The Joy Of Age

On this episode, Patrick talks to publicist Ali Arif about his solo theatre show he’s still performing at the age of 70.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Archy is a cockroach, the reincarnation of a bad poet. His friend, Mehitabel is a down at heel alley cat who claims to be the reincarnation of Cleopatra. Their conversations are very funny, Mehitabel gets into all sorts of scrapes and Archy has a jaundiced view of human nature. Every night he crawls out of his hiding place in the apartment owned by ‘Boss’ and types a poem on his typewriter every night about Archy’s life.
• It was written in the 1920s-30s so it has a jazz age feel to it and includes wonderful New York street slang. The language is brilliant, witty and funny.
• When I was a child there used to be huge clouds of butterflies in the summertime, & that doesn’t happen any more except in protected areas. We’re losing so much of the insect population which is affecting the bird population. There’s a while chain of events that occur when we don’t protect even the smallest life forms. Archy has a message to the human race about what we’re doing to ourselves. 
• I love the young people who are much more environmentally aware than my generation who squandered a lot of the resources of the planet. What’s fantastic about Archy and Mehitabel is that Don Marquis wrote it nearly 100 years ago. People then were well aware that industrial scale society was already using up the resources of the planet, as did Zola, Dickens, Blake many years before that.

BEST MOMENTS

‘It’s a funny, satirical view of human nature and its follies.’

‘I play about 20 different characters during the course of the play.’

‘All actors are, in one way or another, show -offs, and this is my show-off show.’

‘Insects will inherit the planet, we are destroying ourselves & turning the planet into a desert.’

ABOUT THE HOST

Patrick Kealey has been an actor, theatre director, writer and teacher and workshop leader for over 40 years. He runs a professional theatre company based in Hastings UK where he currently lives. Please get in touch with me on the following links below!

CONTACT METHOD

www.theatrenation.org 

https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/ 

On this episode, Patrick is joined once more by Harold Lewey to talk about how everything is interconnected & how some humans can often close themselves off from the web of life while others seem to be able to connect to everything.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• One of the greatest blessings I ever received is that I see beauty everywhere, I literally identify that everything no matter how beautiful, harmonic, or dissonant & annoying, there is beauty absolutely everywhere. Live is a big, strong river coursing ahead & all things are connected to that river.
• After what my father lived through in a concentration camp he became an addict of life & truly helped everybody along the way. He never spoke about it, but he did. So, I had examples & teachers, people aren’t necessarily meant to know, we learn as we go by example, mimicry, by need – which is the greatest inventor.
• There are different types of connection. One of them is inside: Knowing who I am. Once I know that & I have self-identity, then the ‘I’ exists & I look, I see, I go, I touch & can then reach out to the outside. There’s confusion, a lot of people mix it together & look for self-identity based on how other see them because they haven’t taken the time to create the ground base of connection with themselves. These are not interchangeable, you won’t survive with only one, there needs to be balance.
• All human beings need belonging. The question is; what do we belong to & what do we give up of our individual identify to belong. What most people do is create their own little pack, but even within the pack, we’re all different, so we’re doomed to be alone. The first difference we have to accept is our own difference within ourselves, we have our own parts that are different, we believe certain things & there are parts that don’t agree with that part. We tend to meet people that touch that particular point.

BEST MOMENTS

‘Creation is a series of beautiful & sometimes absolutely terrifying manifestations of an endless flow of energy going on. Truly, we are in the river of life.’

‘I don’t believe there’s anything that’s correct or incorrect, as long as we’re not hurting others or ourselves what’s the danger to connecting to & seeing the beauty in everything.’

‘The work begins inside.’

‘The greatest importance for baby is to be held.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Harold Lewey has 40 years in group dynamics leadership, & finding one's voice & direction using theatre, art, music & movement.

Harold's focus has been reading of the unspoken body languages that reveal who we are + how we operate. Accompanying change, seeking Peace, finding humour in detail + perspective in the bigger picture.

ABOUT THE HOST

Patrick Kealey has been an actor, theatre director, writer and teacher and workshop leader for 0ver 40 years. He runs a professional theatre company based in Hastings UK where he currently lives. Please get in touch with me on the following links below!

CONTACT METHOD

www.theatrenation.org 

https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/ 

On this episode, Patrick is joined once more by Harold Lewey to talk about abundance & what it means for them.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• For most people abundance means plentifulness, the cornucopia of life, the richness of fruit pouring out of a conch shell in great quantity. My personal take is that all things I need, want & are meant for me will find me & I will find them. That is the philosophy of abundance & living in abundance. The question is when? Through whom? & how?
• There is an issue that for certain people it has nothing to do with quantity, it has to do with quality. They’re not really interested in quantity, they want a certain quality to their lives. For them abundance has nothing to do with quantity, it has to do with the specifics of quality.
• Is the glass half full or half empty? If you’re looking at the part that’s half empty you will experience the emptiness, if you’re looking at the part that’s half full you will experience the fullness. Look inside & think: “Let me appreciate what I have at this point as being the perfect amount and quality for what I’m capable of doing.” It has a lot to do with people learning humility & patience & being able to handle their own arrogance that they deserve or are supposed to have certain things, jealousy & envy. These are issues we need to deal with
• For one person abundance might be owning a lot of clothes that they never wear, for another it might be having lots of toys, for another simply having one pair of Ray-Ban sunglasses is abundance. Many years ago I heard a guru saying the for her abundance was stuffed olives, they were the ultimate in luxury because you could get a kilo of regular olives for the same price as a small jar of stuffed olives.

BEST MOMENTS

‘Abundance itself is purely an attitude. You can be with nothing & feel & experience abundance or you can have everything & feel short-changed.’

‘Life is full. If you’re rich in problems you’re still rich.’

‘Just because you have a lot of something doesn’t mean you can appreciate it, absorb it or even realise that’s what you have.’

‘A lot of us are still working vacuum which has nothing to do with what does & doesn’t exist in the world, it has to do with our relationship with the emptiness we experience, & no amount of abundance can ever fill that.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Harold Lewey has 40 years in group dynamics leadership, & finding one's voice & direction using theatre, art, music & movement.

Harold's focus has been reading of the unspoken body languages that reveal who we are + how we operate. Accompanying change, seeking Peace, finding humour in detail + perspective in the bigger picture.

ABOUT THE HOST

Patrick Kealey has been an actor, theatre director, writer and teacher and workshop leader for 0ver 40 years. He runs a professional theatre company based in Hastings UK where he currently lives. Please get in touch with me on the following links below!

CONTACT METHOD

www.theatrenation.org 

https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/ 

On this episode, Patrick is joined once more by Harold Lewy to talk about energy, with a particular focus on health & wellbeing as well as the commodification of energy.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• I’ve heard so many people talk unqualified drivel about ‘energy’, but they’ve not done a smidgen of work to actually know what energy is & they hide in there because it sounds good. But, to me, it doesn’t sound good. I don’t think the human race has a shadow of an inkling of how the universe actually works & how great resources have been put to our advantage, & how we haven’t just squandered our own lives but everybody else’s at the same time, thinking we know something we know very little about almost everything. Speak to me about life force.
• The human being is, as most true disciplines describe it, a vector of electromagnetic flows that come through us from the universe down into the earth & that come from the earth and flow through us towards either the sky, the air, or into our bodies & are stuck there. We have several energy points (acupunctural/meridians/flowing levels/pressure points/chakras) in our body, do we truly learn how to use & channel them to turn them into life force? Most people bumble about & find out they’re able to have sex or create life, how much they do with that life or revere & honour it seems a contradiction in terms. 
• We are there but for the life source inside ourselves & when that life force either comes to its termination or moves on from us because we’re not chose as vehicles for that lifeforce, we’ll be physically dead. But there are many ways to enhance that life force.
• To enhance the life force we must be willing to take a step back and say we don’t really know how it comes about. There are many theories & beautiful stories and things written about it. What we need to do first of allis respect it as something we don not control, we have an effect & an influence on the life force but we don’t actually control it. 

BEST MOMENTS

‘We’re being arrogant, self-inflated, uneducated, uninformed, partially looking, partially understanding, mal-interpreting fools. We’re just not getting it.’

‘We honour life yet we show it no respect whatsoever. Life force is everywhere, to mistreat an elephant is to ultimately mistreat your own life force.’

‘Human beings are not very good with things that we don’t control, we tend to have a spurious non-respect for things we don’t control.’

‘You mustn’t overuse your strengths & you must practice & strengthen your weaknesses so that there’s a greater balance.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Harold Lewey has 40 years in group dynamics leadership, & finding one's voice & direction using theatre, art, music & movement.

Harold's focus has been reading of the unspoken body languages that reveal who we are + how we operate. Accompanying change, seeking Peace, finding humour in detail + perspective in the bigger picture.

ABOUT THE HOST

Patrick Kealey has been an actor, theatre director, writer and teacher and workshop leader for 0ver 40 years. He runs a professional theatre company based in Hastings UK where he currently lives. Please get in touch with me on the following links below!

CONTACT METHOD

www.theatrenation.org 

https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/ 

On this episode, Patrick is joined by Harold to talk about change as we get older and why we fear change.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• We fear change because it’s meeting the unknown. Knowing where I am spatially and time-wise gives me a sense of security because I have a basic definition within which to define myself. Self-definition is what – at least the majority of human beings agree – will distinguish us from the rest of the animal species: self-awareness & being able to look at & define ourselves. We have a need for self-definition.
• The two major reasons for change are: The curiosity of the unknown & therefore the pull towards difference. The other is when it’s too painful or constrictive for us to remain as we are, or in the current construct.
• Whether we want to or not, life is made of change because that’s how we matrix, that’s how we our ADM or DNA is already programmed. We’re in a steady evolution & there will be a constant living, growing, dying going on over time.
• It’s as if we’re born with an empty rucksack & as we’re born we put a little pebble in it. Each year & with each experience we add more pebbles & rocks & by the time you get to your 60s or 70s half a mountain is on your back, no wonder you get bent over, it’s a lot of weight to carry. Lighten up, let go, throw out the ballast. The older we are the less we’re supposed to be carrying, not more.

BEST MOMENTS

‘It’s very comforting for human beings to start off knowing the ‘where’ and ‘when’ & the ‘what’ is what we fill in afterwards as self-identity.’

‘A map is only as good as if you know where you are on the map.’

‘The soul doesn’t need to be rooted.’

‘We have slow experiences to learn. We don’t have them because we are slow. Experience is all about integration & knowledge on a cellular level.’

ABOUT THE HOST

Patrick Kealey has been an actor, theatre director, writer and teacher and workshop leader for 0ver 40 years. He runs a professional theatre company based in Hastings UK where he currently lives. Please get in touch with me on the following links below!

CONTACT METHOD

www.theatrenation.org 

https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/ 

In this episode, Patrick is joined once more by his friend Francis Viner to talk about friendship, especially the importance of friendship in one’s life as one gets older, and the need to have friends who have been on the journey with us.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• One of my oldest friends is also one of my best, and the ‘best’ is down to the fact that we’ve seen so many changes in each others’ lives and have been separated by vast distances and still it’s endured. I think we find each other extremely interesting, the conversation has never flagged.
• It’s always been an important part of any relationship that I’ve had, an intellectual compatibility. It’s essential to share a table with anyone. You need people to be challenging, to widen your horizons and keep you honest, and that would be a mutual experience.
• I’ve learned, with age, to become friends with a man without having any sexual content to that relationship. I feel extremely comfortable in that scenario. It took me a while to discover that because, as a young person, I thought there always had to be some erotic compulsion within it. Getting beyond that was one of the most important things I’ve done in my relationships with the male sex. Once I realised that it was possible to have extremely wonderful friendships with guys, and really absolutely love them… it was almost more comfortable without having to deal with the fallout of having had a sexual relationship, “will we, won’t we”, you do and then you don’t anymore. It was a clear field and had a clarity that almost, in some instances certainly, was more profound than some of the friendships I’d made with women. 
• A parent/child relationship is singular, it’s not like anything, it is what it is. Pushing friendship into the equation… I don’t think it is misguided, it’s going to have its own joy and value. My relationship to my own children is not a friendship, there’s complexity of a whole other kind. 

BEST MOMENTS

‘Friends who have been on the journey with us are very valuable, but there are fewer and fewer of them!’

‘I felt like a cuckoo in the nest, so finding people with whom there was the potential for deep sharing and acceptance was enormously important and expanded me.’

‘Wouldn’t it be great if you could keep an intimate relationship as intense and as clean as a friendship? That’s not to say that all friendships don’t have their ups and downs.’

‘Laughter. Where are you going to go without that?’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Frances Viner is an actress, known for Clarissa (1991), The Good Father (1985) and Casualty (1986).

ABOUT THE HOST

Patrick Kealey has been an actor, theatre director, writer and teacher and workshop leader for 0ver 40 years. He runs a professional theatre company based in Hastings UK where he currently lives. Please get in touch with me on the following links below!

CONTACT METHOD

www.theatrenation.org
https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/ 

In this episode, Patrick is joined by JJ Waller to talk about the way the education system has changed over the years and how it, and their social surroundings shaped them.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• One of the things that society needs is theatre in education, drama, improvisation, and acting out of scenarios. It’s a key to understanding empathy and relationships, your sexuality, your place in society, the class system and I’m very sad to think it isn’t prioritised and is always the first thing to be chopped.
• As we get older we become more reactionary, I feel like I’m stuck sitting on the fence quite often not wanting to judge people too quickly. I’m looking to find the good in people. Throughout my whole life I’ve been attracted to opposites and have been interested in being in situations that aren’t part of my norm. I get a buzz from learning and trying to think about people that are different from me.
• I think most of my opportunities in life have come down to luck, though there must be qualities in my personality that could roll with those situations. If I was very shy in public I would be able to go and stand in Covent Garden and attract and entertain crowds of hundreds of people. I didn’t sit down and try to script my life, it was all unplanned.
• Quite often I have a problem expressing what I’m trying to communicate because my attraction to photography is that I’m trying to express my thoughts and feelings with images that I present for a debate between other people rather than explain to you what it means. I’m always trying to understand my own reactions to some of the things I create.

BEST MOMENTS

‘I can’t think of many times when my parents stopped me from doing anything I wanted to do, they were very trusting.’

‘I’m not a workaholic, the opposite of my Dad, likely because I saw the stress being a workaholic put on him.’

‘What surrounds you is the index of your possibilities and it depends on how high or low they are.’

‘Some people wouldn’t call me a street photographer because I’m not just taking a picture, I talk to the subjects.’

ABOUT THE GUEST

JJ Waller is a street performer turned photographer, best known for his street photographs of Brighton, his home town, and other seaside towns, including Blackpool and Benidorm. His portraits of Brighton people during the 2020 COVID-19 Lockdown featured in The Guardian, in the BBC4 Lockdown drama Unprecedented and in a 2020 book, JJ Waller's Lockdown.

Website: https://www.jjwaller.com/ 

ABOUT THE HOST

Patrick Kealey has been an actor, theatre director, writer and teacher and workshop leader for 0ver 40 years. He runs a professional theatre company based in Hastings UK where he currently lives. Please get in touch with me on the following links below!

CONTACT METHOD

www.theatrenation.org 
https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/ 

In this opening episode, Patrick introduces himself and the idea for his podcast, The Joy of Age. In it he hopes to inspire an older generation (50+) to explore the challenges and opportunities of ageing well with the mantra ‘’It’s never too late to follow your dreams”, through all topics relating to living the very best life you want at any age.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• What’s so fun about age and getting older? It’s a question I’ve been asking myself recently and it’s why I’m starting this podcast, despite the fact there are hundreds of thousands of podcasts out there, why not me?! It’s like having a good friend in the room with you while you’re going about your daily life. I know a bit about getting older, so I hope to share my experiences with you.
• The elderly and teenagers have a lot in common, we ought to get together more – and I think there’s a very good reason that teenagers tend to get on better with their grandparents than they do with their parents, but that’s for another time. But, as an elder we’re still here having come through a lot in life. We think we’re in control, but we never actually are, all that we can do with life's flow.
• Grey hair and wrinkles, that physical sense of age and time and time taking its toll. We live in a society – in affluent nations – where we have an obsession of looking and needing to be younger and a terror of owning the process of the journey of life. The most beautiful elders that I’ve seen are the ones who have in no way tried to hide their ageing and the passage of time.
• Why not keep on doing what you love into your 80s or 90s? In order to get joy from life you have to, at some point in your life, discover what is yours. I was taken to see A Christmas Carol in the theatre as a 6 year old and my path was determined at that point while I watched this extraordinary world unfold before me. I didn’t know how they were doing it, but I wanted to be in that world.

BEST MOMENTS

‘I want to talk about the great things and the not so great things about getting older as well as challenging the ideas about getting older that we often come across in the media.’

‘Sometimes, those of us who are older have developed some resilience or skill at negotiating life and are able to put things into perspective.’

‘The messages from society are not positive. I was not being told that I can now look forward to an extraordinary period of my life. There’s a sense that when you retire you must sit on the shelf, go and do your hobbies, sit in your lounge and don’t bother people anymore, you’re not a significant or major member of society. There are many many exceptions to this rule.’

‘I want to talk about learning and trying new things. There are a lot of older people who are doing extraordinary things.’

ABOUT THE HOST

Patrick Kealey has been an actor, theatre director, writer and teacher and workshop leader for 0ver 40 years. He runs a professional theatre company based in Hastings UK where he currently lives. Please get in touch with me on the following links below!

CONTACT METHOD

www.theatrenation.org
https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/ 

In this episode, Patrick is joined by his friend and actress Frances Viner who exemplifies what this podcast is about, which is living life to the max, living all in, giving everything you’ve got, giving no quarter, continuing to explore and being open and completely creative.

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Life is about invention. You can concur with social inventions and try and invent within them or try to push the boundaries and try to step over the line that’s been put in front of you since birth. I’ve certainly never been ‘rule-bound’. What I have now that I didn’t have when I was younger was the confidence to say: “fuck it” and mean it. There’s nothing to lose now and I really, really don’t care what I look like when I go out.
• I don’t get up slinging, I think just get up, don’t lie and let the ghosts surround the bed, because there are few of them now. Then my encounter with the world isn’t hysterically amusing, it’s only by owning up that you’re funny. Everyone goes through it whether it’s a scraped knee at 3 or a broken heart at 50. I’m not dead yet!
• There’s something you can call upon as an older person without even knowing it, because your life has been filled with something, you’ve loved something for a long time, it’s gone into you.
• I don’t feel very political because I’ve kind of given up on it. What’s left? It’s a bit of a desert, so I’ve retreated into art. Although it’s not a retreat at all, it’s an advance because you are going into – as much as you possibly can – the truth of life rather than politics which is more inclined to obfuscate the truth of life, humanity, what it is to be alive and soldier on through intense difficulties. Our attempt at listening to people, giving them their stories and giving them a framework, a platform and an audience is a fine thing to do.

BEST MOMENTS

‘Reflection is part of ageing, I won’t let age beat me.’

‘I would not battle age, because it would be a hiding to nothing! What would I do if I threw away these walking sticks? Fall over!’

‘In art I absolutely need a gut punch: why did that happen, why did you feel that way, why?’

‘Laugh. What else is there?!’

ABOUT THE GUEST

Frances Viner is an actress, known for Clarissa (1991), The Good Father (1985) and Casualty (1986).

ABOUT THE HOST

Patrick Kealey has been an actor, theatre director, writer and teacher and workshop leader for 0ver 40 years. He runs a professional theatre company based in Hastings UK where he currently lives. Please get in touch with me on the following links below!

CONTACT METHOD

www.theatrenation.org
https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/ 

In this episode, Patrick talks about his favourite philosophy on life: Ikigai. This is a Japanese word and it translates to ‘to live with reason’. This ties directly into the message of this podcast which is what gives us joy in life? What is Joy? How and where do we find it?

KEY TAKEAWAYS

• Last year, during the pandemic and the first lockdown, not being able to perform in the theatre meant I had a lot of time on my hands, so I decided to find out a bit more about how money works and how to make more and became quite obsessed with it. Then I got to a point where I realised I was looking at the problem the wrong way round and I was dealing with something I’d not dealt with at the source, I needed to find out what brings me joy in life.
• Thinking small is a great place to start, the Japanese have a culture of minimalism where we in the West are always after big things. Your goals feed into your vision and your purpose in life, we sometimes put too much pressure on having a huge goal or purpose when perhaps the smaller goals towards smaller purposes would be enough.
• During the first lockdown some of us were forced to stop, something we’d never had the luxury to do before. A lot of people started to post comments online about really experiencing nature in a different way and watching the seasons change. Part of joy in life is that being in the flow enables you to sink more deeply into life, there’s nothing you can do but accept the moment.
• As one reaches the later years in one’s life, one can look back and take pleasure in the journey of, hopefully, a good long life. And for all of us life has many ups and downs, highs and lows.

BEST MOMENTS

‘Bookshops are one of my happy places.’

‘The Little Book of Ikigai by Ken Mogi is a lovely little book. It's a very clear, humble, direct way of explaining to a Westerner the philosophy of Ikigai and how it infuses every area of Japanese culture.’

‘Chasing after something that may not be a solution to my purpose is illusory, I needed to come back to the focus of my Ikigai.’

‘Ikigai can be found in the most challenging moments in life or in the very simplest things, like reading the plaques on public benches and being moved by them. Those people named on the plaque probably found their ikigai sitting there staring out at the sea or looking up at the sky.’

ABOUT THE HOST

Patrick Kealey has been an actor, theatre director, writer and teacher and workshop leader for 0ver 40 years. He runs a professional theatre company based in Hastings UK where he currently lives. Please get in touch with me on the following links below!

CONTACT METHOD

www.theatrenation.org
https://www.instagram.com/pktheatrenation/