and successes of women and girls in their daily lives girl talk and also be heard on k s k q national community radio at eighty nine point five f m on sundays and today we are women and aging is the topic this is part two we've already had a lively discussion and we'll review a few things from part one but sure why don't you introduce our g social artist right i'm a social artist which means that and there are a lot of us in the world jean houston has done many conferences and and training in social artistry so a social artist is someone who uses her heart her mind her conscience her courage and her creativity to engage with the world and wake people up and stimulate movement and change and improvement in the world and i am sharing johnson an educator a retired university associate professor write a column for the mail tribune called healthy aging that runs on sundays and also the executive director of a nonprofit that works with aging in place and older adults so i have many dimensions but i'm not a social artist but i love the fact that now i know social i think you are i think you are a social artist because you have a column in the paper and that reaches out to people and i'll take it they great cause so what we'd like to tell our audience that in part one i'll just give you a brief summary of what we discussed we decided that we discussed the fact that aging is an opportunity and that for women it is really reclaiming our power from men and from the consumerism that is present all the  and being present and engaged with younger generations is another way in which we age together with other generations we also discussed the fact that there is denial of ag and one way to actually address that is to listen to persons that we identify as listening leverage and we might get into that a little more so that the audience will understand what that is in awhile people ask me how old i am but usually i try to tell them before they are asked because and i mean i'm interested in knowing but don't have to hold they are like two i just say this is sixty nine years worth of living that i done and i can think it through and i i i want to be seventy nine and eighty nine and i want those to be healthy and beyond i get asked a lot i'm about ten or whatever age i happen to be feeling that day and i realize when people ask me i don't think about it i don't think about age so i don't i feel  met last summer when i was backpacking in the mountains in the high sierra i really got into appreciating my age i used to be you know like apologetic sometimes when saying how old i so it changes all the time but really i it's a surprise and when i hear the number it's a shock to me because i really do feel like a kid and i think that one of the ways that we stay young is by being in touch with our own child inside with wonder and siteman about the world so someday i will have completed sideways and my husband one week later will be ninety two years old and i mean yeah he won't be ninety you know you'll be starting his ninety how to approach life you know one thing is i don't take life quite so seriously as i said many years ago and that is a really quite honestly you know there there research that supports that as we get older and if we are asked how old is old what do you think that change is changes or eighty eight we might say well  probably hundred or if you're sixty five you might say you know old is seventy five or eighty five i mean look further away as we get closer into i think that's kind of a good thing actually as long as we you know experience in action are vital right in a way that we should be use it later she was you have to push and it is really important to keep moving i remember discovering many years ago the irony and i was kind of angry about it the irony of ok in your older years you know we shouldn't have to work so hard we should be able to relax because i was always you know got to do it do it do it push push and when you're older said something like i have to go twice as fast to stay in the same place this is true and and that i feel like i there are days when i don't want to get on my bike but i have to really feel into myself like is this laziness or is this really like i want to be kind to myself and not ride my bike and so it's a collectivity and exercise what could i be doing instead so it's memory depression medication that's a collectivity and because i'm memory challenge at the moment levels and get your docs understanding of what you do how much time you spend in the sun that you know there are there are no magic bullets but there are things that keep getting better we keep getting better at knowing kitchen literally her and she'll do the washing up the washing and for that source long as she has a project to she go out assigned as she walked did she she can't walk that well but she she uses her walker she does really well but the fact that she has a purse something to do and it's like the deep felt need to be needed that's so exposed in our relationship and i'm just i'm it doesn't make any difference but you need to feel that you are needed and that is was our fault for it makes all the difference in the world and related to that i agree it's very powerful but related to that is social connectedness people as they age need to know if they have family and friends and in our nonprofit we do fall risk assessments we go into the home and we help people look at their houses to see if there are things that they could be doing that would avert paul's prevent falls and we've done this now for a year and a half and we go into so many homes where women are living alone you know they're women average age maybe eighty six eighty five you're alone and they're depressed they missed medications they aren't connected i told my husband we do this together i said the best thing we could do we can based around you know a faith community and certain beliefs and values and so they always feel comfortable at home and i think that's really important so religious communities provide an excellent opportunity and when you go to opportunity whether it's in institutionalized religion or whether it's their own spirituality it's just not there at least in the students i teach and it's just and those or eighteen year old folks  very because they're not outside either i think i think being in nature and staying connected to the natural world is vital aspect of being alive person depression later in life so how do you deal with loss it could happen at any age but was is not easy to deal with how do you deal you know i i think if you can find  o use that term listening leverage if you can find somebody who allows you to let the sad out you know just that person maybe it's your spouse maybe it's a good friend maybe it's the clerk of the grocery store that lets you talk about what a bad day you had and just listens to letting that side out getting it out there and somewhere so you're not it's not circling and research going through your system way there are many others you know people will say have a know that well you know they're building very much in too big a hurry to get to the next place or do the next thing i think slowing down that that's my my song go slow i really believe in going slow because then you can pay attention are indeed going to actually know even intentionally intentionally ok i'm forcing my i'm putting the brakes on my tendency to ok next thing next thing do the next thing right let's get going right i have enormous impatience impatient and i'm constantly working against that but when i can feel spacious and go slow then you know i'm not in any kind of age or i'm not in tense i can just relax and be here i present i've read several articles about the one this ease that do this of the issues is loneliness you can be surrounded by friends and surrounded by family but still be learning lonely that is one of the issues keeps rising and the issues i read about  are are you know a social moment where they should be engaged and engaging and happy and getting more joyful and they can't hear a thing that's going on very nicely it is very isolating and in what is terrible worse is that hearing aids are are one of the best things that's happened digitally in the last two decades i mean they are one of the digital hearing aids are unbelievably helpful but they're so expensive so he people that really need them and some people really need them and they don't want them and that's another issue that's still no sign of born a lot of i think more and more i have i i think you're here and if people would be accept it but to to go to get hearing aids and i watched i watched myself and i was really shocked at that was the one area where i felt like i was like them i was like everybody else and as i had to get over it joanna macy helped me get over a friend who visited from you know i would i did get them and i was embarrassed and here you know or i've got to go get my hearing aids just right out there and i thought wow if she can do it i could do it absolutely just was like that i got over at that moment that i tasting something to malnutrition which can play into amounts of medication you take for example if you are evader sixty nine you're going to need less of any kind of medication than you would when you're younger because you're smaller and your whole system and it will not clear your body as quickly so all those things that are age related that again we need to know we know that when we might ask a doctor who's not as on top of it what happens if i take as much medication blood pressure medication now as i used to and they might say well i haven't weighed you lately or haven't we find out as much as we can with the internet we can find out a lot of things about our health and i think we're responsible for doing that and going to the doctor we need to be able to tell them what we know about what's going on in the bodies our minds and also we know some of the remedies and let them know that we're very knowledgeable and see what how they then respond well and i also think the doctor and the medical industry is labels i've probably had what's called arthritis for forty years and i don't call i just i'm sometimes i think yes sometimes i mean eighty and you know my bone density has changed but so what i've lost like four or five inches and i don't call that osteoporosis i don't go for bone density test because if i do a practitioner told me once she said i did go for a bone density test and they prescribe this medication that where you have when you take it you can't sit down for a half an hour and i and i thought yeah must be insane yeah i wouldn't do that for anything and then she said well why did you go why did you go for the test if you don't want to treat if yeah you have to know if you're going to get into the industry they're going t prescribe something that's ridiculously expensive and so i never went for another bone density test so what my bone density is less than a thirty five year old well of course it is i mean i'm seventy or whatever i was when i did that so i'm i'm not comparing myself to mitt romney and in real measures i think are for things that strength in her hands i got balance flexibility there you go i got all of those oh and i'm keeping moving i'm going to get on my bike when i leave here and go oh i'm so proud of you you do walk the wal in this regard i don't like your bike i buy local too i'm that i'm good we've got to buy i think ultimately the world is so messed up that there isn't anything we can do but take care of ourselves sharon johnson and fisher smith and our audience for listening to us this week on girl talk and our program can be watched saturdays at three and then also thursdays at six thirty as well as heard on k s k q eighty nine point five f m so why don't you think our crew i want to thank our crew the names just went by but i want to thank you all very much for being here on a saturday really appreciate the time the energy of those in the control room you've done a great job thank you so much and also to our audience we appreciate you for watching our show thank you thank you