ART OF GROWING OLD

Southland Times, Issue 23969, 8 November 1939, Page 4

ART OF GROWING OLD

ADDRESS TO ROTARY CLUB “The secret of normal healthy development is for one to pass naturally from one phase of life to another; youth is not a matter of years, it is a matter of spirit,” said the Rev. J. A. Thomson in an address on “How to Grow Old Gracefully” at the luncheon of the Invercargill Rotary Club yesterday. Interest in old age developed from a certain fear which hung over the lives of many people, he said. It was interesting to know that Cicero was concerned in the matter. He wrote an article on old age and in it went to some trouble in defining old age and its advantages. Mr Thomson referred to the various phases, each a definite 'one, of man’s development. They could be determined as infancy, childhood, adolescence, manhood, middle age and old age. In his book “Psychology On Morals,” Dr Hadfield said the phases rose in intensity, each developing and giving way in turn to the . next. Taking the phases in turn Mr Thomson said that infancy was the period when the self-consciousness of the child developed. Then followed childhood, that beautiful period of imagination when the child was living its normal, healthy life. Later the youth of 16 to 18 or 20 years lived through the period of adolescence, the phase of idealism when the young people attempted the building of a new world. They adopted a critical attitude and developed a desire to pull down existing institutions and replace them with the ideal—a normal and healthy attitude at that stage of life. Then came manhood and early middle age when man should be and was making an effort to realize the ideals formed in the period of adolescence. That was the stage of character building. Finally there was the period of the old age when man should be prepared to surrender the struggle for power to younger men. The art of growing old gracefully was the secret of perpetual youth, which was not a matter of years, but a matter of spirit, added Mr Thomson. \