Active Aging Year

it was so fun to celebrate Active Aging Week like we did last week. The week long events were fun and the culmination of the Street Fair down Central Park Mall was a fiesta. But truth be told, every week is active aging week at Beatitudes Campus. As a matter of fact, it is Active Aging Year at Beatitudes Campus.

The International Council on Active Aging wanted this last week to challenge society's diminished expectations of aging by showing that, regardless of age or health conditions, adults over 50 can live as fully as possible in all areas of life—physical, social, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, vocational and environmental. Any given week, all you have to do is look around and you will see those diminished expectations burst before your very eyes.

Look at all the resident run efforts and programs, and one quickly sees that nothing could be further from the truth if one thinks that seniors, in this senior living community, don't have high expectations of themselves and their abilities to make a difference. You residents started a campus wide recycling program and developed the Elders for a Sustainable Future. You started the Beatitudes Campus Center for Life Long Learners, now having offered close to a 100 classes and enrolling 150 or more each semester. You have your own Facebook page which is as good as any out there with great shots of Campus Life. You serve on Residents Council committees and design and contribute from everything like recreational outings and events to health and wellness programs. The fitness classes are overflowing and the Fitness Center is rarely empty. During the summer months, and even in the winter, the folk in the pool are always making waves.

And it doesn't stop there! I am amazed at all of the residents who are volunteering for non-profits off Campus, and with our CAREcorps officially launched, even more are volunteering on Campus. You residents teach Sit and Be Fit and facilitate heady endeavors like Science and Spirituality. You help in the Gift Shop, run the Beatitudes Backstreet Boutique through the Auxiliary and till the Beatitudes community garden making it the envy of every other Life Plan Community. You create game nights, you sing, dance and plan events for your floors and buildings, drawing our community closer and closer together. When a new resident moves in, you cannot wait to send another welcoming resident to unleash the radical hospitality that makes this community shine. You saw the need for teaching our immigrant brothers and sisters English and you started an English Language Assistance program and the list can go on and on.

I know I speak for all of us who are fortunate enough to be able to work and serve at Beatitudes Campus when I say that you all are paving the way for the rest of us and inspire us every day. I only wish your contemporaries knew what you know and do with your lives and see that, if they think a community like ours is for “old people”, then the only thing “old” is their thinking. You have created a vibrant, energetic, inspiring and anything but inactive community.

It's Active Aging Year this year and, thanks to you, will be every year hereafter.