Preparing to Age in Place

The public library can help reduce clutter!
Decades past I went to the library every weekend.
Then I moved and Amazon trained me to buy every book I wanted to browse. Click and it's mine.
Every year or so I weeded my bookshelves and gave them to the library!
Recently I learned that our modest neighborhood library can reserve any book in the large county library system. It's usually here for check out in 24 hours.
Faster than Amazon!
I'm in love with the library again.

I've been reading through many topics that appear under "Aging Well,” noting how often people express suffering, sometimes because of particular illness but often without certainty about the cause of the unhappiness...maybe "life is just too much."
I have certainly felt unhappiness, sometimes brief and sometimes lingering into a deeper gloom. It is a terrible burden when it won’t let go.

Psychologist Paul Eckman wrote that passing feelings are all healthy responses to life situations - happiness, sadness, anger, fear, distrust, curiosity.
Healthy feelings are flexible. They arise and subside, giving room for the next feeling.
It becomes unhealthy when a feeling becomes “locked in” and can’t pass away.

With age and the loss of energies and resources, painful feelings may be more likely to “lock in.” We need to explore and support our ways to move on from heavy feelings. And I can testify this isn’t always easy.

I find it’s very important for me to have projects that express my positive values in the world. These don’t need to be big projects, but it helps if they are somewhat independent of each other. If I decide to clean up my shop or the community barn, it’s just me, the broom and the sawdust. The clean shop will usually invite me to take on something more.
My neighbor, who has significant dementia, works her garden plot every morning. In the afternoon she does amazingly complex jigsaw puzzles, dementia over-ruled by her interest!

Quietly, in my heart I embrace her, because I know we are each finding refuge, and often joy in our work, grateful to move into feelings that affirm our lives. We can do something.

I find with neg reactions and subsequent feelings are best dealt with by taking that energy and creating something beautiful/good/ meaningful with my painting...and if this is negative situation created by another person who wants to hurt you, put you down; they can't do it because creative energy always wins...makes you stronger....and you are a better person ...whether it's painting, writing, singing, cooking, creating or mending a pair of socks.

From the hill wrote; "creative energy always wins...makes you stronger....and you are a better person ...whether it's painting, writing, singing, cooking, creating or mending a pair of socks."

At the heart of this is love. Whenever we reach out to any one, any thing, any feeling with gentle love, we are also lifted up to a moment of better life.
It can be as simple as a moment of appreciation.
Paying attention is a gift that gives both ways.

such good stuff here. Thank you all for sharing these pearls of wisdom.

Four months ago I set out to make my office/music room handicapped accessible. Thanks to a response by Savanah, I took a re-look this morning.
Things are a lot better. Most of the unnecessary leftovers are gone.
But I today realized three important rules:
1) Everything must be capable of being lifted and moved with one hand.
2) Everything above shoulder height must be light, easy to reach without stretching.
3) Objects must not be leaning against one another and likely to fall (such as long shelves of books.
Considering that I began this project standing on chairs to lift heavy boxes off high shelves, it's gone well.
It's "almost done."
Now it's just between Almost and Me.

Great reminder!!!thank you!

Also— I donated 350 art books to local college library and casual reading to local library, keeping my top 200.

Hey, Ed... another musician / home recordist here.
Very happy to hear you've tackled getting the music room in shape... a sacred space for some of us. ;>)
All the best!

/LarryG

@adr - I really like & appreciate your putting into words what I feel:

"There is a light inside of [each] of us that is begging to glow."

I once attended a service where each person was given a small candle, and theirs was lit by the person next to them, and so on to the next. At a certain point everyone holds up their light [candle]. It brought tears to my eyes, and [temporarily, for me] erased all of our differences, petty complaints and frustrations. Yet that image has been with me for over 25+ years now.

I look for that light in others, and I think I always will, but unfortunately somehow it seems to be hiding from others for fear of being blown out.

But still a hopeful image and memory of possibilities.