I worry about worry-free living

For years, have been bugged by "full-services senior lifestyle residences" advertising.  One of the top tier senior residences near us offers "worry-free" - none of their need fret about yard work or cleaning, food shopping or cooking. It's all done for them.

Well, their idea of heavenly is my concept of hell. 

Where is the purpose of living when everything is done for you?  Women who took pride in their housekeeping & home-making, men who puttered with the family cars & kept their yards in Longwood-esque shape, suddenly have NOTHING to do with their time.  Doing those things might sound like drudgery, but they fill our hours, form part of our reason for being.  Imagine it  gone.  In the name of our own good.  

Imagine your typical day.  What did you do over the past 24 hours?  

Since yesterday morning, I helped John gather up & take out the trash, roasted tomatoes & onions for a vegetable compote, worked in my computer studio, wrote two blog postings, visited my online community & circle of friends, read three books, sent a couple e-mails, fed the cats, put some time on my "Senior Values-Vision-Dreams Project," made several phone calls, set up a coffee date next week with a buddy, took a grannie client out to dinner & back to her senior residence where we colored butterflies while listening to the local jazz station.  

That is a pretty typical day for me.  And it didn't include making lunch or supper, any housework.  While the elderly couldn't do a fraction of those things, they need to DO that fraction, an opportunity many who could don't get.  

I wish it was possible to put into words the frustration that haunts me with how we view "best practices" elder care.  It feels to me like the opposite of what is needed.  Where is the sense of purpose?  Where is even an understanding that HAVING a sense of genuine purpose is vital for the health & well-being of every single one of us?  

How can we get our older & elderly friends feeling that essential-for-well-being sense of genuine purpose?  We need to think way out of the box to ways they can feel needed, productive, contributing.   

It doesn't help that they live in such age-segregated communities.  What could be some options to that?

A body in motion tends to stay in motion, a body at rest tends to stay at rest.  While it's a lot easier to manage a bunch of bodies at rest, it does not serve them.  How can we nudge those passive bodies into the active state that is essential for their health?

Worry-free living worries me.  Human beings need concerns, we need problems to resolve & daily duties to keep our minds active, our hands busy, our bodies moving.  I don't have an answer to who we can turn around this miserable culture we've created over the past 50 years around aging, but I know it's got to be questioned, challenged.  A place to start is to break down the factors around aging & how its currently approached in the good ol' USA.  

When I grow old, my hope isn't for a worry-free life.  My hope is to age out of this existence the way my mother, my mother-in-law, most of my elderly friends did - bidding farewell to a life that was purpose-filled to the end.  

That's it - in a nutshell, how do we get from worry-free to purpose-filled?  Because THAT life is sure worth living!