Too often we've designated certain tasks for a preschool age or certain tasks for youngsters who are in school.

We may have designated tasks for college age, young adulthood, middle age, normal adulthood.

The senior years or however we designated older adulthood, you know, and the reality is that one of the things that that does is it compartmentalizes the way in which we focus what we do at different age.

Welcome to Rejuvenaging with Dr. Ron Kaiser. This is a podcast designed to help you lead your life enthusiastically today, tomorrow, and every other day.

I am your host, Ron Kaiser, positive health psychologist, also keynote and TEDx speaker, coach, and author of the triple award winning book Rejuvenaging the Art and Science of Growing Older with Enthusiasm.

As listeners of podcasts, no, my goal is to always present guests who lead their own lives enthusiastically and have different ways of helping us to become better versions of ourselves on a regular basis.

Now, once in a while, particularly on holiday weeks, I do a solo podcast, generally covering a topic that isn't covered when we have our normal shows with guests.

So, I'd like to do that today, and what I'm calling this podcast is the continuum of living. Now, how's that for an ambiguous title?

What I'd like to be able to do is try to dispel the notion of all these different stages of life and recognize that we exist on a continuum, the continuum of living.

Too often, we've designated certain tasks for, say, preschool age, or certain tasks for youngsters who are in school.

We may have designated tasks for college age, young adulthood, middle age, normal adulthood, the senior years, or however we designated older adulthood.

And the reality is that one of the things that that does is it compartmentalizes the way in which we focus what we do at different ages.

Thus, in preschool, I mean play is a big thing, but we shouldn't ever forget that that's something that we utilize throughout our life.

Some people, once they leave school age, never take another course, never really learn anything new, may never even open a book after that.

One of the problems is that at certain ages, we seem to be excused from doing things that are good for us.

In other words, if, say, in middle age, if we're raising a young family during younger than middle age years, very often we're excused from exercising, eating well, things of that nature, as long as we can provide for the family.

That makes it a lot harder to bring a healthy body and mind into the retirement years, for example.

And if the retirement years, if they're cemented retirement, if they're not seen as existing on a continuum, then we may not really be prepared for it.

In other words, what else is there to do but retire?

Retirement historically has been associated with passivity and decline when people can do a lot of great things with their bodies and their minds and their contributions to the community.

One of the great things about thinking about life as existing on a continuum is that we begin to do a building, utilizing building blocks that we gain from each age, incorporating fun into our lives,

incorporating exercise, play into our lives, recognizing that nutrition is not something that is sometimes taught as a subject in school, but something that enables us to lead our lives in a certain way so that we maintain healthy body weight, a healthy brain.

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