Visual Conversation Helps People Embrace Its Meaning…
My mother looked at me perplexed – “What does life look like after adulthood? I don’t understand. What’s after?” Dr. Bill Thomas engages her curiosity with what he calls this next phase of life in his new book, “Second Wind.” As boomers take center stage with numbers and passion, Thomas believes we are on the verge of a transformation and he describes his vision for life after adulthood – called elderhood, in his upcoming Second Wind Tour.
How can you possibly think beyond the monotony of your current adulthood? One Lifesprk family member, Marsha, shares a time when she walked into a business meeting and her phone flashed a call from her mom Betty. Without hesitating, she took the call. “Help – I’m out of toilet paper,” Betty stressed. Two thousand miles away, Marsha could feel her anxiety rising. Was her mom really out of toilet paper, or had she not looked in the right spot? For her, this is adulthood – life as an adult child caring for her aging parent from 1,800 miles away.
This stressful frenzy of ‘life out of balance’ is all too common for baby boomers who as Thomas believes, “have been caught up in a life where ’there’s always more to do and less time in which to get it done.’” Sound familiar?
Lifesprk is firm in its belief that the current path for aging in this country leads too many people to end up on what Lifesprk calls the roller coaster of crisis – with one health crisis after another. Like Marsha, many can relate to this roller coaster – whether it’s your parents’ ride, or your own. Lifesprk believes this roller coaster isn’t acceptable and it’s time to change the experience. Lifesprk is sponsoring Thomas’s Second Wind Tour bringing this visual conversation to Orchestra Hall in Minneapolis on May 9 to revolutionize the conversation and help people in the second half discover their second wind. Dr. Thomas describes the tour is “a companion to the book’s ‘second wind’ theme challenging the conventional narrative of decline in mid-life and beyond.”
Wherever you are in adulthood, know this – the power in discovering your second wind is possible. Take yourself out of the frenzy of the day for a moment and visualize it – what does your second wind look like? What do you see yourself doing in elderhood? What will life after adulthood mean to you? Breathe it in. Write it down. Who will help you achieve it for yourself and those you love? Now stop thinking and reach for it, I dare you.
Seek On! Dream On! Shine On!
