The other day, I was talking with my daughter Michele (Inspired Senior on Facebook) about a workshop she teaches for seniors on aging. My question for her was: “Why don’t older people create vision boards the way teenagers and middle-agers do??” There are all kinds of workshops, articles, internet postings, and other things I don’t even know about where people are taught the essence of creating vision boards for themselves.
When my mother (a college professor) went into assisted living, and then skilled nursing, there was an arts and crafts session where they did the same kind of “artwork” that kids in kindergarten are doing. This involved, mostly, cutting out pictures and pasting them on sheets of paper. It made me sad to think of my brilliant mother doing this kind of thing. She no longer had a “vision” about her future, and the paper was simply a collection of pretty images. When she had to move into assisted living, her comment was “well, I guess this is where I will die.”
She didn’t die in her room on the assisted living side, she didn’t die in the skilled nursing side. She didn’t die when we moved her to a place that was closer to my daughter. And she didn’t die when she was moved to an area where she could get better care. There was a long stretch of time between her first thought that her life was over and her last thought on the day of her death.
She still had feelings and she still wanted things, but she had no vision for her life – what happened?
Why do we give up on our future while we are still alive? Why do we stop imagining our lives after a certain point?
Even a person who has been diagnosed with a fatal illness still has a future, and they have decisions that have to be made. In the end, we all have a “fatal” illness because we’re all going to die, hard as that may be to accept. But, how do we want to live?
My vision board is a work in progress. I’m doing it on the computer rather than cutting pictures out of magazines. And I still have a long way to go.