My mother Carolyn Tucker Kamin shared a common interest in the new like the musician Eric Clapton.
Carolyn would tell me either by phone call or when I was growing up she’d remind me to “go see something new”. She was infinitely curious.And delightfully explored every subject in her cooking, reading, and tracking down new ideas. It wasn’t as if she was a hippy mom, she was like a joyful anthropologist and she appreciated new ideas in young people. The greatest complaint my mother had was friends who got together and complained about their aches and pains. She detested it. That’s why in the last 20 years of her life she surrounded herself with companions that were 20 to 30 years younger than she. Seeking out their ideas, sharing their energy and staying in love with life.
The masterful musician Eric Clapton was heard to have said “I used to dismiss younger musicians because I believed I had explored all those sounds. And as I got older I began to grow to respect and enjoy their experimentation and creation.” A sea change of perspective in the way we see aging is coming. To design our own age we must dismiss the archaic perspectives regarding the limitations of older, consider the “new older”(TM) and always keep our ideas open to the new.