HEALTHY AT 100 by Robbins John

Author:Robbins, John [Robbins, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2008-12-09T20:00:00+00:00

10

Born to Move

The aging process has you firmly in its grasp if you never get the urge to throw a snowball.

—Doug Larson

When George Burns was in his nineties, he received a letter saying: “My husband and I are senior citizens and we still care about each other. Is it okay to make love in the 90s?”

George replied: “I think it’s best around 70 or 75. If it gets any hotter than that, I turn on the air conditioner.”

Like Jack LaLanne, George Burns understood that the greatest misconception people have about the aging process is that it’s synonymous with decline and illness.

Like a fish unaware of water, we move about in a world of invisible assumptions. We usually don’t realize how pervasive are such negative beliefs about aging. We take them for granted. And we unconsciously pass them on to our children.

Witness, for example, “Secrets of Aging,” which opened at the Museum of Science in Boston in 2000. Billed as the first comprehensive exhibit on the topic of aging, the exhibit drew more than a halfmillion visitors in its six months in Boston, then toured nationally to other museums throughout the United States. The most popular component of the exhibit attracted long lines of children. It was called “Face Aging.”1

After waiting in line, each youngster sat down inside a booth and had his or her face photographed by an automatic camera. After another wait, the child’s digitized portrait appeared on a TV monitor. Then, by tapping a simple keyboard, each youngster could rapidly call up simulations of what he or she would “look like” at various ages. By tapping quickly, the series of stills could be made to run almost like a movie. The series of “photos” went up to the age of sixty-nine.

Everything about the exhibit implied scientific truth. It was held in the Museum of Science, and it involved an impressive array of complex and nonhuman technologies: the photo taken by a robot eye with no human involvement, the computer-driven graphics, the “interactive” button that produced an aging effect forward and then reversed it if you went backward.

What did the children see? As the “years” went by, the computer added grotesque pouches, reddish skin, and blotches to their familiar features. Their faces sagged and distorted, becoming increasingly repulsive.

When the children emerged from the booth, they were shaken. One eight-year-old girl within the hearing of a Boston Globe reporter moaned, “I don’t want to get old.” When author Margaret Gullette interviewed children as they exited, she asked, “What did you learn?” The answer was always the same: “I don’t want to get old.”2

Whatever the people who designed the booth intended, the message that came across to the children was that regardless of the choices they might make in their lives, regardless of how they eat or whether they exercise, and regardless of the kind of people they become, they will inevitably become ugly as they age. The message they received was that with each passing year, their appearance would become, predictably and inescapably, more and more repulsive.

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