You Still Have Time
A podcast with the goal to motivate and encourage those who share our belief that getting older isn't a time to give up living.
You Still Have Time
Remember the Time
Hope and Harold discuss why remembering the past may be enjoyable but living there can keep us from living our best life now.
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Hello and welcome to You Still Have Tomlin. We are your hosts. I'm Hope. I'm Harold. And we'd like to thank you for joining us today. For those of you who are with us for the first time, thank you. We hope you'll enjoy the podcast and become part of the You Still Have Time community. For those who are returning, thank you too for thinking it worthy of your time.
SPEAKER_01:We decided to title this episode, Remember the Time. What triggered the title and what triggered this discussion was I was thinking about the conversations we have when we get together. And usually we go back to when we were kids. So we talk about high school. We talk about raising a family, the first child we had, the first job we had, the first car we had. We spend so much time talking about what we used to be, how we used to live. how things used to be. And we neglect sometimes thinking about today or tomorrow. So that's really where the genesis of this podcast came from. We want to make certain that people recognize that it's okay to be nostalgic about the past, but you're living in the present and you can't go back.
SPEAKER_00:So, yeah, so this podcast, we are trying to... examine, discuss, whatever, how our relationship with the past influences how we live now. We get, as Harold said, we get stuck sometimes. And we can't live our lives as fully as we are able to because we are
SPEAKER_01:still looking backwards. And if we haven't said it in the earlier podcast, we're going to continue to say it. We're not the experts. We're no experts. We're just reflecting on what we have experienced through our life.
SPEAKER_00:Right. Harold said in our last podcast that he didn't think he'd have to do research for the podcast. We've ended up, every time we see something about older people or aging, we're reading it, we're sharing it, we're talking about it. But this is a conversation... that we're having with each other and we're opening it to you so that maybe it'll encourage you to have these same conversations or to think about some of the things that we've discovered.
SPEAKER_01:Do you find yourself wishing you could speak to a human being on the phone sometimes? I'm sure you know exactly what I mean. Press 1. If you want to continue in English, press two in Spanish, press three, press four. Okay. Then you get to another level and you just go on and on. And how many of you just press zero hoping you can get to an operator? Do you constantly compare today's prices to the past? I have a little story to tell here. Don't say anything, Hope. I know she wants to cut you off. Don't say anything. I remember as a kid, I would ask my father for money. Go to the movies. At the time, it was 25 cents. So you can imagine how far back that was. And he would say, 25 cents? 25 cents? You know what I did with 25 cents? I could ride the subway. I could buy a newspaper and get a hot dog and still have change. And I would say, yeah, but the movies is 25 cents. What the hell? What does that have to do with anything? Anyway, do you find yourself still comparing prices today to the past? Do you find yourself complaining about behaviors of young people today? Clothing, language, their music? When did it become okay for indoor clothes to be worn outdoors?
SPEAKER_00:This is one of Harold's favorite topics, and I'll have to agree with him. It is a little disconcerting to go to the supermarket and see someone in their pajamas and slippers pushing the shopping cart around. I'm not quite sure about that.
SPEAKER_01:I think it's just a natural tendency for us to compare things to the way they used to be. And that's fine. I think that's okay. It's natural.
SPEAKER_00:It's what our parents did. Right. If you remember, our parents had, well, at least my parents did, have problems with the music. What is that you're listening to? Or the way we wore our hair, guys who grew their hair, long hair and the clothes we wore. Oh, my goodness. They thought that the world was coming to an end. Civilization was ending because we were trying to be different. We were expressing ourselves in this way. It's the same thing now. It's just natural, as Harold said.
SPEAKER_01:And I think that that's the point we would like to leave you with today. It's natural for us to look back and compare and say things like, and I'm sure we've all said it, oh, it used to be great back then. But you know what? You can't go back then. The one thing that's inevitable is change. And when it becomes a problem is when we refuse to accept that things are changing.
SPEAKER_00:So that's what we're talking about today, how our relationships, to the past influences our present. As Harold likes to say, you can't drive a car looking in the rear view mirror. And you can't live that way either. While being nostalgic about things, remembering the good times when you were younger, the things you did with your friends, that's all great. And it can help when you're with a group of friends and you're talking about the good times you had, it builds your relationships. It solidifies those relationships and those experiences. But there's still time or you still have time to create new memories. Every day, you can do things that are exciting and interesting, but you can't do that if you are stuck thinking about what used to be.
SPEAKER_01:Some of the changes that we are encountering, I understand they are sometimes scary. When I say scary, I mean we just recently cut the cord on our cable. It took us, I don't know, a while because it just seemed so daunting. But we did our homework, or actually hoped it, and we finally cut the cord.
SPEAKER_00:You did that. Well, that was after our son-in-law suggested that he might look into something else. And Harold, you know, took the ball and ran with it.
SPEAKER_01:So some of these changes, though, these technological changes are beneficial. I can think of a few off the top of my head. Easy pass. I mean, do you really want to go back to the time when you had to wait on a Tobel? Well, you couldn't. You can't because there are no Tobels anymore. ATMs. Self-checkout, that's one of my biggies. I can go in the store and be out within five or ten minutes, and I see so many of our fellow seniors waiting in line, and I know the self-checkout lines in the kiosks sometimes are confusing, but I think that if you just accept that this is the way things are going to be because they're not going to go back. I mean, even some of the restaurants, how many, oh, a whole, When we go to a restaurant and they hand us an iPad to order. Hand
SPEAKER_00:us an iPad, no physical menu. Right. So you have to, or not even an iPad, you have to take your phone and scan a QR code to see the menu. Now, currently, most of those places will have a physical menu that they will bring to you. But talk about feeling like outsiders. Right. Oh, we have to get the old-fashioned.
SPEAKER_01:Right, right. Could you please bring us a paper menu? Thank you. Yes, because we are old.
SPEAKER_00:And then going to pay for it, too. They have iPads so that you can pay for your bill and tap your card. All of those things, they're not going to go away. In fact, what is going to go away are the other– options that we now have that some places are holding on to just for folks like us. But sooner or later, all that's going to disappear as well. We hope to encourage people that, yes, it can be scary. And yes, it is something new to learn. But you've learned new things all of your life. You learned how to drive. You learned how to take public transportation, maybe. So many things. You learned your responsibilities at a new job, things that you had never done before, and you can still do it now. And we're not saying that you have to do everything, but there certainly are things that make our lives easier and provide us with more time. And as I said in a past podcast, I'm old now and I don't have a lot of time ahead of me. So I want to make the best use of the time I still have. And that's not standing online or going to a department store to buy stuff when I can buy it online and they can deliver it to me. That's just how I feel
SPEAKER_01:about it. The title of the podcast is You Still Have Time Online. but you don't have a whole lot of time. So you don't want to waste it waiting online.
SPEAKER_00:Oh, boy, yes. One foot in the grave and one foot on a banana peel? No, I don't think. I don't think that's something people want to think
SPEAKER_01:about. The changes that the technologies are affording us are making our life better, making it easier. And what happens when you don't accept them or you don't learn them you become dependent on others. So many of us have our children or grandchildren helping us maneuver this. And isn't that what we wanted to avoid? I mean, what do we always say as we get old? We don't want to have to depend on our children, you know, to do all these things, but we're enabling that dependence by refusing to accept the changes. And that's what we're suggesting that we we actually started this podcast because we want to maintain our independence for as long as possible.
SPEAKER_00:And we know that a lot of you feel the same way. So we just hope to, as you listen in on our conversations about these things, that it will motivate you, that it will encourage you, that it will give you some, I don't know, courage to say, hey, I'm going to try that. or I know that I can do that. We just want to make sure that we take full advantage of what's available to us so that we can live life to the fullest. And those of us who are short timers here, we've got more time behind us and ahead of us, should really take full advantage of those things.
SPEAKER_01:One of the things that I think most of us have taking advantage of all the changes in medical and medicine. Some of us have more bionic parts in us than we would like to admit. He's talking about me. I'm 75%
SPEAKER_00:bionic. So that when we go through the airport, she sets off all the alarms. I don't go through those regular gates. I go through the circular one, the one where you stand there with your arms out. But it's a good thing. It's a good thing. It is because we were talking this morning and one of the things that we talked about was that our parents' generation would have loved to have some of the technologies, the medical technologies that we have now. I always say, thank God for replacement parts or I would probably be in a wheelchair or at the very least walking with a walker. So it's enabled me to continue to be somewhat active and independent, where if this had happened 40 years ago, certainly 50 years ago, I would not have had the opportunity.
SPEAKER_01:Another component of nostalgia or looking in the past is reflecting upon our missteps. Maybe we dropped out of school early because we had the support of family. Maybe we just made some poor choices in our lives that led us on a path that it took us a while to recognize, but now we should not be hindered by those missteps from the past. So many of us get to our stages of life and say, well, I know I dropped out of school and I was too late to go back. No, it isn't. You still have time.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. And if there are other things that you wanted to do, I always wanted to learn to play the piano. And I've been saying for 30 years that before I leave this earth, hopefully I will take some piano lessons. Maybe this podcast will hold my feet to the fire. And I'll do that. But whatever it is, is it learning a new language? Is it learning how to play an instrument? Is it going back to school to complete a degree? All of those things are still possible. Now, of course, they have to be reasonable. If
SPEAKER_01:you had planned to be a ballerina, chances are you, It might be too late. You may not still have
SPEAKER_00:time. Right. And if you want to be a skateboard champion, I don't think that it might be in the cards for you. Hey, but maybe you can learn all about skateboarding. Maybe you can coach skateboarding in some way. I don't know. All we're saying is don't let your regrets, your, as Harold put it, missteps, in the past keep you from doing those things now. In fact, this is the opportune time. Now you have the time. Now if you're retired, you don't have to worry about work. You're not raising young children. This time is for you. So use it to your best advantage. Another thing about past regrets. If you mistreated someone or said something that hurt someone and you still think about it today and regret doing it, let me just say you still have time to correct that. It's never too late to say you're sorry. And I have talked to so many people who had great friendships or even siblings, you know, and other family members who, you know, they had a falling out 25, 35, 50 years ago and those relationships were severed. Well, if that's still on your mind and you really want to try to do something about it and do it, you still have time to do that. Well, we hope that you've enjoyed today's show. We look forward to hearing from you. Tell us what you think about the show. We hope that something we said today has hit a nerve. We'll get you thinking. We'll start you talking about it with your friends and others. But we're happy to have you join us here at You Still Have Time. Before we close, we have a couple of requests. If you have any ideas for future topics or any guest suggestions, please send them to us at info at YouStillHaveTime.net. Also, don't forget to follow us on Facebook and hit that subscribe button wherever you listen to this podcast. And finally, always remember, you still have time. Bye-bye. See you next time.
