According to Pew Research Center 10,000 of us are turning 65 each day and retiring. Although most of of us in this bracket can expect extended lifespans many of us feel anxious about the future. The statistics suggest half of us will suffer from some form of dementia or Alzheimer's by the time we reach our final decades. How prepared are we and our loved ones for the increased amount of depression and disability we can expect in these so called "golden years." Financial planners may help us protect our pocket books during these decades but who is looking out for us to help us brave the psychological challenges?
Enter Retirement Reading: Bibliotherapy for the Over Sixties-a new book published by Changingtimes Press and available on Amazon. Laurence and Mike Peters are two former college English teachers who expertly analyze over 50 fiction and non fiction books that are key to psychological survival in your post sixty years. The Ancient Egyptians knew a thing or two about the power of reading; the motto over King Ramesses II's library (the world's oldest) was "House of Healing for the Soul."
The authors recommend these books not just as an antidote to society's enthusiasm for youth and its readiness to discard you together with your experiencebut also to give you ways to positively enjoy the aging process. the authors want you to delight in Cicero's rejoinder to youth that "the great affairs of life are not performed by physical strength, or activity or nimbleness of body, but by deliberation, character, expression of opinion." If you need a book to help you move beyond self pity and disappointment this is the book to read.
Not all the books discussed will meet everyone's needs, but the right book at the right time can serve, as Kafka so clearly put it, as "the axe for the frozen sea within us." Those Egyptian ancestors of ours may not have faced the retirement angst but they did try to help us with coming up with a way to address it.
Comments
To post a comment, you must
register and
login.
.png)
