Happy New Year from Changing Aging!!!Would like to start off this year with a post about rejuvenation from our guest blogger Jim Klobuchar, adventure traveler and legendary newspaper columnist.

Suddenly, A World with a Pulse

My friend emerged from the self-inflicted doldrums of retirement a few days ago to announce that he had been rescued, and he is now aflame with the gifts of a restored passion.He identified his rescuer as the late Ludwig von Beethoven. After I read the account of my friend’s deliverance, I added an asterisk to include a departed little lady as one of his anonymous angels.My friend taught economics for years at a prominent eastern university. Since his retirement he and his wife have traveled often and experienced scenes and sensations that were rewarding. By his own confession, though, he has lived a life-both on campus and in later– with head ‘buried in texts, ordered by logic and hard evidence, with few opportunities to develop an openness to the higher ranges of emotions…’This is a serious admission, friends. But the condition didn’t vanish when he retired, and it didn’t seem particularly reversible.Yet how much do we really know about the odd linkages in our lives that can suddenly unleash a core identity in us, a thrill we never expected no matter our age or our resistance to something suspiciously new.I have to introduce my mother here. Convinced that I was going to be the next Rachmaninoff of the keyboard, she insisted that I should take piano lessons despite the evidence coming out of our old upright when I played Mozart. After four years she ended the unequal battle and I went back to football. But the seed she planted was stubborn and in later years I came to love serious music and to play it. A few months ago my friend and his wife visited and I invited them into my music room to hear and see a DVD of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, conducted by Claudio Abbado. With today’s technology one can create a whole library of the masters, and now on a spread screen you can immerse yourself, almost physically, in glorious music here and now, at hand.My friend wrote a few days ago. They have retooled their TV and expanded the sound. They have fled their formal dining room and become unapologetic snackers, taking their meals surrounded by Beethoven, Schubert, Shostakovich and Puccini. I’d told them that the adagio movement of Brahms 2^nd Piano Concerto was so serene and wistful and so touched with longing it would bring them to tears.’It’s an absolute joy,’ he wrote. ‘experiencing pure beauty so close, with such intimacy.’I thought, ‘This one is for you, mom. But don’t remind me of Beethoven’s ‘Fuer Elise. Too many notes!’ I still can’t play in right.

You can read last month’s post from Jim here.