Catherine Kottner follows her own advice for successful aging--stay connected, keep busy, and know who you are
New York City resident is "Splendid Senior Among Us" for May 2007
It seems only fitting that Catherine Kottner is being honored as an inspirational senior, since the 79-year-old New York City resident facilitates a weekly women's discussion group on "successful aging."
Her advice to others in or approaching their senior years? Stay connected. Keep busy, if that’s always been your way. But also take time, if need be, to figure out who you are.
“If you’ve always been busy and connected,” Kottner says, “take courses,” volunteer in the school system (a good way to “pay back” a public education), but also take time to think about yourself and your life instead of “just being busy.”
That’s worked pretty well for Kottner, who is the May 2007 “Splendid Senior Among Us” in the national program initiated by Pearlsong Press. Kottner was nominated by Patricia A. Kusnick, director of the Lenox Hill Neighborhood House Senior Center on East 70th Street in New York City, where for the past 15 years Kottner has facilitated the women’s group as well as presented orientation programs dealing with relocation stress, national and international volunteerism, and “Where, When and How to Shop in New York.”
The women in her discussion groups “never tire of the topics that she introduces every week,” Kusnick wrote in her nomination letter. “She has the ability to work with women of all backgrounds and to draw out the humanity in all of them….Catherine has inspired me to be the best that I can be.”
In working with women from many different backgrounds, it probably doesn’t hurt that Kottner speaks six languages. In addition to the Serbo-Croatian she spoke at home as a child and the English she learned in school, she speaks French, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. She worked for more than three decades as a United Nations executive in New York City, and helped establish the first UN Child Care Center (“a labor of love,” Kottner says).
Kottner’s interest in helping others was apparent even in elementary school, when she organized and headed a toy library for children unable to buy their own playthings.
She encourages other senior women not to focus on whether they have a man in their lives, how often their children or grandchildren visit, or whether they have children at all. There’s no reason to be lonely or unhappy even if single, widowed or childless, she says.
A good way to feel loved and nurtured is to give love and nurturing to others. There’s no trick to meeting other people, she says—“you meet people while doing things you enjoy.”
As the “Splendid Senior Among Us” honoree for May 2007, Kottner receives a certificate and an autographed copy of Splendid Seniors: Great Lives, Great Deeds by Jack Adler (original trade paperback published by Pearlsong Press in March 2007).Pearlsong Press is sponsoring the year-long “Splendid Seniors Among Us” program in conjunction with publication of Adler’s book, to honor seniors who are living inspirations. For more information about the “Splendid Seniors Among Us” program, see the Pearlsong Press website at www.pearlsong.com.
Pearlsong Press, founded in 2003 by psychologist and journalist Peggy Elam, Ph.D, specializes in books and resources that entertain while expanding perspectives on the self and the world.
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