hi and welcome to girl talk my name is regina errors and my co host is carol voice and girl talk is a discussion of the opportunities challenges and successes of women and girls in their daily lives girl talk can also be heard on k s k q ashwin community radio at eighty nine point five f m on sundays at noon and today our program we're going to have our two parts part one and two women and aging so part one we have two guests today karen would you like to introduce our guests i would we have two guests and we have serge ons and also thought fisher smith and i'm going to ask them each to introduce themselves and got would you begin please yes my name is don fisher smith well stupid to say well you know don but if you are yeah i remember you said you wanted to be credited as a social artist and so i would like for you to tell us in our audience what to set exactly mean well i've been thinking about it a lot it's it's a wonderful phrase i think jean euston thought it out and social artist is someone who uses her courage her creativity her conscience and her heart to bring about change to wake people up to interact socially  do whatever she's motivated to do to wake people up and to bring about change in the world with whatever issues her conscience leads her i like that definition a good definition and in a way it covers all the i've done a lot of different things and it covers all of those and it's also in the moment and can happen at any time like right now absolutely so watch out ok briefly his i'm a retired university associate professor i have a direct nonprofit in with my husband right now called age friendly innovators because what age friendly  come along name but we focus on helping people age in place and then i'm not a social artist as your credits suggest but i am a male tribune columnist so that's kind theories of aging and some of them more attractive than others one is called the wear and tear theory and aging starts the minute we're born and we go through these cycles and  seems to be happening right now as as i get older i'm about to become seventy which is really a corner turning kind of moment i i am more in tune with who i am or who i you feel well that's wonderful and because regina earlier said to me remember this is about women and aging it's not just about aging that put me back into my sort of comprehensive overall view of our culture which is to remind us that we that we have been dumbed down by capitalism and and economics and the advertising industry and by the patriarchy by men to believe that we are objects and that we must be for ever beautiful like a doll and dumbed down and i think we in we've given our power away when we get consumed with how we look and how an image and we buy into the industry of of makeup and clothing and all of these things well we had a whole discussion here as we were preparing for the show about make up in those of those that are wearing make up and lives stick and yes i have to admit that i try to wear lipstick now because i think it gives my you know as i get older my face and color and but it really is something we're taught young girls are taught their mothers are role models and their mother societal over there but in our culture in our western culture it's all about image because the advertising because of the advertising industry and because of the huge amount of money that consumerism have to have so i questioned it can be very subtle further on this so how does the media really affect our age you know when we see young women in women sometimes we see older folks in only in ads that deal with pharmaceuticals so this is  image i mean some people don't watch t v anymore but how does the image we get from the media of fact the whole process of aging aging is obviously a process but how does what society and culture tell us in the media whether it's advertising or t v how does that affect us in our own a g well are we talking about you and me or us in general i mean i know in general we're asleep but in particular i  really talk about myself and my process and i feel like i that my my power as a an individual as a woman my personal power is in addressing myself and my own feelings about it and not falling into needing to please others or society can let's talk about how how women think not how they look otherwise we're that's what i want so i don't wear make up i never have since i was in my thirty's and and i don't know where high i don't dress for anybody i dress for comfort and that's that aren't aging well do not have that vitality that they put out this energy that you can see and dot all the time and i think that's what makes us live longer makes us live more healthy is an engagement with why that is expressed through vitality that is the best word for years and i you know i have an extreme amount of energy and for me i guess i quite that with vitality is that i'm engaged and lots have a louis as i get older and engaged in continuous learning i mean that's what ashland is wonderful in that regard and we have programs we have and i mean there's learning all the time and as agers if we can keep doing continuous learning if we can learn about aging if we can learn my big emphasis right nursing home and at a cost to you personally and to society that is off the charts and even with our health care system being what it is we're not talking about that to me for women who are the nurturers over time he ping women peers family i think about something like that that really we don't and i love hearing you say that because i've i figured it out totally for myself i think by the problem for me is is focusing on aging rather than focusing on being alive and being vital and being part of nature so that we know that everything dies we know if we watch the garden that the rose is only going to last a while everything has it's its time but i specially love what you said about falling because i i don't think about aging except as i think about practical things and i go backpacking and i finally decided that when i'm in the mountains and i'm that the biggest thing i need to do is be careful about falling because i've i've seen that when people fall it's like the beginning of the end it is and i don't that's not to work in your job and other issues how do you how do you stay focused in the present if that's really the key to eighteen holes with a healthy  didn't how do you do that how do you stay focused in the present and that's why i think how you do this is only we can only do one thing at a time i have a multi tasker i know well you do it your way you have to find your own and obviously we each have to find our own answer to that question if we think that's what works if we find out what works for us but but we can but  many don't and there's so much in denial about aging what do we do how to wait when we see a friend who is in denial of aging or we see a friend who's just retired and they're having real difficulty finding their passion after they've been working for sixty years how do we as caregivers as we are women how do we have a way and assist others in getting through that huge barrier yeah i think we're  talking about a number of different things here and i agree we can only if we can model for others i mean if you're an active age or if you're a continuous learning age or if you're a hiking age  to see that and think about it and do something with it what is true about the aging body all these various things that happened with the wear and tear of theory for example is our mental processes change many thing i have shrunk but but a big part of what changes is distraction is more intrusive and so what do you do about a loud noise in the background as you're trying to focus and stay in the moment well you make sure that you're hearing aids or probe appropriately tuned you asked the person respectfully does dr just you stay more aware because distractions are going to pull you into a different direction if we know that we know about aging and things that affect us and we can manage them more easily if we are and if we're paying attention then we learn as we go what what distraction is doing to us and we learn now that to take care of it and listening to your body which we you know we ask are our fourteen year old granddaughter is coming to visit us tomorrow and she's never spent a week with us before i don't even know her very well but i'm expecting actually to get better at aging by understanding her youthful exuberance and vitality and shyness and all these things that make up the package of women helping women and women helping themselves were being with young people yes that is that's one of my biggest things i went to spain to spend a week with my twenty year old granddaughter and i learned so much and i think staying connected generationally is huge and i just learned an awful lot what did you about that well her about well ok so there's the generation gap and there's the digital gap yeah and just to say  general terms to close the generational gap and to close the digital gap disaster ever keep the brain going whoa so i didn't know none of those when you give us an example yeah i i really have a love hate relationship with the computer with the with things like facebook i don't watch television and i don't listen to the radio and never have and but i have to i do i've chosen to be involved with the computer and i i intentionally made myself learn how to do how to do the facebook thing just so that i could understand the mentality and what i learned from my granddaughter is that social media has really changed the way young people think it has messed with their psyche and i think all of the social media and technology has has done something to our brains in a way to our social brains that we distracted we have no in durance for anything longer than five minutes we're very superficial you know these are not unknown things but i think staying active and learning new things all the time and being in the present and being with young people and because the reality is with your granddaughter i'm you we were both sitting side by side here's my fourteen year old here i am and we're asked to learn a new computer program she would learn it much like that and i would learn it but it would take longer time and if i can stay patient with myself and use so that's ok it's ok yeah and knowing about aging when people deny aging i think the things that you need to learn so you can manage the next step you know whether we're talking about wearing a computer program or anything else related to you you know now there's a fine line that i that what you said made me think of between because i i always question denial what you know what is what's denial because i don't pay much i don't think much about aging i don't think about it i just live my life and i forget things and and i know somebody else who's focused on aging or who doesn't who cares about it as a or or fears it is go saying oh oh it's a senior moment or oh i'm losing my memory or something i do as i remember that i've always forgotten things so i don't i don't think about the things that are happening to me i don't think of heart part of that i i think we all would agree with that but part of it is as we're all going to live a whole lot longer than we ever anticipated the vika heard that one of us will live beyond one hundred the two of us will is you know i hope notable i hope all is well and that would be great but what's also true is we are not going to avoid at age ninety or ninety five even the best of health throughout our lives we're not going to be able to avoid conic addresses but those problems things are going to be there and so managing those self directed chronic disease self management is actually a stanford course it's available in the valley so if that comes your way diabetes osteoporosis heart condition how do you tell i don't keep i do i do chronic conditions i've lived with for you know fifteen twenty years and what a few pros is and i actually went to my doctor here recently and i'm not on any of those medications fosamax or any of that but she did send me for another bone density test and every time i have those i get reminded yes even though you fall down and don't break bones you do have osteoporosis and she wanted to remind me of the sign went you know disease in that you're here today gone tomorrow but you know i'm cern's me about denial and it's happened with some friends of mine and even with my own mother and that is when she got to the point where she could not drive i had to take her keys away she said i'm fine vitality i know what i'm doing when i'm driving the car don't take my keys away you're taking away my independence let's not go got complaints from people who saw her driving and they said you know she's going to kill herself or someone else we can and that was denial on her part and then when you have to take it away it is heartbreaking magic so that's how we prepare for those moments in life when our independence is so tied to the fact that we can get around on our bikes we can get around our cars and all of a sudden someone family member says all right it's time to stop you're in danger in yourself endangering others and when there's total resistance to that what do you do there's a couple of things that i in my experience and i we have done that same thing with my father in law and my mother but i think you find the person who has listening leverage the person might be a doctor might be a daughter has was listening leverage christening leverage oh i  you approach it if you if you when you're communicating with someone if you say well let me give you an example when my thursday is garbage day at our house and if i'm gone all day and i come home and a garbage hasn't been taken out if i say to my husband you didn't take the garbage well that just goes downhill i say you message if i say i was hoping the garbage would get out it still didn't get out but it might be more likely to get out next week i'm not i ever says you is very powerful yes communications were very good we have the same yeah well ladies you know we're not quite out of town time but  i want to make sure that we can kind of finish up this part one we are going to have a part two where we can continue our discussion on aging so so let's let's kind of put some closing thoughts to this segment here on this was going to be on on issues in the next segment we're going to talk on solutions we want to talk about and i've taken some notes so at the beginning of our next section i will give a brief summary of what we did just in this portion and then in the second part what we're going to do is deal with healthy ways in which we can age healthy in a healthy way we've we've  down some of that already talked about some of that so let's maybe we can even repeat some of it that's ok but we're going to look at how do we really find ways to live into a gene living in our ag place or however we do it dot actually does it how we want to talk about that so we can share this with those women and men who are listening to it so that's where we're going to go we all actually do it i mean w have in common at this table are two things where women and i are getting older yes tell me something is there anyone in this world who's getting younger i know but perhaps the attitude keeps then you know youthful orientation almost out of time today so let's thank our guest sharon johnson and she is a columnist for the mail tribune and fisher smith who is a social artist and we all know what that is to helping us today with volunteering to be our crew we really appreciate it and thank you so much yes thank you so much to our audience for watching us on road valley community t v and no you can also hear two eighty nine point five f m broadcasting from ashland on sundays so bye for now bye bye we hope you join us for part two on women and