Aging Well in Community
Cohousing helps us have more enjoyment, connection, intellectual stimulation, and good health — ingredients to aging successfully.
Enjoy your home as you age
Home is an important part of identity and belonging. Most people would prefer to stay in their own homes as long as possible---and studies show people are happier and feel better at home. And most people feel better connected to others. Cohousing provides the best of both worlds.
Independence through interdependence
Interdependence is a key difference between cohousing and other kinds of retirement communities. In the latter, paid caretakers provide services, and residents become dependent, without a way to help others.
Interdependence in a cohousing community is a natural result of sharing common spaces, living close together, bonding through activities, and getting to know each other while running the community.
Many things are easier and more enjoyable when we do them together. Walking or biking, carpooling, sharing a trip to the grocery store, or taking public transportation to classes, art museums, concerts and lectures. Cooking a meal together, helping each other re-pot plants or even tackling a deep cleaning project — this give-and-take relationship is satisfying and helps us accomplish more than we could alone.
Homes that support aging in place can include:
Designs that maximize natural light and views of the outdoors.
Automatic lighting, climate-control and security systems.
Heated floors and easy temperature control.
Limited stairs or none, and safety features like railings and non-slip flooring.
Accessible showers and tubs.
Easy-to-access storage and hooks for things like towels and robes at eye level.
Wider doorways and lower countertops for possible wheelchair use.
Good acoustics in the common house.
Cohousing communities are designed for connection with others, a crucial aspect of aging well in place.
Life long learning
As we phase out of parenting and careers, many of us have time and energy to learn new skills and fuel our intellectual curiosity. Research on the benefits of continued learning as we age is clear. People who keep learning new information, skills and ways to be of service stay healthier in the long run. Some examples:
Developing new skills through running the community, such as property management, consensus decision-making, nonviolent communication, and universal design planning.
Participating in study and book groups, music classes, yoga or tai chi, art and woodworking projects, sewing and quilting groups, and much more.
Using the Learning in Retirement model of peer-to-peer learning and participating in study groups designed for those 50 and older.
Cultivating meaning and purpose
Cohousing encourages connection and contemplation by:
Offering opportunities to connect with each other regularly.
Helping us grow through the commitment and effort needed to live together.
Fostering a feeling of belonging and breaking us out of loneliness and isolation.
Allowing us to create something larger than ourselves.
Providing shared spaces designed for connection and private spaces for reflection.
Saging - the wisdom of age
The concept of saging, described by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi in his book From Aging to Sage-ing (https://sage-ing.org), expresses the belief that our usefulness as people has no expiration date. We are never over the hill. Rather, we have a great deal to give back to the world that has given us so much.
The qualities of saging qualities include openness, flexibility, compassion, intellectual curiosity and humility. Cohousing provides opportunities to practice compassionate listening, take a nonjudgmental and non-adversarial attitude, and become comfortable with diverse points of view.
Making peace with death and dying
Woven into the warp and weft of existence, death can deepen our appreciation of life. The more we embrace our mortality as something that motivates us to live our lives fully, the more our anxiety can transform into feelings of awe and gratitude. In our society, detachment from death makes it frightening and mysterious. The ability to age, get sick and die in community makes this process part of a lifetime of belonging.
A return to village life
In many ways, cohousing recreates the tribes and villages that kept groups of humans alive for millennia before modern culture and technology. Today we can capture all that was good about those earlier communities by creating a more enjoyable, connected and purposeful experience of aging.