Talia Carner

This week I shopped for three must-haves: a car, a computer, and a pair of sneakers.

Researching a new car was simple. A few websites have determined that the number of doors and the color you want are all you need to take an educated stab at buying the second most expensive possession in almost anyone’s life. Budget is a distant third. I punched in my responses and out popped a few cars. I weeded out those that failed to meet my request that the passenger seat must be endowed with the same fancy adjustments as the driver’s, from lumbar support to climate control. Why? Because when my husband drives me around, I am relegated to the passenger seat. It’s still my car too, where I should not be considered a second-class citizen.

Only two cars fit my criterion. At the first showroom, I sniffed the inside of one of them for that delicious leather aroma, took it out for a spin, signed a few papers, and became the official owner.

Finding a notebook computer was a more demanding task, requiring me to master new terminology such as RAM and Megahertz, and understand what the number of pixels on my screen meant. I got the hang of it as I perused through several catalogues and sorted the models that matched my budget. Then I called some online companies and got my deal—sight unseen, a free case included. The computer arrived in a box the next afternoon.

Buying sneakers, though… well, that demoted me to the class of dimwits. “Do you cross-train?” the salesman standing in front of a wall of sneakers asked me, producing in the same breath a shoe whose top was crisscrossed by a straining pink mesh that reminded me of my late grandmother’s corset.

Cross-train? I mulled over the new term until I remembered someone at the gym where I take Pilates (barefoot) mentioning a cross-training machine. “No,” I shook my head. “But I’m size eight, medium.” Surely he’d appreciate an easy-to-fit customer.

Unimpressed by my helpfulness, he pulled down another pair. “Do you need the sneakers for jogging? Walking on the treadmill?” He pointed at an air-bubble, like the one in a plumb-ruler, set in the back of the heel.

I thought of my nature walks—in the woods, by rivulets and on rocky inclines. How would I keep the air bubble centered? And if I did, how would I even be able to see it? “I just need sneakers.” I pointed to a white-and-blue pair that looked benign enough. “What about these?”

“Do you do aerobics or jazz?” He drew my attention to the fact that the sole of the sneaker was broader than the top part, which would add balance if I did aerobics, but might make a pivot in a jazz routine treacherous.

“Yes, I dance.”

So he turned to a Lucite display where, like a trophy, there stood a sneaker whose two-inch bottom seemed to have been made from stalagmites and stalactites meeting halfway, leaving miniature caves. “Shock absorbers,” he said.

The caves seemed like a perfect refuge for pebbles and small cockroaches. “Too much sneaker,” I said.

He turned away from the display in obvious dismissal of that option for me; I was undeserving of that special marvel of human engineering.

Trying to save face I offered, “I have a high arch.”

His eyes searched the ceiling and his brows crinkled as he considered that new obstacle. Then his gaze traveled back to the selection on the wall, and he pulled down a sneaker. He flexed it lengthwise and widthwise, explaining the technology involved in designing an arch support. I was grateful that at the car showroom no one had suggested I crawl underneath the axle for an engineering lesson.

The salesman compared this Eighth Wonder of Shoe Engineering against a more cushioned shoe, which would provide a better spring… if I were jumping hoops, that is. In my compassion toward the salesman, I scoured my brain to give him something to work with. “I’m planning to ride a bike.” Well, I used to, and they say you never forget.

He handed me a single shoe with Day-Glo strips at the back and sides. Like a chef waiting to hear praise of his Banana Flambée, he watched me with eager eyes. Not knowing what to do with the shoe balanced in my hand—sniffing it as I did in the car seemed awkward—I weighed it in my palm. “It’s heavy,” I said.

He pointed at the strips. “Reflectors. Good for riding after dusk.”

“I need a pair that would be nothing special, you know, for everything.”

It was no use. I would have to throw my lot with good faith. I yanked a shoe off the wall. It had no mesh, or bubbles, or caves, or glow-in-the-dark features. The heel did not extend out. The gentle-looking sole would allow some toe-pointing. The stitching was a bit fancy, and a purple-and-yellow combination was not my favorite color scheme, but this simple Neanderthal model, from times before shoe technology had become a university degree, seemed right. “What about these? How much?”

“Ninety-five dollars.”

I left the store sneakerless. At least I have a car and a computer.

You can follow Talia Carner here.

I turned 50 this past December, and guess what? My life isn’t over. I didn’t slide down that slippery slope of aging I kept hearing about. If anything, the most amazing thing happened. I woke up. I have morphed into my authentic self like a butterfly emerging from its cocoon.

I was as surprised as anyone to experience this awakening, since I believed much of the rhetoric that abounds about decline, depression, and despair being hallmarks of aging. I felt that angst in my 30s, but throughout my 40s and marching into a new decade I began to feel a different mantra struggling to the surface. This mantra said, “You are not who you were, only older.” It wasn’t until I turned the corner on 50, however, that I let that mantra break free with all the strength of a gale force wind.

I began to seek out other women in midlife to find out if I was the lone wolf experiencing aging as a rebirth. I didn’t know what to expect, but what I found in talking with women in their 40s, 50s, 60s, and beyond is a collective commonality. I found that, like me, they are happy being where they are, and have no desire to go back to any of the earlier stages or decades of their lives.

Suzanne Braun Levine talks about this very thing in her book “Fifty is the New Fifty.” She writes: “The assumption is that youth – or at least younger – is the ideal state and that given a chance, no woman in her right mind would relinquish it. I have found the opposite to be true. Many of us are delighting in rejecting that backward-looking mindset and focusing on (to paraphrase the song from The King and I) ‘the beautiful and new things I am learning about me day by day.’ The range of things to learn about ourselves is now as wide as it hasn’t been since we were adolescents. So much about our bodies, our thinking, our relationships, and our approach to the world is under review – by us for a change.”

Evelyn Kalinosky

When you look at the reality, midlife and beyond is longer than any other stage of life. My mother is 92 and still kicking, despite two broken hips that have relegated her to a wheelchair. If I share my mother’s longevity genes, I have another 42+ years of life to live – way longer than childhood, adolescence, or early adulthood stages. That’s a tremendous amount of time to simply endure, to simply exist. Newsflash: I have no intention of simply existing, and neither do my midlife soul sisters, most of whom, like me, can expect to live another 25-30 years or more. Our mothers and grandmothers may have felt that “the change of life” meant their lives stopped changing, but for today’s midlife-and-beyond women, that meaning is no longer inevitable thanks to the women’s movement and our willingness to rewrite the book on aging.

The real challenge to this stage of life is to get to know ourselves in this new context. Who is this person who declares, “I no longer care what others think of me,” and means it? Who is questioning the meaning of her work, and the nature of her relationships to see if they support who she is now? Who is waking up to the wealth of possibilities, and is willing to tackle a new and totally out-of-character experience just for the fun of it? Who, despite understanding that life and death are not just words any longer, keeps moving forward?

The struggle is to learn which parts of ourselves are true and authentic, and which parts are conditioned responses based on “faulty” messages we may have received when we were younger. For me, these “faulty” messages said that what I had to offer was my physical appearance – not my intelligence, not my compassionate nature, not my curiosity, or quirky sense of humor – and even that offering wasn’t good enough. That baggage has dogged me year after year, and the more I challenge it, the more I realize that it has nothing to do with reality – it has nothing to do with who I really am or what I have to offer.

I wasn’t capable of knowing that, of owning it in my 20s or 30s, and just began to grasp it in my 40s. That’s why I can say with complete candor and honesty that given a pill that would transform me back to age 25, I would not take it. Yeah, right, you say. Skeptics abound, I’m sure. Who wouldn’t want to be younger given the chance, but for me, going back to who I was at 25 means living the life of a people-pleaser, a caretaker lacking enough self-worth to recognize my gifts and maintain boundaries. The truth is, there is no magic pill that will transform us back in time, and we don’t need one. What we need is to live the stage we’re in, and to be willing to keep growing. Nothing makes us older faster than standing still, stagnating.

That knowledge has empowered me enough to become an entrepreneur at age 50, and I work with other professional women 50 and over to create a midlife and beyond that’s as unique as our fingerprints. All the roads I’ve traveled have led me to where I am today. The lines on my face are reminders of these roads (though hopefully a little less weathered). I know that my path is not anyone else’s path, despite that collective commonality I mentioned earlier. Each of us cuts our own unique trail through life. I also know that who I am today is not who I will be in 10 years, let alone 20. I will not be “the same person, only older,” but will continue to embrace the evolutionary process that is a fundamental part of aging. And although the path I cut is uniquely my own, I’m sure my midlife soul sisters will keep me company along the way.

Follow Evelyn online at www.evelynkalinosky.com

Dr. Helen Tam

Since BoomerCafé is all about baby boomers with active lifestyles, we like this story about Helen Tam, a gung-ho sailing enthusiast who proves it’s never too late to discover new passion. The cool thing is, it’s adapted from an article that appeared in SAIL Magazine, written by like-minded boomer (and sailor and surfer) Mike Petrie. He calls Ms. Tam a Love-Smitten Beginner.

When you’re a smart, bi-coastal, successful, physically fit boomer woman with a busy medical practice who pursues life experiences with real fervor, where do you turn for new challenges? To the sea!

Dr. Helen Tam has pursued her newest interest – sailing – with all the passion of a love-smitten teenager. A little over a year ago she knew little of sailing or the ocean. But in the span of a single year she has crewed in yacht races on both coasts, completed nearly every Coast Guard Auxiliary class available, is studying to obtain her Captain’s License, and purchased her own boat. This dedicated hardcore beginner is a force to be reckoned with. I happened to mention her zeal for the sport to my editor at SAIL magazine and was immediately asked to write an article about Helen.

And so it was that on a recent warm day in Southern California, Helen and I set sail. My interview was a hit and miss operation, as her concentration was focused on every nuance of the boat; she kept leaping into action trimming sails, adjusting this-and-that, and only addressing my questions between nautical tasks. Throughout the afternoon, this woman’s energy level never waned.

Q: What turned you on to sailing in the first place?
A: Hmm. Mid-life crisis? I’m at that stage of life, ha-ha. A baby boomer looking to add some excitement. But I’ve always loved the ocean.

Q: Was there some pivotal moment when you knew that sailing was just what the doctor ordered? Pardon the pun.
A: First time out! Sailing a Catalina 25 (one model of sailboat) with my friend in San Diego Bay. Twenty-five knot winds, white caps, water over the rail. I didn’t know anything about sailing and the skipper had a look of trepidation on his face. But I felt thrill and excitement instead of fear.

Q: How about since then? The ocean can be a dangerous place. Any moments where fear entered the mix?
A: (Laughing) I’m crazy, I suppose, but I’ve never yet felt scared on a boat. I did an accidental gybe that first time out and survived. Another time I capsized in a Lido 14 (another model of sailboat) during Santa Ana winds, but was able to right it just as an oncoming ferry was approaching. It was a close call, but I survived with the boat – and myself – intact. Each time, I felt as if I cheated death (more laughter) and that just makes it all the more exciting. Don’t misunderstand. I have a healthy respect for the ocean, the dangers involved, and always try to take appropriate precautions.

Q: So, you’d recommend sailing to anyone looking to add a dose of excitement to their life?
A: Oh yes! Excitement, challenge, adventure. And learning new things like navigation, boat-handling, dynamics of wind on sails.

Q: What were your worst times out sailing?
A: There are no worst times. Sailing is like pizza: ALL pizza is good, some pizzas are merely better than others.

Q: What is it about sailing that turns you on the most?
A: (Again laughing) Every time my boat heels and water comes over the rail! Chasing after the tall ships at Dana Point with my little boat and getting caught in the mock cannon battles; flying my spinnaker; crewing and honing my skills yacht racing; winning an all-female race recently at Naples Yacht Club in Florida. EVERYTHING about sailing is such a turn on. But I guess what I truly enjoy most is winding down after a day of sailing my boat hard, and simply watching sunsets at sea. The sky turning a fiery orange, wanting it to go on forever, not wanting to return to port, to just keep on sailing … to head for the South Pacific instead.

Q: Is that a goal? To sail the South Pacific?
A: Absolutely. I’m trying to find a crew position for the next Transpac race (from California to Hawaii) to get ocean-crossing experience. My real goal is to cross solo one day.

Q: If you were to sum up your experiences sailing into a one-liner, what would it be?
A: I cheated death again!

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that old age — if a boomer can even be described that way — crept up by surprise. I have sensed it coming in many ways.

I heard it coming, with the occasional creak of bones. I detected it every time I tried to clip my toenails. (Which reminds me: how is it that, with my body shrinking, the distance between my hands and my toes has increased by an order of magnitude? It has gotten so much harder to care for my feet at the same time that these extremities cry out for additional attention.)

I felt it coming too, as the flesh on my upper arm loosened so I could feel it jostling for a stronghold, then giving up and yielding to gravity. And I saw it coming, more and more every day, when I looked in the mirror. I just avoided looking as much as possible.

Being out and about though, I couldn’t altogether avoid the mirror. But maybe it doesn’t matter, because somehow in the last two or three years I have stopped being visible. It’s like when a woman is pregnant; others know you are there, but they assume you are not in the game. You may be working, you may even have a position of respect, but you aren’t taken as seriously because your physical situation is an obvious restraint.

Well, when you have passed a certain age, it’s no different. You are there, but you aren’t REALLY there. You aren’t a player. You are irrelevant.

And the physical changes, evident though they are, don’t feel as bad as the psychological ones. A few months ago, within the space of two weeks, two different people asked me what I “used to do” for a living. They made the assumption that I was retired, that I didn’t need to work anymore. Their offhand remarks were a dagger. I had a sudden flash of a 59-year-old woman fishing for business (in my case, looking for writing assignments) as if she were a 30-year-old, ridiculously competing with 30-year-olds for work. I no longer felt energized and experienced; I felt… pathetic.

Last week I was having coffee with a 40-something fellow who was about to head an alumni association. We were meeting because he wanted to know what I was doing as head of a similar group. He then explained, “The person who used to head my alumni association is very capable but is at the end of a career and we need officers who are still fully immersed in theirs.”

“Oops,” I thought to myself, “Does he realize what he is telling me? That I am too old to be doing what I am doing?” So I said, aloud, “I probably should be stepping down from my group too. We need younger blood. But I should mention that networking is useful for people at any age, not only the youngest ones. I have to network all the time as a self-employed professional.”

“Yes, of course,” he murmured expansively. “But you already have a network, and a good one. At this point you are only trying to enrich it. The young alumni need to build their network from scratch.”

No! WAIT A MINUTE! Me too, I am still scratching, nowhere near the point of having “arrived” and therefore entitled to a little coasting. Some of my friends, yes — those who have retired from companies they headed, or departments they guided, or enterprises they created from scratch. The economics of their situations aside (because the economics have changed for everyone this year), they can safely feel that they have grabbed the brass ring and held it in their hands. I can’t. It’s still out there waiting for me, and I have got to pursue it with all the vigor that my softened muscles and slightly stiffened limbs can muster.

Discussing this with a 50-ish colleague, I lamented some career choices that I had made in the context of marriage and family. “If I knew then what I know now about how successful careers are built, maybe I would have focused more on work instead of trying to straddle job and family and pretending that I could succeed equally well with both.”

My colleague demurred. “Friends I know made just that choice. They gave up marriages and children to concentrate exclusively on their careers. And now they find themselves unemployed. Their companies pushed them out or went out of business or merged with someone else. All these friends have are scrapbooks with some clips. You have clips and kids, a spouse and community accomplishments. You chose wisely, in my view.”

That perspective on success versus failure did catch me by surprise. But it’s hard to argue with facts.

Based in Italy, Claudia writes for international publications and corporations.
See www.flisi.net, Pink magazine, Diary of a French Facelift  and www.worldreviewer.com/member/claudia-flisi (for riding vacations)

Girlfriends, let’s get real. No one can stay young forever. No surprise there, right? Well then, why do we spend so darn much time and effort trying to “stay young”?

We all would like to look like we did when we were 25 (or maybe not). I for one, would not. At 25 I had those nasty crooked teeth that I no longer have and I’m in better shape now. I would like to have the thicker brown hair I had at 25 but that’s long gone. But so what. Thank God for wigs.

Most important, I’m a lot smarter now than I was at 25. For example, I don’t allow awareness of my chronological age to dictate how I think or live my life. I’m living as if I will live forever. I have no plans to move into a “Golden Ghetto” and vegetate with depressing old ladies who wear purple hats. Frankly, I think retirement communities should have a “black box” warning at their front gate: “Caution: This is a place where old people come to play and decay. Enter at your own risk.”

So much for being smart. Let’s get back to this “staying young” thing.

As impossible as it is to “stay young,” it is not impossible to keep basic youthful attributes. To me, that means staying healthy, strong, and flexible both mentally and physically. And, you have to be productive. (Sorry about that, but post retirement productivity is not a punishment, it’s a gift that you give yourself to stay — are you ready for the magic word? — ageless. More than that, it’s becoming a financial necessity.)

Look, you are going to get wrinkles. So what. If they bother you all that much, get them lasered away. Whatever it is about your face that bothers you, you can get it fixed. But know this: You can be wrinkled and ageless.

If you start an exercise regimen early enough in life you can stay a shapely size 10 forever. But if you are at a point where you no longer have a waist, so what? What’s more important is your health, and what you are doing with your life that is of benefit not just to you, but to others. You are going to get aches and pains, and maybe worse. But I am firmly of the opinion that if you take care of yourself early on, you can handle the slings and arrows of age more effectively.

I often quote Dr. John W. Rowe, author of Successful Aging. He maintains that how well we age is 70 percent the result of lifestyle choices. The rest — the other 30 percent — we can blame on our genes. Here’s the reality: The older you get, the more aggressively that 30 percent tries to rule and ruin your life. Having said that, I also firmly believe that if you take good care of yourself while you “still got it goin’ on,” the negative side of your genetic makeup can be mitigated. It doesn’t always work, but I believe it takes the “edge” off whatever happens. For example, many people believe arthritis, or the tendency toward it as you get old, is inherited, and once you get it you are stuck with it. Maybe so. But plenty of people have learned how to manage and even eliminate arthritic symptoms — inherited or not — with exercise and diet.

Here’s the bottom line. Staying young is impossible. Let’s get over it. That doesn’t mean we should stop trying to look as good as we can. Every woman wants to look great and she should (most men, too). However, chasing youth sometimes gets in the way of common sense, which should tell us when it’s time to stop doing stupid stuff that will never get us to where we once were or would like to be.

Listening to our common sense means we stop buying expensive cosmetics that can’t possibly do what they promise and instead, buy supplements and quality food. It means that instead of buying more clothes and worthless junk we buy a treadmill. I often watch a home shopping show while walking on my treadmill. It’s disturbing that so many obviously old women call in to buy rings, bracelets, and other useless trinkets. I wonder if they spend the same amount of money to stay healthy or improve their health.

Being ageless should be the Holy Grail of the aging process. It’s the one thing we can control because it’s a choice — an act of the will and not a whim of the Universe. If you can muster enough determination and toughness to outsmart the machinations of Mother Time by deciding to live an ageless lifestyle, the payoff is unbelievable. When you choose to be ageless, when you choose to ignore your chronological age, you finally get to experience an exhilarating liberation that no amount of trying to stay young can produce.

Barbara Morris live in Southern California.
Web sites: PutOldOnHold.com and NoMoreLittleOldLadies.com.

Maybe the dumbest career blunder I ever made was getting a PhD in physics because I thought people would say I was smart. Wrong career move; wrong reason.

Getting fired as an investment banker (right career move) when I didn’t like finance (wrong reason) was another of my many foolish fiascos.

Fired. Quit. It doesn’t really matter. I changed jobs and careers often over twenty-five years, and collected here what I learned about what not to do. What I did wrong, may point the way for others to be right.

I’ve worked as a car washer, taxi driver, physics professor, management consultant, book publisher, author, and investment banker. Since I’ve had so many careers and mistakes and changes myself, I feel I’ve earned the right to speak with confidence about them. I’ve seen myself and other boomers recover from making poor career choices or bad job decisions, and learn by correcting plain errors in judgment. Somebody has to do this.

Does each of us have a lifetime allotment? Is the idea to make our mistakes quickly — to get them out of our system, over and done with — then move forward? I’ve paid those dues myself, and as a result became interested in helping other baby boomers do the same: I am now a career consultant.

So here’s my lifetime goof list. What are your own favorite foolish fiascos?

• Working at changing a job or career — only when I was unhappy.
• Waiting for opportunities to fall into my lap.
• Deferring decisions until I was fired or burned out.
• Intellectualizing about where to go and how to get there.
• Hoping to fall into something by being a generalist.
• Allowing negative prophecies and despondency (the “nocebo” effect, the negative counterpart of the placebo) to overwhelm my job choices and career decisions.
• Coming to conclusions prematurely, without reflection (“chicken little syndrome”).
• Imagining that I could read other people’s minds without supporting evidence and corroboration.
• Taking everything personally — which made me angry, guilty, or depressed.
• Believing that success in one area automatically translated to success in every area, without the need for the same effort that led to the first success.
• Assuming, without debate or doubt, that what I imagined my critics said about me was true, without bothering to determine its validity.
• Aspiring to be perfect in all things, especially when setting my work standards unattainably high.
• Comparing myself to others who are more accomplished, and accepting a negative and discouraging contrast.
• Worrying about what I couldn’t change — instead of coping with what I can.
• Responding “Yes, but …” to every positive thought, intention, or bit of good advice.Deciding I must earn the same money, or maintain the same level of status, responsibility, or prestige in my next career or job — instead of pursuing what I enjoy doing well. Believing I’d be hired to do something only because I have been formally trained.
• Getting another degree when it isn’t a requirement for work I’d really like to do.
• Keeping my feelings of dissatisfaction to myself — or dumping them on my family and friends … or on myself in angry self-criticism. 
• Expecting my work-life to bring complete personal fulfillment.
• Burning my bridges behind me.
• Ruminating on what I should have done in the past, instead of focusing exclusively on what I can do in the future (“shudda, wudda, cudda”).
• Postponing gratification in my work or my life indefinitely.
• Staying where I was for fear of failing elsewhere.
• Holding onto an irrational belief that I owe a lifestyle commitment to my current employer, my next job, or my career, or to a sizable investment in my habitual expertise (which can be a form of ‘addiction’).

Everyone makes mistakes. Even dumb mistakes. But smart people make dumb mistakes and learn from them. They remind themselves of their strengths. They re-affirm their assets without denying reality. They don’t dwell on their failures. They learn and move on. I did. You can.

During the darkest days of World War II, many boomer parents heard and sang a Johnny Mercer/Harold Arlen song: “You’ve got to ac-cen-cu-ate the pos-i-tive.e-lim-i-nate the neg-a-tive.” Let’s bring this song back.

I knew somewhere in the depths of my heart that I had wanted to dance for a long time, but I had so many commitments to so many people, so many details to look after, that for more than twenty years I kept telling myself time wasn’t right.

There is a magnet on the door of my refrigerator that says Don’t postpone joy. I guess the morning I stumbled across the Caruso Dancesport Center ad, I finally decided to stop ignoring my magnet. This is the story about how deciding not to postpone my joy changed my life.

I’m sharing my experience in hopes that it might help other women like me who are seeking to rediscover themselves. There are many of us who are eventually forced to confront the question of who we are, and who we want to be come. We have made the choice to be caretakers, to provide for our families, whom we cherish, to work at our careers as best we can. This in itself is a huge achievement, but there are dreams that weave their way through our daily lives, filaments of desire and magic, which we put aside in the immediacy of our many obligations.

To try and fulfill a dream can mean to risk everything – your health, your family, your friends, your finances, and ultimately your own imagining of who you are. You have to embrace the risk, you literally have to jump off an emotional cliff and go into free fall.

This, then, is the story of my year of discovering competitive ballroom dancing and what it meant to me. It is about setting a tremendous goal to be reaching in a year’s time. It is about pushing myself to go for it.

I don’t think I could have dared without the support of my husband. Without him it would have felt too lonely. But I have always felt that the hardest battles, those we fight at 4 in the morning, are solitary, with no awards or applause. These are the battles that go on within our psyche, of the self divided between wishing and doing. Will you dare to compete against yourself?

I knew there was no magic wand to make me an instant Dancer. The wand was hours and hours and hours of just plain hard work.

There were moments, even weeks of genuine terror and despair for me. When my mind or my body refused to function at all, much less at the standard I had set, it was truly discouraging. When I had practiced and practiced until I was tired to the bone, and still had not met my expectations, it was agonizing. But I had taken a do-or-die dictum. I was going to give every breath in my body and every shred of will power to make this dream come true. If I failed, or even died in the process, so be it. I would not capitulate.

I was going to dance.

My image of myself as an ill person had to be overcome. I had had years of pain management. I knew the rules were in order for me to live a normal life. They were a strict regimen of diet, rest, exercise, and minimum stress. The fact that I also had a torn meniscus in both knees, only 50% use of my right arm from a fracture that never healed properly, and damaged nerve roots in my lower back were obstacles. These were fears I had to get over to achieve my dream of being a serious ballroom competitor. It took all of my courage and more. It took every ounce of willpower and discipline that I could muster. It was worth it – the music made it worth it, the dancing made it worth everything. It became my life. A healthy life!

Lydia Raurell’s Web site.

Click here to read about Lydia’s book – The Year of Dancing Dangerously: A Woman’s Journey from Beginner to National Leader in 365 Days
 - at Amazon.com.

As the years amble along, so does the body. Unfortunately it is mostly going south.

It is time to take a good look in the mirror (full length). If you are totally satisfied with what you see, you may stop reading this right now. But if you are like most of us baby boomers, our bodies and faces have a mind of their own.

This is not a dissertation on all the new methods of facial surgery and improvement. That’s because there are things you can start doing for yourself without the aid of a surgeon or dermatologist.

Check out your body. Do you wear the same size you’ve worn for the past ten years? Assuming of course you are satisfied with that size.

Diet is a bad word, one I personally detest. The minute I think diet… I want to eat. But start thinking about where you can pare off some calories. Eliminate your mocha java, sugar in your coffee, desserts, etc. You can actually change your eating habits where you almost won’t feel the pain. And your healthy and energetic side will thank you too!

For women, the hairdo is next. Have you been wearing long hair in a boring style since childhood? Long hair is great on the very young, but as the aging process sets in it may be time for a new and more upbeat hairdo.

Makeup: this too is for women only. Maybe you are wearing too much or too little. Drop in to your favorite department store. Those ladies behind the counters cannot wait to get their hands on your face and sell you a bunch of new makeup. So you can appease them by buying one or two products.

I know we all hate to pay retail. Evaluate your clothes and twirl all the way around as you look in your full length mirror. Do your clothes fit well? What about the color selection and how does it make your skin appear? True miniskirts and leisure suits are probably not appropriate… but it is all about how you look. You are the very best judge of this. Pick out clothes that make you feel good with lively colors that give you joy inside. Nothing is more beautiful than a confident person. This is a great beginning, and the cost is a whole lot less than drastic measures.

Facial exercises are great for both women and men. Easy to do and free after you purchase the video and instructions. The younger you start these exercises, the better the results. So, there are many small measures you can take to improve the way you look, and equally important, how you feel about the way you look!

Click here for Carol’s Web site.

If this sounds far-fetched, you haven’t seen the newest real estate phenomenon in Roseville. It’s a national demonstration home for advances in housing elder generations. The single-story house opened Oct. 23 and is a glimpse of what might happen when 70 million baby boomers hit their 70s and 80s.

“Three hundred-some people have toured this house,” said Sheri Peifer, vice president with Carmichael-based Eskaton Senior Residences and Services. It’s a daily pilgrimage of architects, home builders, technology insiders and elder-care professionals. Visitors came one recent week from Florida, Georgia and Oregon. The 1,850-square-foot house is a joint venture with Roseville builder Lakemont Homes.

Most people associate 40-year-old Eskaton with assisted living. But its demonstration house is a pitch to the design and building industry for what’s possible now in standard senior housing. The new in-home technology on display helps seniors with what they want most: to stay in their own house as long as possible.

Click here for the rest of the story.

In the years after World War II, Americans packed up their young families and Army surplus camping gear and headed into the national forests to hunt, fish, and hike. Going to the woods was part of what it meant to be an American. Today, however, visits to the national forests are off 13 percent.

Top officials at the U.S. Forest Service blame it on circumstances outside their control — rising gas prices, the popularity of video games and the Internet, and an increasingly urban and aging population less inclined to camp out.

Critics focus on fees charged for hiking trails and visitor centers, a proliferation of noisy off-road vehicles and the declining proportion of the Forest Service budget dedicated to recreation.

Read the rest of the story.