Agewell: Taking a Long-Term Perspective

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Article by Mike Milstein.

Charmaine Field is the Family Support Services provider at Manuka Community House. In this role she works with families, whose members range in age from birth to their sixties, focusing on crisis management and individual counselling. It is intensive work and highly demanding mentally.

How does she keep energized and motivated about her work? “The work I do requires lots of sitting and talking with people so I focus on physical exercise. I also spend time on brain things, like crossword puzzles and Sudoko. I’m quite hooked just generally on learning, formal or informal, by DVD’s, magazines, or whatever.”

She also watches how others stay healthy. “When I look around me I see people taking physical activity more seriously as they age. Making sure one is physically fit seems to come with maturity.”

Charmaine looks backwards to understand how she has arrived where she is in life and forward to prepare for her older years. She has the interest and ability to reflect about the past and the future in part because of the work she does, but also because of her upbringing and life’s experiences.

She credits her mother for guiding her toward the direction she has pursued in life. In fact, her mother was a great role model. “She would read a book and summarise it in just 10 minutes. She had a passion for learning and retained what she learned.  She continued learning until she died.”

When Charmaine was a teenager her mother started psychiatric training and she put her study notes on the bathroom wall. Charmaine helped her review them and the experience contributed significantly to the career choice of social work and counselling.

Charmaine relies heavily on spirituality to respond to life’s challenges. “I grew into a realization of the importance of spirituality in my 30s and 40s. I continued to weave it together until I found the right pattern for me. It’s an integral part of what I do, say and feel. It underlies everything. Spirituality builds an inner strength. It gives you rest and peace, but it also gives you energy for life. My spiritual underpinnings have been really important, creating a foundation of belief that good will eventually win. I know it’s not always like that, but I still believe that if a person works with integrity and ethics that you’ll get a good result.”

At the age of 52, Charmaine is looking forward to more free time to travel and explore her passions. Her own children left home ten years ago, but her husband’s teenage son will be at home for a few more years.

 What’s next? “Well, I’m not going to get another bloke with a small child. I want to keep the one I’ve got!” she laughs. Instead she is looking forward to “having more freedom of choice about what we will be able to do.”  This will also require some rethinking about work, which is important to her. She feels lucky that she has lots of passion for her work. “I’ve been able to, in a sense, tailor-make my job to my energy levels. I work 4 days per week, but in another ten years I’ll want to down size that a little.

“I’m the kind of person who needs lots of mental stimulation so I’m thinking about how to do that. I think it’s about building on the things you are aware of about yourself, what your passions are and what motivates you. It’s also about looking at health care, particularly preventative health care, to be sure your body is in as good a place as it can be. For example, I stopped smoking 7 years ago. I think it’s about being both bodily and spiritually aware. It’s about finding your passion and spirit and keeping that connectedness.

“Thinking about ageing is a wee bit scary. I think about the things I do and don’t want to be doing in ten years time and how I will get there. I think conscious ageing is about walking alongside other people who are making discoveries and choices and who have passion in the lives they lead. It’s also about developing a history of one’s own successes so when the going gets hard you know you got through it in the past and you will now. Every challenge is just a blink of an eye in one’s life time. It’s best to have a long term perspective rather than obsess on momentary issues.”

Note: This article was published in The Leader, Nelson, NZ, on June 12, 2008. It summarizes an interview aired on Nelson’s Fresh FM that was conducted by Annie Henry for the Conscious Ageing Network (CAN) and sponsored by Age Concern, Nelson. If you want to share your thoughts with CAN or wish to know when interviews will be aired, send an email to agewell@xtra.co.nz.  

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