THE BABY BOOMER GUIDE TO CREATIVE AGEING
The late sixties and beyond are a landmark: a good time to choose what you want from the years ahead, and take stock of the story so far. This short, practical book offers you valuable guidance, new skills, and resources to help you to be happy in your vintage years and grow through the tough bits.
Chapters about Finding Your Gifts include Love Me Do on relationships, and Born to be Wild on fresh adventures. Digging Your Challenges includes Good Vibrations on managing your health, and Matthew and Son on work and money. Fresh Maps includes Won’t Get Fooled Again on changing your story, and My Generation, wisdom from others. If you remember the idealism of the 1960’s, this is a chance to renew it!
Alan Heeks is a natural happiness expert, workshop leader, and social entrepreneur who has been exploring wellbeing and resilience for many years. He has led many groups on creative ageing, and his second book was Out of the Woods: a guide to life for men beyond 50. Now 69, Alan is deeply engaged with the issues in this new book.
Praise for Not Fade Away:
Practical, informative and friendly. If you are over sixty but still feel alive and up for it, then Alan Heeks gives us some really useful hints and resources. Money. Relationships. Sex. Family. Work. It’s all in here – with good advice and ideas. Recommended for all of us who won’t just fade away! —
William Bloom, author of Feeling Safe: How to be Strong and Positive in a Changing World
Not Fade Away is available via Amazon, and via booksellers and online. The print book is £10 RRP, the Ebook version, RRP £7 is also available. See below for detailed Contents of the book.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER OUTLINE
- Rave on: finding your way in the vintage years.
Overview of book and approach: finding the gifts, digging the challenges, making fresh maps.
PART 1: FINDING YOUR GIFTS
- Love me do: reinventing partnership
Exploring different forms of intimate partnership in later life. Renewing a long marriage. Silver dating.
- You’ve got a friend: pals in maturity
Reviewing the nature of friendship in mature years; how to find, renew, repair them.
- Get it together: finding your communities
Different kinds of groups and communities: what you need, what can you offer, how to find it.
- We are family: who are you now?
Rediscovering your own roles, adjusting as others change. Seeing and tuning up family dynamics.
- As time goes by: finding the gifts of time
Recognising your scope for choice, taking quality time, widening the options, using time happily.
- Running on faith: gifts of inspiration
Ways to explore and find purpose and perspective.
- Born to be wild: fresh adventures
Using your freedom, stretch and surprise yourself: inner and outer adventures.
- Afternoon delight: daily comforts
Looking after yourself in small daily ways, making everyday life more special.
PART 2: DIGGING THE CHALLENGES
- Good Vibrations: managing your health
How diet and exercise help. Preventative measures. Handling minor and major health issues.
- All over now: handling loss
Losses are natural at this age; how to handle them well.
- Hold me: befriending your fears
Ways to accept your fears, live with them, learn from them – and don’t be run by them.
- All along the watchtower – daily uncertainties
As daily life gets more complex and uncertain, practical tips to raise your resilience.
- Matthew & Son: work and money
Finding positive ways to meet financial needs and find the right role for work in your life.
PART 3: FRESH MAPS
- Won’t get fooled again – change the story
Recognise recurring patterns, and your chance to change them.
- Something tells me I’m into something good – exploring elderhood
Older and wiser: exploring elderhood as a role model and what it can mean for you.
- Listen to me – different voices
Recognise and integrate the various voices and aspects of yourself.
- My generation: wisdom from others
An anthology of brief insights and guidance from people in their sixties, seventies and eighties.
- Woodstock: a festival for the 70’s
An inspiring resource of books, music, poems and movies for finding your way at 70.
- I can see for miles: future outlook
Hints, forecasts and opportunities for the decades ahead.
CONCLUSION
- Sunshine of your love: this could be so good!
Staying hopeful. Parting advice, further resources.