L’age de Creer

Rene LaForestier, a French geriatrician, looked at the lives of older people in a Parisian hospital/home for the aged and vowed to change it.  His answer was simple: create a space in which older people could be creative.   He prepared a room with items that would foster creativity: paints, brushes, paper, pens, music and invited the elderly patients to enter.  Enter they did, and the result of that experiment was the basis of his book,  L’age de Creer, The Age of Creativity.

Perhaps, to make it clear to everyone, he should have called it, The Creativity of Age, for this is a time when other responsibilities and distractions are put aside and what is left is a vacuum that can be filled with nothing--or sadness--or creativity and life. It may well be the continuation of life’s past efforts, or it may be a totally new direction for us to tackle.  Or, sadly, as my dear friend says, "I'm ready to go."  She has stopped living.

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne argued that we should be involved in those things that bring pleasure…and let death catch up with us as it may.  “I want to be doing things, prolonging life’s duties as much as I can: I want Death to find me planting my cabbages, neither worrying about it, nor the unfinished gardening.”One’s creativity is not limited to the arts.  Designing a computer program, planting one’s garden, experimenting with Greek recipes, doing scientific experiements, or playing in the park with children:  all of these stimulate the mind and are productive human endeavors.  

“ This everyday creativity or mindfulness is actually good for one's health and well-being," explains Ellen J. Langer, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and author of Mindfulness.  Her research with the elderly has shown that when encouraged to be creative or mindful, the elderly actually live longer and happier lives. "When we don't keep our minds active, the mind and body gradually turn themselves off," says Dr. Langer.

 As someone once said, when we stop creating, we stop living. Too many of us, when we realize that we are now part of the elderly generation, succumbs to a stereotype:  The Loss of Our Abilities.  It is too easy to say, “I can’t do this, and I can’t do that—like I used to!  Poor me!”  Those around us, usually trying to sympathize with their elderly relatives, try to “make life easier for them.”  But this does not mean that one has to assume that the elderly are not still capable of  human productivity.

Creativity—the ability to know and feel and write and do those things which one didn’t have the time for earlier in life. Creativity—the ability to see over the horizon of a long accepted norm to view the many avenues still available to us; avenues that may lead us to broad expansions of possibilities of what life holds for us.  Consider that the boundaries of practicality are no longer necessary.  If this is true, what dreams there be; what ideas may come, what memories can we reconsider and, perhaps, change our outlook on our purpose of life.   This is a time to consider why we are here.

 Gene D. Cohen, MD, PhD is the director and professor of health-care sciences and professor of psychiatry at the Center on Aging, Health & Humanities, George Washington University, Washington, DC and the author of The Creative Age: Awakening Human Potential in the Second Half of Life (Harper Collins).  About his twenty-five year study on creativity and aging in more than 200 senior citizens, Dr. Cohen says,

“Expressing ourselves creatively can actually improve health, both mentally and physically.”  Dr. Cohen also makes some other key points regarding the importance of creativity to wellness: Creativity reinforces connections between brain cells, strengthens morale, relieves sleep and mood disorders, increases vocabulatry, gives us a positive outlook and sense of well-being, and even makes it easier to face adversity.

 Being able to include choice and creativity in one’s life optimizes health and longevity. Love and work:  we can still have both.  Love the day; work as the day allows.  L’Age de Creer.

**The Watercolor in this post was done by an Alzheimer's patient in the program "Memories in the Making", sponsored by the Alzheimer's Association, which takes art into nursing homes and assisted living facilities,  allowing  patients a creative outlet.