It is not uncommon to find the people like Mr. Bard who spends his retired life alone in his house after the death of his wife who had been his companion for forty- five years!
His two children live in two different continents and cannot make it to pay a visit to their father more than once a year.
Not that Mr. Bard is complaining, but he is terribly lonely. His children are concerned, too, and desperately want to help their father so that he can live the rest of his life in a better way than this.
Do you also have a loved one who does not know how to spend his or her retirement years meaningfully?
Do you desperately want to help them out? Do you really want the color of the days of this last phase of his or her life to change into pure gold? Here are some practical tips to help your loved one to achieve a happy retired life.
Be positive towards life.
You will be able to age gracefully only if you maintain a positive outlook towards everything in your surroundings.
Being positive is easier said than done. While you know the value of positive thinking, you cannot always prevent yourself from doing the opposite that is, thinking in a negative way.
So how to keep positive?
First of all, stop thinking all the time about the things that bother you. As you approach the threshold of retirement, the factor that constantly keeps haunting you is your growing age.
Stop counting your age. Repeat the old saying whenever asked about your age; My age is how I look.
Another thing that makes your stress hormones secrete faster and more is the increasing or fast dropping of your weight.
It is only natural that weight will vary with growing age. Stop worrying about it. Your doctor knows better than you how to deal with their fluctuating performance!
Not only weight; stop thinking about increasing BP, lowering height and all those silly measurements.
You are paying your doctor, aren’t you? He will take all the necessary steps to keep them in control.
As long as you are not feeling anything wrong, do not bother to dig out a reason, have trust in your doctor, follow his instructions and you will be in perfect health.
And for goodness sake, avoid those typical old gentlemen, grumpy and always complaining. It seems they do not find any topic beyond cancer and Alzheimer’s disease to talk about.
Keep the company of friends who view life from a positive angle and who are generally cheerful.
Initiate a process where you can share the jokes among you and laugh a lot. The grumpiness of the environment accounts for a heaviness of the mind, whereas laughter is the best medicine for everything.
Make new friends, preferably with the kids and youngsters in their teens. From the outside, they may seem a bit irritating to you, but just make friendships and you will learn the funny side of their lives that will slash a good ten years from your age.
Even if you do not find anyone suitable in the real world, you can make friends in the cyber world.
Chatting over the internet will help you learn more what is going on the other side of the world, the way different parts of the world live, and so on.
You know there can be no end to knowledge, and what can be more helpful than the internet to acquire more knowledge?
Joining any program to learn something new is the best way of utilizing your retired years. Take a journey deep down inside and find out the thing that you always wanted to learn, but did not do it out for some reason or the other.
It might have been music; it might have been art or anything on the earth. Now is the time to sharpen up your hidden skill and let the world know of your hidden talent.
In short, keep your brain busy and keep the demon called Alzheimer’s away.
Lastly, take life as it comes. Having good health? Great! Work towards maintaining it. Not keeping good health?
No problem, do what’s needed to overcome the challenges. In short, live in the moment and do not count how many breaths you are left with.
