Margaret Trudeau: ‘Be curious and full of wonder’
Margaret Trudeau spoke to an audience of 250 at McMaster’s David Braley Health Sciences Centre in downtown Hamilton as part of Living Long, Living Well, a symposium focused on healthy aging, the second event in the Big Ideas, Better Cities series.
What’s the secret to healthy aging?
“Do something you’ve never done before,” says Canadian icon Margaret Trudeau, author of The Time of Your Life.
Trudeau, 67, spoke candidly to a full house at McMaster’s David Braley Health Sciences Centre in downtown Hamilton, recounting her struggles with mental health and talking about how people can make their later years meaningful and fulfilling.
“We need to be curious and full of wonder,” says Trudeau. “We’re free people when we’re older. We need to resist the siren song of our sofa and go outside and talk to strangers. This is what we forget to do, we stay in and we meet the same people and we do the same things, when we really should get out and start a new direction.”
Read the Hamilton Spectator article on Margaret Trudeau’s talk.
Trudeau’s talk was part of Living Long, Living Well: A Symposium on the Plasticity of Aging, the second event in McMaster University’s Big Ideas, Better Cities series meant to showcase how McMaster research can help communities respond to 21st century challenges.
Featuring more than 30 McMaster and international experts, the symposium, organized by the new McMaster Institute for GeroScience, focused on the latest research on aging and how to ensure that cities and communities have the information they need to help people live longer and better.
“Aging is not only biological, it’s not only clinical, it’s a social phenomenon and the message we heard from our speakers over the past few days is that much of our joy comes from how we live as social beings,” says Parminder Raina, the lead organizer of the symposium, the director of the McMaster Institute for GeroScience, and the Raymond and Margaret Labarge Chair in Research and Knowledge Application for Optimal Aging.
“We need to understand our biology, our psychology, how we live in our communities and interact with other people. All of this has to be brought together to understand why some people age in a healthy way and others don’t. This is a very new science and this is why we’re doing the work we’re doing at McMaster.”
The next event in the Big Ideas, Better Cities series is Better Communities Through Better Data (November 2-3, 2015).
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Big Ideas, Better Cities is funded through Forward with Integrity and is part of a number of initiatives currently underway to enhance and support research at McMaster.
