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CONCENTRATION – PART I TOPOLOGY

Rebecca Otowa


Picture shows where I usually get up and down from my kitchen (right) and bath (upper left) showing steps. Black tile area is a shoe zone, others are no-shoe zones.

 

I have written before about the changes of “old age”. (I can hear some people saying, the cusp of 70 is not old! There are 90-year-olds climbing Mt. Everest! Well, that may be true of some hardy souls – my husband springs to mind – but generally speaking, the 70s is the forgotten decade, where you gaze with consternation at your failing body, but can’t really talk about it because “70 is not old”.)

 

How has my life changed in say 5 years? Bear with me while I recount a couple of changes in my relationship to this material frame. I know it’s the height of self-centeredness and also a hallmark of old age to bore others with one’s physical woes, and that is not my intention. What I am trying to do is explain how I handle these changes, which takes concentration of a kind I haven’t had to bring to bear since childhood.

 

I recently revisited the word “topology”. It’s a branch of geometry that “studies properties of spaces that are invariant under continuous deformation” (Google). In other words, it’s a way of thinking about material forms, plus an element of “What happens if I do THIS?” In daily life, specifically the part I want to address, it’s about clothing. Topological conundrums abound for the older person in what has been, for decades, a relatively unconscious procedure, namely dressing oneself. Suddenly one has to pay more attention to things like whether an article of clothing is inside out, backwards, etc. It’s more challenging when tags (that typically signal the back of a garment) are either absent or in another place, as often happens when many garments one uses were manufactured in another country. I have to look for clues such as placement of pockets, the relative roominess of part of a garment, etc. to make sure I’m not putting it on backwards. We make much of this process with small children, and glow with pride when the child can “dress himself”, but this is actually a very complex procedure involving many neural firings in the brain.

 

Speaking of topology (grossness alert!), I have not put on a bra by myself for several weeks now, because the hooks in back require the backward bending of two arms and two sets of very clever fingers, which I do not have at the moment. This is such an unnecessarily complex activity that I may say goodbye to it for good. My husband, whom I got to hook and unhook a bra a couple of times in this healing interval, was astounded that I did this unsung, day in and day out, for decades without even thinking about it. As do most women. This is one area where I must concentrate on a previously unconscious activity. And, do I want to? My mother, who used to collect little old ladies, became friends with a pair who lived next door to us in Australia. She recounted with astonishment that these ladies, around 90 years old, were still dressing themselves, complete with panty hose and tie shoes (and, one imagines, other items of unnecessary clothing), every day of their lives. She did so herself well into her 90s, actually. How much easier life would be if we could give ourselves the freedom to stop doing these troublesome and meaningless things, after a certain age!

 

Another area of concentration has to do with the placement of my feet. I live in an old Japanese house, which means that to enter, you must step up to the level of the house (sometimes as much as 50 centimeters, though my husband has thoughtfully built steps here and there to help me) AND remove your shoes. The opposite move is required for exiting. Since my house is old, it is also large, with a correspondingly large number of these step-up-and-down, shoes-on, shoes-off places to negotiate multiple times per day. I have to concentrate on these because I don’t want to fall, especially when I am alone (“In a Japanese countryside neighborhood in the middle of the day, no one can hear you scream.”) If you are hard-core, you won’t even let a small stockinged toe touch the lower ground when doing the shoe thing. (I remember when I was trying to walk 5 steps to the car following my injury, how insistent my next-door neighbor was that I put on shoes, even in my extremity.) I’m a little more low-key about this recently. I will occasionally walk outside with stockinged or even bare feet, since putting on or taking off shoes requires balancing on one foot a lot, with the attendant risk of falling. I’m also much more tolerant of foreigners who visit my home and, being told to take off their shoes, will dance around on the ground in their stockinged or bare feet while doing this, but I turn a blind eye now, as I realize how complicated it is if you’re not used to it (and my aging body seems to want to go back to a time when I wasn’t).

 

And I won’t even go into all the opportunities around my house to trip, on the edges of flagstones or inexplicable small steps on cement floors or slippery rocks or lintels or differing floor surfaces between rooms. All this at a time when old age means you shuffle more. I have to concentrate on lifting my feet higher all the time. (Fortunately, no longer wearing a bra makes it easier to see and watch my feet. Think about it – or actually, don’t.)

 

I found out recently that my balance is much worse when carrying something (as I usually am) or when I suddenly remember some other chore (as I do quite often). If I lose concentration on what I’m doing, I can find myself losing my balance. So increasingly, I consciously remind myself not to carry things from one place to another in order to be efficient, as I taught myself to do for years (hard for a multitasking woman to unlearn!). A small child of two or less learns, painstakingly, to walk, and is then out the door for many years, doing this complex balancing act without thinking practically all his life, and then, without warning, this effortless movement is taken away and he is two years old again.

 

I guess I will continue this in the next blog. Older people (in their 70s or older), if you are reading this, please remember we are pioneers of the species! It’s extremely recently (1 or 2 generations) that our life expectancy outstripped our bodies. We are doing what very few people in the history of mankind have done before, and with very little in the way of knowledge, help, or support from those who don’t know what we are dealing with. I know this because I used to be one of those “all of his shit still works” people, as Stephen King said. We all were, once upon a time.

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catherine.haskin
catherine.haskin
Oct 28, 2024

True--“In a Japanese countryside neighborhood in the middle of the day, no one can hear you scream.” And I think this is becoming true even in urban settings, when almost everyone else is at work or school (or worse, they ignore any and every noise not being made by themselves).


I am lucky that I only have one genkan, while the main living area is on the second floor, so...stairs.

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