Balance is something so many of us take for granted until we lose it. I realized this for the first time a few years ago when I was grocery shopping with my grandmother. After years of picking her up every Sunday so that she could get her food for the week, we’d settled into a nice little routine. I’d follow her around with the grocery cart while she buzzed about, gathering her favorite rye bread, European butter, and Hungarian salami.
Getting older comes with a certain set of cultural expectations, rooted in our idealized sense of essential fairness. You work hard, perhaps you raise children, you have a decent old age, and you leave the world a little better than when you found it. Even just the price of human life—the struggles, heartbreaks, and quotidian day-to-day—seem to be justification for contentment toward the end.
There’s a fairly new idea in medicine known as epigenetics. Roughly, it is the idea that the environment—broadly described as everything that happens to you—can influence your genetics, leaving you more or less prone to disease or sickness.
Holidays were the hardest for her. At 87 years old, Elma, who lived independently in her own small apartment in San Francisco, spent most of her days alone—even Christmas day. When she was younger, Christmas was her favorite time of year, and her happiest memories were of huddling around the tree with her two boys and husband on Christmas morning, singing carols and opening gifts.
It was a dream come true for Laura when she was finally able to move out of a San Mateo nursing home back into her own apartment. Thanks to the Community Care Settings Pilot (CCSP) program through Institute on Aging, her inpatient rehabilitation after a major car accident didn’t go on longer than it needed to: She was able to return to the community where she feels at home.
One of the problems with aging in America is that, for various reasons, your world can become easily constricted. Streets and sidewalks aren’t designed with the needs of older adults in mind. Friends move away or pass on. Driving becomes more difficult. And for some reason, as a society, we feel that increased isolation is a normal course of events, rather than a series of choices.
We all have one special home we live in our entire lives: our bodies. When older adults are working against arthritis and other challenges to their mobility, it’s not just their physical fitness that backslides—they’re also likely to lose touch and feel disconnected from their bodies. When we’re not feeling actively in touch with those living homes, we feel displaced, and other aspects of our lives can get out of balance, too.
Your life is nothing if not a highly complex collection of interrelated parts and pieces. We navigate our colorful emotional journeys and simultaneously cultivate our roles in families, in the community, and in the workplace. And, of course, we manage the many layers of our health, our relationships, and our goals and dreams. These different parts can’t function altogether separately from each other. On top of it all, we must strive to build and maintain bridges between the interrelated elements of our lives.
For almost a decade, Deanna was “going to write a memoir.” For almost a decade, she just didn’t really know where or how to start. She collected all kind of photos and dates and evidence of life memories over those long years, but breaking into the actual writing was intimidating, so, again and again, she’d start and quickly stop in one notebook or the next.
There is no one tool or solution for achieving all-around balance—it takes a comprehensive strategy to avoid burnout—but yoga for caregivers can certainly be counted as a powerful force for peace and positivity amidst the challenges.
Institute on Aging (IOA) CONNECT is your direct line to us and the starting point for help with your concerns about the needs of older adults and adults with disabilities. IOA CONNECT links you with our services, as well as community services available. Reach out to connect with us.
Phone: (415) 750 – 4111 | Fax: (415) 750 – 5338
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