- Here is the article I mentioned. I have included the web link, but I don’t know if you can read the entire article if you are not a subscriber so I also posted the entire article as a PDF.
The article isn’t just “throwing bones” to the old folks. It really makes sense. We have lost some things but also gained some very valuable abilities as far as creative production and the ability to communicate life at a different level.
At least read down until you come to the part about the cooperation of the right side/left side of the brain. The wall is lower because we need more cooperation, and because of this cooperation we can excel as never before. This is not fluff. We might not remember why we walked to the other end of the house, and our chess game and math ability may have lost a little of the zip, but we are primed for creative outbursts as I call them. But we need to use our minds and neither be imprisoned by the fear of failure or the awkwardness of our forgetful moments.
- Live and see what happens. That is what I am finding out as I am now on the “other side” of sixty and loving it.
Dave
Here is an excerpt, the web link and the PDF of the entire file ————————-
How To Live Long
It may be no coincidence that so many creative types have long lives. New findings show how doing what you love can add years.
By Jeffrey Kluger Monday, Sept. 23, 2013
Illustration by Serge Bloch for TIME
One of the greatest buildings in New York City was created by a very old man. You won’t find it on the skyline–it’s far too small for that. You have to get up close, at street level. It’s on Fifth Avenue, which for block after block obeys the old New York building rule of big and tall and flat–until all at once, at 88th Street, it doesn’t. There stands the stout, round drinking cup that is the Guggenheim Museum, with its natural light and spiraling floor and snow white exterior, parting the neat scrim of the streetscape and filling it with a bit of stylish defiance. The human genius behind that structural genius was Frank Lloyd Wright, who started designing the building in 1943, when he was 76, kept at it until ground was broken in 1956 and lived until 1959–just shy of both his 92nd birthday and the museum’s official opening.
“If you walk into any of Wright’s buildings, you see he didn’t think like us,” says neuropsychologist Donald Davidoff of Harvard Medical School. “His rooms can have seven different heights to them depending on where you’re standing. He thought in three dimensions, which is something we can appreciate when we see it but can’t do ourselves.”
Wright may have been unique in the style and quality and iconoclasm of his work, but he was not unique in how old he was when he did it–and that’s true in a lot of fields. You can keep your boy geniuses in Silicon Valley, your young guns tearing up the fashion world, your celebrated wunderkinder in music and art and finance and government. Spare a moment–spare more than a moment–for the superannuated creators: Goya, who produced some of his most haunting paintings when he was in his late 70s; Goethe, who finished writing his masterpiece, Faust, when he was 81; Galileo, who published his last paper when he was 74, just a few years before his death–at a time when average human life expectancy was 35.
