My Challenge

My challenge is to live an active life by aging healthier and younger (written in 2013)

Clearly from the picture above, everyone can see that fast forwarding 50 years from the picture from my great-grandmother Iida Karolina’s main picture has changed us considerably. Now the youngest woman in the other picture is the great-grandmother and I (the one in the middle) am the new grandmother (mummu). The age difference between the generations has shortened a little bit. In the older picture the ages were between 24 and 82 and in this one the yongest is 27 and the oldest is 77.

For me, what is the most striking in this picture is that it shows how the lifestyle choices of our modern life are affecting us by adding kilos to our bodies. Of course, it is also in the angles of how the pictures are taken but we are the proof of those statistics that say that our eating and living habits make us predisposed to all kinds of previously unknown illnesses. While our life expectancy rises, it does not follow that the quality of our aging lives gets better. In fact often it seems that we just suffer longer catching all kind of ailments before slowly fading away.

My experience

For obvious reasons, at having the privilege of following the lives of so many older generations in my own family, I have always been curious about old age. I have contemplated on the “wisdom of old age” and what it would be like. When would we be wise enough to show that experience. I have read a lot about how people see their aging process, researched and interviewed people in relation to their aging and worked amongst the older generations in age care.

My most memorable experience has been as a carer to my grandparents for ten year, where I witnessed the aging of two very different persons. My grandfather was totally comfortable with his aging and growing old and my grandmother was very uncomfortable with her aging. She stated often that she was not ‘aging well’. This didn’t mean that she wouldn’t continue having great gene expression in her looks even though she encountered dementia and other illnesses due to her earlier lifestyle choices.  My grandfather, on the other hand, died healthy as did my great-grandmother before him.

My contemplating question

There is a saying in Finnish that I have always heard about generational aging. This saying assumes that each generation is better, healthier or has more wisdom than the last (“pojasta polvi paranee”). In our case, my great-grandmother was the healthiest and died as the oldest. So, what has it been in the modern lifestyle that has caused the illnesses or other caused to disrupt a perfectly good saying? This is not to imply that some people do not live happily to a very high age. In fact I know some who have gotten their letter from the Queen for their 100th birthday and are happy centennials. It just hasn’t happened in my family, where the odds were very good from the beginning.

My challence

My challenge in this blog is to record my own attempts to understand the causes that have brought on the shortening of the life expectancy for our family. I want to learn more about healthy living and counter the effects of poor lifestyle choices, find and apply better choices and ultimately beat my great-grandmother Iida Karoliina’s 105 years of healthy and happy life.