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Articles by Dami Roelse
What Walking really does for us: The Magic of Long Distance Hiking
I didn’t start hiking long distances until I was well into my 60s. During my life, I had backpacked and hiked for several days at a time. Aside from a 3-week trek to Mount Everest in my 20-ties, I never spent weeks on the trail. During a tough time in my marriage in my late 50-ties, I sought the high mountains of the Himalayas to get away from the confusion at home. Far horizons, empty landscapes, and a challenge that would test my limits and reveal my true capabilities were what I wanted.
What Walking Really Does for Us: Walking and Strength
As we age, we’re told we lose muscle strength unless we engage in strength training. This article disputes the notion that walking isn’t strength training. We build strength in different ways. Strength of character, strength of mind, strength of body. We’re told we need to exercise if we want to keep our vitality, our cognition, our balance, our daily functioning. Few people talk about maintaining strength of character. It seems once you’ve built character, it stays with you.
What Walking Really Does for Our Aging Bodies
We understand walking’s positive effects. Walking increases blood flow, strengthens bones, improves blood pressure, and provides cardio for the heart if we set a good pace. Walking clears out the cobwebs in our brains, creates clearer thinking, and relieves depression. As I stated in my first book, Walking Gone Wild, How to Lose Your Age on the Trail, walking is in our DNA. As humans, we are meant to walk, and as we do it, we strengthen our humanness.
Become a walking woman
‘Walking Gone Wild: How to Lose Your Age on the Trail’ Sage Press (BookLocker.com, 2023, 205 pp.) “We must develop a compelling vision of later life,” author Dami Roelse propounds in this guidebook for walkers, “one that does not assume a trajectory of decline after 50.” The choice is letting yourself go into the “ice-cream bucket” or returning to humans’ natural form of movement. Walking.
Social Media - A Boon or Bane for the 60-Plus Community?
Facebook accounts have been hacked. Facebook has been used to target elections. Facebook advertisers have your data. According to Omnicore stats, 62% of online seniors aged 65+ are on Facebook. Are you still a Facebook/media user? Or have you joined the ranks of those who don’t trust social media and are choosing to make friends elsewhere? There is a danger in using this medium, but, as with any tool, how you use it determines how safe you are.
How Summer Helped Me to Get Ready for Fall and Winter
As the days shorten, the sunny hours become more precious. I grab a hold of them as if they are a lifeline strung between me and the darkness that increasingly envelops me as the days roll toward the winter solstice. It resembles a slow drowning into the depth of the season. Taking a sunny afternoon walk, I reflect on everything that happened in the last six months of light, travel and a long hiking season. Did the spring and summer seasons transform me? New neurons fill my brain.
Every Year After 60 Deserves a Re-Boot! Where Will You Go?
The desert spreads out below me as I pick my way on the rocky trail. Yesterday’s deep purple of Chinese lantern flowers lining the path has changed to soft lavender phacelia and bright orange mallow. Life at the speed of two miles an hour lets me retrieve the names of plants buried in the recesses of my brain since last summer’s hikes. I stop and scan the valley below, check the flower app on my phone for a new name to add to my botanical vocabulary. I adjust my pack, sip water and move on.
Should You Worry About Your Bone Density?
Thinning of the bones is inevitable for women after 60, right? For 10 years, I was hovering in the osteopenia range, blond, blue-eyed, with Northern European heritage. I thought I had to just live with it, swallow my calcium, eat my greens and keep exercising to combat the onslaught of aging. Then my doctor told me that calcium absorption from supplements is not significant enough to warrant taking it. So that left eating my greens and exercise.
Recognizing Our Potential as Women Over 60
Women over 60 may remember our younger days when we fought for the acknowledgement of women as equals. When we wanted to be “seen” for who we really were. Gone were the days of subservience to the patriarchal structure that had ruled the role of women from the dawn of humankind. We experienced the innocent freedom that the 70s and 80s gave us. Exploring our newly found equality in sports and business, we also explored our womanhood.
Doing Housework Can Be a Gift After 60... No, Seriously!
By the time we have crossed the 60 timeline, doing housework is probably the last thing on our mind. Let alone housework on a sunny summer day. You will think, “There are better things to do with my time.” That may be so, but let’s not underestimate the lowly housework in its capacity of giving satisfaction and joy. In 1957, in his classic The Poetics of Space, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote: “Through housewifely care a house recovers not so much its originality as its origin.
5 Reasons for Taking Up the Walking Life in Retirement
Walking is touted as good for our health, our emotional well-being and our social connections. I want to give you 5 more reasons. Walking doesn’t make you younger in years, but it allows you to have experiences where you forget your age. When you walk, you engage all your senses, and the world around you will trigger your brain to send you messages of aliveness, enjoyment and gratefulness. Do you experience aliveness when you’re sitting in your chair watching a movie? I don’t think so.
From Hibernation to Wholeness
Don’t you feel like holing up when the shorter days of November arrive (if you’re in the Northern hemisphere, that is)? Do you have a voice inside that says, “If you don’t use it, you lose it”? There are seasons to our activity levels, especially after we reach a certain age.
Should You Throw Out Your “To-Do” List After 60? Or, Just Rework It a Bit?
It’s a beautiful morning and I’m out the gate as if I have to reach the finish line by tomorrow! While laundry is drying on the line in the sun, yoghurt incubating in a sunny window, the dishwasher cleaned out, the blemished apple harvest paired and simmering on the stove to become apple butter, I get to write an article for Sixty and Me. As I am shifting from summer hiking season to fall harvest and writing touring, my list of things to do right now is so long I have to organize my time.
How to Rock It the Mature Way in the New Year: Downsizing Your Habits as Your New Resolution!
You’ve heard it: New Year’s resolutions don’t last! This doesn’t mean that you can’t take stock of what you want in life. The still dark, shorter days of January in the Northern hemisphere are the perfect time for taking stock. If you are in your 60s or 70s, retirement and aging loom big.
4 Ways to Reinvent Holiday Traditions to Fit Your Lifestyle
At this time of year we often fall back on the celebration habits we have formed over time. Read on for ideas of how to reinvent holiday traditions in ways that serve you! I started an alternate holiday tradition when my children were young. I wanted to get them away from the overbearing glitter and consumerism all around. A spiral of greens in our family living room with a big candle in the center became the vehicle for a darkness-to-light ritual.
Is 60 Too Old for Adventure Travel? No Way - But Consider These 4 Things
After a month in Europe, followed by a 6-week trip to Ladakh, Nepal, and China, including base camp Mt Everest and Mt Kailash in Tibet, I’m home again on the West Coast of America. Adventurous, you may think, for a 72-year-old. I’m back with a new view of the globalization of the world, politics, global migration, and my place in it.
How to Have More Energy After 60… According to Toddlers
I often hear grandparents say, “I love spending time with the toddler grands but am glad to give them back to their parents at the end of the day. I’m exhausted, they have so much energy!” Does our energy have to wane when we are past 60? I took a look at why these little ones have so much energy to see what I could learn. If you’re wondering how to have more energy after 60, toddlers can teach you a lot! We know movement keeps us healthy.
4 Ways to Escape the Summer Travel Nightmare After 60
Are you in the middle of your summer travel? Are you experiencing overbooked flights, long waits at airports and high costs to boot? Most airlines now offer seating, eating and baggage choices for the discerning traveler. Those of you who travel the air regularly know airline travel has become a nightmare. Not only is the budget-conscious traveler in the economy class affected, the other classes are the subject of overbooked planes and mechanical breakdowns as well.
Are Your Clothes Enhancing or Impairing Your Lifestyle After 60?
Magazines are full of articles about fashion for women over 50. Some give good advice, others not so much. I want to talk about fashion that enhances our lifestyle. Is your lifestyle healthy with lots of movement? Do you enjoy hobbies that dirty your clothes? Are you attending small group events? Do you travel or like relaxing at home? These activities require different clothes that offer comfort, ease and style. Not style dictated by fashion magazines, but a style that expresses your uniqueness.
Hiking Training for the Long Trail as a Senior
Hiking training for the Long Trail is a different puppy for a senior than it is for a young person. On a recent morning five-mile hike while walking off the stress of nightly presentations about hiking and backpacking to an eager, older audience, I was like a horse let out of the stable: my stride lengthened with each step until I found the rhythm that sustains me and lets me breathe deep and free.
Beauty Starts at Your Feet! 4 Ways to Care for Your Feet After 60 (And 6 Painful Conditions to Avoid)
For women, the question “Do I look good?” points at appearance, body shape, face, and hair. We use makeup and skin care to hide blemishes, change our facial color, accentuate the eyes and mouth. Bras and bodysuits help with our contours. We curl, uncurl, dye, bleach, streak, cut, and add pieces to our hair to enhance our looks. Advertising show us a plethora of products and possibilities for becoming desirable. Have you ever seen an ad that touts beauty through foot care?
How to Rock It the Mature Way in 2019: Downsizing Your Habits as Your New Resolution!
You’ve heard it: New Year’s resolutions don’t last! This doesn’t mean that you can’t take stock of what you want in life. The still dark, shorter days of January in the Northern hemisphere are the perfect time for taking stock. If you are in your 60s or 70s, retirement and aging loom big.
Happiness with Less: How to Achieve It Through the Holidays and into the New Year
One by one I picked up the memories wrapped in each ornament and hung them on the tree. Pictures materialized in my mind of a beloved’s head bent while creating these ornaments in his shop, little fingers gingerly gluing a star on a felt Christmas tree, a friend’s offering of a token of nature, a sister’s foreboding of a life passing. These are my company in the dark days of December.
4 Ways to Make Holiday Eating a Gift of Social Experience
In our ‘civilized’ world, food isn’t just used for survival, food is a drug. Do you know anyone who consistently refuses food when offered? I know people who, when food comes around, say, “I really shouldn’t,” or “Just a bite.” Then they sit down, fill the plate, smell, taste and dig in. Even my picky grandsons eat regularly, although not always when we want them to eat. They haven’t figured out the social aspect of eating, yet.
Getting Lost At Camp... Yes it Can Happen
The trailhead for my morning pick-up was a four-mile walk from where I made camp for the night. Getting lost wasn’t on my mind—the Oregon woods were home to me, and I found a small open space 50 feet from the PCT. I felt proud and smug that I still had the skill to chase the mosquitos away and make hot grub the old-fashioned way: over a campfire. I had stopped making fires years ago thanks to high fire danger in Oregon.
Will You Finish Your Long-Distance Hike?
With the summer season in full swing, the thru-hikers are showing up in my little town situated over halfway on the Pacific Crest Trail, mile 1,730 of 2,650. The eager hungry eyes, I met in the first 150 miles of the desert out of Campo, have turned into perpetually hungry bodies. The bouncy legs have become sinewy brown bundles of muscle.
A Slow Revolution: Finding Connectedness on the Trail
When you’re preparing for a long-distance hike where you’ll be walking at two to three miles per hour, you begin a slow revolution in your life and the lives of people surrounding you. Hiking distances is addictive. Once you’ve started, there is no turning back. You become a walker and you will forever look for opportunities to do more of it. Our society seeks convenience and ease. Getting somewhere fast and accomplishing things with the click of a button is the standard of living.
4 Things Most People Don’t Get About Loneliness After 50
Many Sixty and Me articles discuss loneliness and the myths that go along with it. Here is another light shed on that topic. I encountered loneliness in my late teens. Even though I was born into a large family and connected with friends through school and university, I felt the acute existential loneliness that comes with an inquiring mind.
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