Active Grandparents Quotes

It’s taboo to admit that you’re lonely. You can make jokes about it, of course. You can tell people that you spend most of your time with Netflix or that you haven’t left the house today and you might not even go outside tomorrow. Ha ha, funny. But rarely do you ever tell people about the true depths of your loneliness, about how you feel more and more alienated from your friends each passing day and you’re not sure how to fix it. It seems like everyone is just better at living than you are. A part of you knew this was going to happen. Growing up, you just had this feeling that you wouldn’t transition well to adult life, that you’d fall right through the cracks. And look at you now. La di da, it’s happening. Your mother, your father, your grandparents: they all look at you like you’re some prized jewel and they tell you over and over again just how lucky you are to be young and have your whole life ahead of you. “Getting old ain’t for sissies,” your father tells you wearily. You wish they’d stop saying these things to you because all it does is fill you with guilt and panic. All it does is remind you of how much you’re not taking advantage of your youth. You want to kiss all kinds of different people, you want to wake up in a stranger’s bed maybe once or twice just to see if it feels good to feel nothing, you want to have a group of friends that feels like a tribe, a bonafide family. You want to go from one place to the next constantly and have your weekends feel like one long epic day. You want to dance to stupid music in your stupid room and have a nice job that doesn’t get in the way of living your life too much. You want to be less scared, less anxious, and more willing. Because if you’re closed off now, you can only imagine what you’ll be like later. Every day you vow to change some aspect of your life and every day you fail. At this point, you’re starting to question your own power as a human being. As of right now, your fears have you beat. They’re the ones that are holding your twenties hostage. Stop thinking that everyone is having more sex than you, that everyone has more friends than you, that everyone out is having more fun than you. Not because it’s not true (it might be!) but because that kind of thinking leaves you frozen. You’ve already spent enough time feeling like you’re stuck, like you’re watching your life fall through you like a fast dissolve and you’re unable to hold on to anything. I don’t know if you ever get better. I don’t know if a person can just wake up one day and decide to be an active participant in their life. I’d like to think so. I’d like to think that people get better each and every day but that’s not really true. People get worse and it’s their stories that end up getting forgotten because we can’t stand an unhappy ending. The sick have to get better. Our normalcy depends upon it. You have to value yourself. You have to want great things for your life. This sort of shit doesn’t happen overnight but it can and will happen if you want it. Do you want it bad enough? Does the fear of being filled with regret in your thirties trump your fear of living today? We shall see.

We’re engaging in a set of activities which go way beyond the individual life span, way beyond children, grandchildren, way beyond parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, to the whole frame of at least civilizational life. Once you get comfortable with that, then you start to go further out still, to three and a half billion years of life on Earth, and maybe we’ll do another three and a half billion years. That’s kind of interesting to try to hold in your mind. And once you’ve held it in your mind, what do you do on Monday?

Most parents thought they were being good parents. They learned from their parents or their grandparents, many of whom were severely traumatized and emotionally disconnected coming out of the devastation of a 1918 influenza pandemic and two world wars.

Your grandmother and I (and many others) would have had to be more extreme people than we were, during that critical period, to have done whatever it was we should have been doing. And our lives had not prepared us for extremity, to mobilize or to be as focussed and energized as I can see, in retrospect, we would have needed to be. We were not prepared to drop everything in defense of a system that was, to us, like oxygen: used constantly, never noted. We were spoiled, I think I am trying to say. As were those on the other side: willing to tear it all down because they had been so thoroughly nourished by the vacuous plenty in which we all lived, a bountiful condition that allowed people to thrive and opine and swagger around like kings and queens while remaining ignorant of their own history. What would you have had me do? What would you have done?

Arteriosclerosis, removing people from active life when the period of maximum fertility has passed, is of benefit to the young if it relieves them of the care of parents, or brings them an inheritance as they enter adult life. . . . Any attempts to eradicate such a disease from the urban population will be frustrated by natural selection and the survival of more grandchildren in families with few grandparents. Those best fitted to survive in a world growing more urban are those who cease to require support as soon as their roles as parents have been completed. Atherosclerosis and hypertension are now the chief factors in determining that we do not overstay our allotted span of life too long.

North Korean students and intellectuals didn’t dare to stage protests as their counterparts in other Communist countries did. There was no Prague Spring or Tiananmen Square. The level of repression in North Korea was so great that no organized resistance could take root. Any antiregime activity would have terrible consequences for the protester, his immediate family, and all other known relatives. Under a system that sought to stamp out tainted blood for three generations, the punishment would extend to parents, grandparents, brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, cousins. “A lot of people felt if you had one life to give, you would give it to get rid of this terrible regime, but then you’re not the only one getting punished. Your family would go through hell,” one defector told me.

Although not all latter-day Americans sit as much as some alarmists suggest, we are more sedentary than earlier generations. There is evidence that the total time Americans spent sitting increased 43 percent between 1965 and 2009, and slightly more for people in England and other postindustrial countries.22 So I probably spend two to three hours more in chairs during a given day than my grandparents did when they were my age. My grandparents, however, were not much more sedentary than most hunter-gatherers and subsistence farmers. Researchers have used accelerometers, heart rate monitors, and other sensors to measure activity levels in hunter-gatherers in Tanzania,23 farmer-hunters in the Amazonian rain forest,24 and several other non-industrialized populations.25 In these groups, people tend to be sedentary between five and ten hours a day. The Hadza, for example, spend about nine “non-ambulatory” hours on a typical day, mostly sitting on the ground with their legs in front of them, but also squatting about two hours a day and kneeling an hour a day.26 So while nonindustrial people engage in considerably more physical activity than average industrialized and postindustrialized people, they also sit a lot.

More than anything, we have lost the cultural customs and traditions that bring extended families together, linking adults and children in caring relationships, that give the adult friends of parents a place in their children's lives. It is the role of culture to cultivate connections between the dependent and the dependable and to prevent attachment voids from occurring. Among the many reasons that culture is failing us, two bear mentioning. The first is the jarringly rapid rate of change in twentieth-century industrial societies. It requires time to develop customs and traditions that serve attachment needs, hundreds of years to create a working culture that serves a particular social and geographical environment. Our society has been changing much too rapidly for culture to evolve accordingly. There is now more change in a decade than previously in a century. When circumstances change more quickly than our culture can adapt to, customs and traditions disintegrate. It is not surprising that today's culture is failing its traditional function of supporting adult-child attachments. Part of the rapid change has been the electronic transmission of culture, allowing commercially blended and packaged culture to be broadcast into our homes and into the very minds of our children. Instant culture has replaced what used to be passed down through custom and tradition and from one generation to another. “Almost every day I find myself fighting the bubble-gum culture my children are exposed to,” said a frustrated father interviewed for this book. Not only is the content often alien to the culture of the parents but the process of transmission has taken grandparents out of the loop and made them seem sadly out of touch. Games, too, have become electronic. They have always been an instrument of culture to connect people to people, especially children to adults. Now games have become a solitary activity, watched in parallel on television sports-casts or engaged in in isolation on the computer. The most significant change in recent times has been the technology of communication — first the phone and then the Internet through e-mail and instant messaging. We are enamored of communication technology without being aware that one of its primary functions is to facilitate attachments. We have unwittingly put it into the hands of children who, of course, are using it to connect with their peers. Because of their strong attachment needs, the contact is highly addictive, often becoming a major preoccupation. Our culture has not been able to evolve the customs and traditions to contain this development, and so again we are all left to our own devices. This wonderful new technology would be a powerfully positive instrument if used to facilitate child-adult connections — as it does, for example, when it enables easy communication between students living away from home, and their parents. Left unchecked, it promotes peer orientation.

During [Erté]’s childhood St. Petersburg was an elegant centre of theatrical and artistic life. At the same time, under its cultivated sophistication, ominous rumbles could be distinguished. The reign of the tough Alexander III ended in 1894 and his more gentle successor Nicholas was to be the last of the Tsars … St. Petersburg was a very French city. The Franco-Russian Pact of 1892 consolidated military and cultural ties, and later brought Russia into the First World war. Two activities that deeply influenced [Erté], fashion and art, were particularly dominated by France. The brilliant couturier Paul Poiret, for whom Erté was later to work in Paris, visited the city to display his creations. Modern art from abroad, principally French, was beginning to be show in Russia in the early years of the century … In St. Petersburg there were three Imperial theatres―the Maryinsky, devoted to opera and ballet, the Alexandrinsky, with its lovely classical façade, performing Russian and foreign classical drama, and the Michaelovsky with a French repertoire and company … It is not surprising that an artistic youth in St. Petersburg in the first decade of this century should have seen his future in the theatre. The theatre, especially opera and ballet, attracted the leading young painters of the day, including Mikhail Vrubel, possibly the greatest Russian painter of the pre-modernistic period. The father of modern theatrical design in Russia was Alexandre Benois, an offspring of the brilliant foreign colony in the imperial capital. Before 1890 he formed a club of fellow-pupils who were called ‘The Nevsky Pickwickians’. They were joined by the young Jew, Leon Rosenberg, who later took the name of one of his grandparents, Bakst. Another member introduced his cousin to the group―Serge Diaghilev. From these origins emerged the Mir Iskustva (World of Art) society, the forerunner of the whole modern movement in Russia. Soon after its foundation in 1899 both Benois and Bakst produced their first work in the theatre, The infiltration of the members of Mir Iskustva into the Imperial theatre was due to the patronage of its director Prince Volkonsky who appointed Diaghilev as an assistant. But under Volkonsky’s successor Diagilev lost his job and was barred from further state employment. He then devoted his energies and genius to editing the Mir Iskustva magazine and to a series of exhibitions which introduced Russia to work of foreign artists … These culminated in the remarkable exhibition of Russian portraiture held at the Taurida Palace in 1905, and the Russian section at the salon d'Autumne in Paris the following year. This was the most comprehensive Russian exhibition ever held, from early icons to the young Larionov and Gontcharova. Diagilev’s ban from Russian theatrical life also led to a series of concerts in Paris in 1907, at which he introduced contemporary Russian composers, the production Boris Godunov the following year with Chaliapin and costumes and décor by Benois and Golovin, and then in 1909, on May 19, the first season of the ballet Russes at the Châtelet Theatre.

God is who He says He is. God can do what He says He can do. I am who God says I am. I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me God’s Word is alive and active in me.

For years, all we do is feed. We don’t control what our parents feed us for dinner, we don’t control what they read to us (or don’t read to us) or what they let us watch. We are like jars of wet clay, and we are loaded full with every kind of tale—films; books; TV shows; stories from friends, parents, grandparents. And as we dry, we take the shape of what has been dumped inside of us. When we begin to make our own choices, when we become an active character in our own narratives, all of that soul food is behind us. We might not even remember the stories, but they groomed and molded us while we were still unfired clay.

They called it, oddly, a “toddy.” Their homemade remedies for the cold, flu, and croup varied a little, depending on which grandparents were mixing the concoctions, but the active

At the age of five, she was forced to flee an area of the world that is now Pakistan. It was during the time of the bloody Indian subcontinent partition. Along with her family, my mother joined one of the largest human migrations in history. After arriving in India, she lived as a refugee for the next several years, struggling to survive. People in those refugee camps didn’t have the luxury of hopes, dreams, and aspirations. Yet her mother (my grandmother), Gopibai Hingorani, a woman who had completed only the fourth grade, told her she was going to make sure her daughter received something that no one could ever take away from her: an education. It still gives me shivers to imagine a young girl trapped in a camp being told she would one day become someone who mattered. By keeping her promise, my grandmother initially gave my mother her sense of purpose. My mom completed engineering college in India and made history as the first female engineer there. It was just the beginning of her life in a male-dominated space. After reading a biography of Henry Ford, she dreamed of working for the company that he’d built. Again, my grandparents came through. They took their savings of a lifetime to send my mom to the United States in 1965. At age twenty-four, she became the first woman hired as an engineer at Ford Motor Company. My parents are now retired in Florida, but they stay active, playing a lot of bridge, singing karaoke, and traveling. My mother spends a lot of time with her five granddaughters, teaching them the value of a life lived with purpose.

In the eyes of American law, corporations are viewed as legal persons in much the same way as natural persons like our grandparents, parents, partners, and friends.

And so, for countless generations, our ancestors rested as much as possible but also spent many hours a day walking, carrying, and digging, and occasionally they also ran, climbed, threw, danced, and fought. Their lives were challenging, and plenty of them died young, but physical activity helped many of those who survived childhood to become active, productive grandparents.

Both men had grown up in families where the grandparents had been active and committed church people before the revolution. With official sanction, the communist youth organizations and the educational system worked to alienate children from their believing parents and grandparents.

A Family Affair: Essential Fatty Acids More chemical clues to the nature of alcoholism come from research focusing on alcoholics with at least one grandparent who was Welsh, Irish, Scottish, Scandinavian, or native American. Typically, these alcoholics have a history of depression going back to childhood and close relatives who suffered from depression or schizophrenia. Some may have relatives who committed suicide. There also may be a family history of eczema, cystic fibrosis, premenstrual syndrome, diabetes, irritable bowel syndrome, or benign breast disease. The common denominator here is a genetic abnormality in the way the body handles certain essential fatty acids (EFAs) derived from foods. Normally, these EFAs are converted in the brain to various metabolites such as prostaglandin E1 (PGE1), which plays a vital role in the prevention of depression, convulsions, and hyperexcitability. When the EFA conversion process is defective, brain levels of prostaglandin E1 are lower than normal, which results in depression. In affected individuals, alcohol acts as a double-edged sword. It activates the PGE1 within the brain, which immediately lifts depression and creates feelings of well-being. Because the brain cannot make new PGE1 efficiently, its meager supply of PGE1 is gradually depleted. Over time, the ability of alcohol to lift depression slowly diminishes. Several years ago, researchers hit upon a solution to this problem. They discovered that a natural substance, oil of evening primrose, contains large amounts of gamma-linolenic acid (GLA), which can help the brain convert EFAs to PGE1. The results are quite dramatic. In a recent study in Scotland, researcher David Horrobin, M.D., matched two groups of alcoholics whose EFA levels were 50 percent below normal. The first group got EFA replacement, the second, a placebo. Marked differences between the two groups emerged in the withdrawal stage. The group that got EFA replacement had far fewer symptoms, while the placebo group displayed the full range of withdrawal symptoms associated with prostaglandin deficiency: tremors, irritability, tension, hyperexcitability, and convulsions. At the outset of the study, members of both groups had some degree of alcohol-related liver damage. Three months later, the researchers found that liver function among the EFA replacement group was almost normal. There was no significant improvement among the placebo group. A year later, the placebo group was still deficient in the natural ability to convert essential fatty acids into PGE1. What’s more, only 28 percent of this group had remained sober; the rest had resumed drinking. Results were dramatically better among the EFA replacement group: 83 percent remained sober and depression free.

When we first went to Provence, I assumed I would be observing a different culture. With attachment in mind, it became obvious to me that it is much more than a different culture — I was witnessing a culture at work and a culture that worked. Children greeted adults and adults greeted children. Socializing involved whole families, not adults with adults and children with children. There was only one village activity at a time, so families were not pulled in several directions. Sunday afternoon was for family walks in the countryside. Even at the village fountain, the local hangout, teens mixed with seniors. Festivals and celebrations, of which there were many, were all family affairs. The music and dancing brought the generations together instead of separating them. Culture took precedence over materialism. One could not even buy a baguette without first engaging in the appropriate greeting rituals. Village stores were closed for three hours at midday while schools emptied and families reconvened. Lunch was eaten in a congenial manner as multigenerational groupings sat around tables, sharing conversation and a meal. The attachment customs around the village primary school were equally impressive. Children were personally escorted to school and picked up by their parents or grandparents. The school was gated and the grounds could be entered only by a single entrance. At the gate were the teachers, waiting for their students to be handed over to them. Again, culture dictated that connection be established with appropriate greetings between the adult escorts and the teachers as well as the teachers and the students. Sometimes when the class had been collected but the school bell had not yet rung, the teacher would lead the class through the playground, like a mother goose followed by her goslings. While to North American eyes this may appear to be a preschool ritual, even absurd, in Provence it was selfevidently part of the natural order of things. When children were released from school, it was always one class at a time, the teacher in the lead. The teacher would wait with the students at the gate until all had been collected by their adult escort. Their teachers were their teachers whether on the grounds or in the village market or at the village festival. There weren't many cracks to fall through. Provençal culture was keeping attachment voids to a minimum.

The family has always been a very important part of Italian life. In country areas, it is still common for grandparents, parents, and children to live in the same house. Even when young couples find a home of their own, they like to visit their parents regularly. In recent years, the traditional closeness of the family has become less important for some Italians, especially in the big cities. Each year thousands of young people from the southern regions leave their families and move north, to find work in the industrial areas. A typical Italian family in a town lives in an apartment, probably with a kitchen, dining room, living room, bathroom, and two or three bedrooms. Children come home from school around noon. Many workers also come home for a two-hour break, joining the family for a large midday meal, and perhaps taking a nap afterward, before returning to work. For children, the afternoon is usually occupied with homework, after which there is time for play or activities such as swimming or judo. The evening meal is usually small and taken while watching television, reading, or enjoying conversation.

The loud honking from the car outside broke through everyone’s thoughts. The office manager had arrived. ‘What a story,’ said Raghu. ‘That was beautiful, Ajji!’ The children agreed and crowded around their grandparents for one last group hug. Kamlu Ajji held Ajji’s hands tightly and said, ‘I’ll see you soon!’ Ajji nodded, unable to speak. She was going to miss her and the kids. ‘Come on, children, it’s time to go,’ said Ajja and helped them load the bags in the car. Within minutes, the car began to move. The children waved and said goodbye. ‘They will see a whole different world now,’ said Ajji. ‘We are old and we must still be careful with our activities for some more time,’ said Ajja. Ajji nodded and Ajja patted her on the back, reassuring her that he was there for her even though the children had gone. The two of them stood for some time watching the car until it reached the end of the road and disappeared from view. Then they turned around and slowly went back inside the house.