it gives you the heebie jeebies? Just remember, your gramps was forty in the picture and still looks older than you.

I figure the market for age defying products and procedures is more driven by emotions than fear, and here’s why:

If you’ve got a skin irregularity that you’ve lived with, had checked, and don’t like, never liked, and wished was gone, you can find highly skilled professionals to work with.

Read the testimonials, review before and after pictures, before you choose your practitioner.

Removing skin tags and benign moles is different than wholesale surgical changes; it’s a small change with a big difference, not a lifestyle makeover.

Aging Issues

If looking younger is the goal, and you’ve rolled the clock back twenty years, the emotional frontier comes next.

How do you feel looking twenty years younger? If your answer is, “I feel like a fraud,” it’s time for some emotional work.

My recommendation for this emotional work comes with music, specifically music therapy.

By now you’ve heard how music lights up our brains when we listen, and even more if we play something? If not hit this link.

From Bridgetown Music Therapy:

“I regard music therapy as a tool of great power in many neurological disorders, [such as] Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s because of its unique capacity to organize and reorganize cerebral function when it has been damaged.” 

–Dr. Oliver Sacks, renowned expert on music therapy

If reorganizing your cerebral function sounds silly because there’s nothing wrong, consider this: we’re often the last to know if there is something wrong, so why not be pro-active?

Pounding a drum or shaking a rattle counts in music therapy; keeping time also counts. If you just listen, it still counts. You can’t go wrong, but what if you want to get the whole immersion effect of music therapy?

When the topic of learning comes up, especially learning to play a musical instrument, the go-to response is often, “I don’t have a musical bone in my body.”

The good news is you won’t be playing anything with your bone, musical or not, so pick up a music maker and get with it. Find a quiet place and ruin it with practice. Fill the garage, the basement, the extra room with every mistake and miss-start; practice until something starts making sense.

Take a class and buy a book to learn faster.

Then, when you start feeling the effort is wearing you out and making you tired, but the sound keeps getting better, take the next step. Leave the safety of playing to an audience of one, you, and play out. Find somewhere to share.

On a personal note, and who doesn’t get personal when the goal is education, I’ve taken these same steps and it led to a feeling of accomplishment I imagine every performer has felt: “I made it to the end.”

Find a third place to be vulnerable and get comfortable with the exposure. What if something goes wrong while you do your thing? It’s not a ‘what if,’ it’s a reality. Something always goes wrong, just don’t let it distract you.

If you’re a singer and someone wants to sing along? Invite them into the moment and share the experience.

If someone in the audience has a request, be a good listener. This is where the brain function thing kicks into high gear. In this moment you are a performer locked into what you do best, but now you must expand your act? No, not really, just be nice and say you’ll try next time.

An important part of aging is knowing when to play the nice card. Since it’s hard to overplay, why not bring nice first? Good manners make a big difference.

Finally, I’m happy to say my world tour of Tigard made it’s fourth stop Saturday night with two band members. My other stops had been solo acoustic; Saturday was plugged in. We started, didn’t stop until the end, and it was as much therapy as anyone could ask for, and then some.

If you’ve ever stood up when you didn’t have to, but because you could, then my friends, you are aging very gracefully no matter the age. I was so proud of the guys I played with that I couldn’t stop smiling for two days.

And the pictures were semi-hilarious. Leave a comment and I’ll post a few here and you’ll feel your face change to a smile all on it’s own.

Game, blouses.