"Are you in good hands?"

Insurance

“What the insurance companies have done is to reverse the business so that the public at large insures the insurance companies.”

                                  Gerry Spence

“Physically you are a human being, but mentally you are incomplete.  Given that we have this physical human form, we must safeguard our mental capacity for judgment.  For that we cannot take out insurance; the insurance company is within: self-discipline, self-awareness, and a clear realization of the disadvantages of anger and the positive effects of kindness.”

                                  The Dalai Lama

         I will be sixty-five in September.  For the past three months, I have been deluged with applications for insurance riders and drug coverage policies—Wellspring, Humana, Hartford, and some that don’t list a name and look totally shady.  My phone rings ten times a day and when I answer, a recorded message says, “As a senior you are eligible for…”  I hang up.  The truth is, I hate knowing I’m now considered ‘old’ and in need of ‘extra drug coverage.’  I had to force myself to block out a day on my calendar to sit down with a stack of potential insurance offers and make a decision. I hate reading the fine print!

         Somehow time passes; our human bodies show it but inside, nothing much changes.  Inside, the spirit is young and alive.  Old age is supposed to be a time of wisdom and contentment, when the drives that animated our youth calm and mellow out, allowing us to go deeper and wider.  But the emphasis on youth in our society creates an underlying anxiety about aging that threatens to sabotage the very years that should be spent enjoying the rewards of a lifetime of service.  There is no insurance policy that protects against irrelevance and invisibility.

         The journey of these later years is one of self-discovery—a time for unearthing talents that have been lying dormant for decades because time didn’t allow.  A friend said to me recently, “I retired so that I could paint as much as I wanted to.”  The real insurance for this stage is throwing oneself into life in way that is individual and unique, allowing the juices to flow into creativity and self-expression in a profoundly new way.  This time requires more exercise and less food, more kindness and less anger, more contemplation and less rush.  The world needs the kind of insurance that we ‘elders’ bring.

                                  Kindling that fire in the belly,

                                  Jane