Beauty in numbers

A sweet on the table; you think of kids, or your mouth waters.

A wildflower in a vase; your eyes light up. It delights you.

Plenty of sweets and many different kinds of them; a specific part of your brain suddenly becomes activated. You see a different kind of order.

Lots of flowers blooming at the top of a tree; a pleasurable sensation runs over you. In viewing such a pleasing sight, a pensive you becomes a happy you. There is magic in numbers, and increasing numbers are more magical, except, of course, when something unpleasant becomes alarmingly large, a swarm of locusts, for example.

Do we see beauty in a large number of seniors living together under one roof (in a nursing home)? I hope we do.

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.

Urban planning

It is projected that, about 25 years from now, one in four people in Hong Kong will be age 65 or over. Amazing! Have you ever imagined what it will be like when you walk on the streets or go anywhere in the city where you live, and every fourth person you run into is a senior? I have been thinking about that lately.

I think there will be more wheelchairs everywhere. Walkways, pavements, passages, etc., will need to be provided to cater to this need. They will have to be much wider. I visualize that elevators and escalators will be much slower than they are now, to allow for the slower reactions of older people. I imagine that public transport will have more special features that cater to the needs of people who require walking assistance, and for wheelchair users. And it will only be reasonable to have more resting places throughout buildings and public places, where people can pause and take a break.

Navigating stairways is a struggle for many seniors.

Activists are pushing hard for industries and the commercial sector to adopt the principles of universal design so that we can begin creating a more friendly environment for the old and disabled. By then, I don’t think we will need to fight that hard. Universal design will be incorporated in lots of places, maybe nearly everywhere. The sheer political force of the large number of seniors will make their voices more easily heard and their demands better answered.

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.

Honor

I read this piece of news in the papers. A father sold his home and then worked very hard every day with his wife, making fishing nets to pay off his deceased sons’ debt. Three of his four sons died in a super storm four years ago, owing huge sums of money. The couple is expected to work for years to come, in order to finish paying their sons’ debt. The father said he would do this for his sons. He is honoring his sons by paying their debt. It is not just the love of a father or a strong sense of responsibility that compels the man to do this. I call it honor. He is an honorable man. He is now 82 years old.

I see honorable seniors every day in Hong Kong. They may be old, and some may be a little messy. They are those ordinary people to whom you may not give a second glance when you meet them in the street. Some can be rather peculiar in their behavior, but they are all honorable people to me, just the same. They are respecting life by doing the best they can.

I see many seniors selling all sorts of stuff on the streets. I don’t think they are trying to make money. I doubt they can make good money out of the items they sell—pediclips, hairclips, buttons, rubber bands, candies and so on, which are usually worth no more than a few dollars. What I see is that they are trying to spend their time doing something useful.

An older woman listening to a Walkman and selling goods in a bag; an older man scrubbing the outer shell of an electric fan to remove the rust; a barber cutting hair on a pedestrian walkway under a bridge; a group marking their place every morning outside the train station to collect used free newspapers from passersby for recycling: All these sights tell me about seniors’ ingenuity in finding meaningful occupations for themselves. I find it an admirable virtue.

Senior cleaning rusty fan.

Fan repair king.

Selling phones and other electronic devices.

Seniors collect and recycle newspapers.

Senior retailer interacts with customer.

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.

Hong Kong, a highly age-integrated society

I never realized how highly age-integrated Hong Kong is until I visited Singapore. Singapore, a garden city, is very pretty and highly organized. If you walk around downtown and along Raffles Place, you will not run into older people, no matter what time of the day it is. It is entirely a young peoples' world. Even as I visited beach areas famous for seafood, I found hardly any families bringing seniors along to dinner. The only exception is probably Singapore's Chinatown, where I may have met more people who were older.

This is in stark contrast to Hong Kong. Here, you run into seniors anywhere who are going about their business. In the Central District—the business core of Hong Kong—you brush shoulders with young and old alike. You find rich seniors having high tea in the Mandarin Hotel—you know they're rich by the way they dress and how they carry themselves—and you run into seniors picking up cardboard boxes to sell to recycling merchants. Hong Kong seniors may shop at the famous Lane Crawford emporium, or they may be selling small items (scarves, imitation jewelry, scissors, fans, all sorts) in their stalls on a side or back street in Central. Both the young and the old fight with you for use of the pavement, and we all jaywalk.

I once asked a Singaporean friend why I so rarely find seniors in downtown Singapore. She told me it was because they did not need to go downtown. All their needs could be met in the housing estate in which they lived. Housing communities are designed to be self-sufficient in Singapore, with clinics, shopping malls and community centers. But I still do not get it. Because their needs can be met entirely within their neighborhood, they have no business visiting downtown at all?

I have tried hard to think of the reasons that may account for the differences between the two cities. I can't put my finger on it. I think back to other cities I have visited—Stockholm, London, Taipei, Chicago. Now that I am trying to make sense out of an observation, I am no longer sure of what the other cities are like. But I am certain that they are unlike Singapore, which has made a deep impression on me in this regard.

I strongly object to retirement communities. I would not move into one myself. Why do we need age-segregated communities when, in the real world, people of all ages live together?

Yes, young people can be cruel sometimes, mocking those who have grown old and frail. But not all young people are so. Yes, the amenities of a retirement community may be quite attractive, but meeting with people from all walks of life is much more interesting. We can only promote understanding and acceptance between generations if we live together, not separate from one another.

For Reflections on Nursing Leadership (RNL), published by the Honor Society of Nursing, Sigma Theta Tau International.