BouncingBabyBoomer.com

A 40 Second Aging Test

This is the first time I have shared a piece of email hot out of the InBox (with an anonymous author to boot) as forwarded by a longtime friend. But it made me grin enough to just jump in and re-post.

Reasons why to follow.

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Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2009

Subject: 40 Second Aging Test  

The following was developed as a mental age assessment by the School of Psychiatry at Harvard University {yahsureyoubetcha she interjects}.

Take your time and see if you can read each line aloud without a mistake. The average person over 40 years of age doesn't get it! {beware of the early or frequent mis-use of exclamation points}...

Living As If

A dear old pal of mine, Dave deBronkart, survived a very scary bout with kidney cancer last year inspiring all of his friends in the process. He is now doing great health-wise and loving his new role as an "E-Patient" advocate (my series on HealthCare 2.0 next week will include several mentions from Dave's E-Patient blog ). Dave also has a Google list he calls "Living As If Your Life Depended on It" which talks about living with added meaning.  I would like to take a leaf from his book and borrow part of his phrase to apply in a slightly different way.

I want to suggest starting right now, that we as a nation live "As If" we were already OK, and then keep that image in mind each day.

 

I don't mean casting back to the days of shopping until we dropped (if you ever did) or counting your extra money (if you ever made some) or sampling the best food and wine you can try. I mean casting ahead to where you -- as a person -- want to be when we finish this long march towards our recovery, and then living as if you are already there.

 

What do you intend to be doing with more prudence and less haste? Where will you be more sensitive or less driven? What will you simplify in your life to feel less burdened? Where do you plan to take more responsibility for how things work out? Where will you contribute to something larger than your own needs?

 

Whatever you imagine will be your new, better country and your new, better self in it, please keep that image near the front of your mind every day. It can be our own national version of "fake it until you make it."

 

It also has a much stronger chance of coming true that way.

Prodding Us Into Swing-Voting Pens

Vilified. Victimized. Sanctified. Stratified.

We have become so "niche-i-fied" that any wedge will do when a politician needs another way to exploit a difference between me and you.

What used to seem like a statistician's insight has morphed into a cheerleading strategy that helps to frame sound bites in stadiums and pot shots in debates. Throwaway tags like "Joe the Plumber" are used to mobilize disposable interest groups that just might become swing votes in swing states if persuaded they had the power.

It is not the people driving the polls; it is the pols prodding us in to convenient cattle pens.

Call me naive, but I used to think it worked the opposite way when perhaps it never did.