1. Introduction

Most people who write about the elderly, their problems and concerns, have never themselves been elderly. Nevertheless, they write profusely and give advice about what is, to them, an unknown dimension of life.

That certainly cannot be said about your authors! We have travelled life's road and experienced its turmoil and travail. We have known sickness and disease, suffered bereavement and sorrow, sustained life's defeats and also tasted the sweetness of success.

We have worked in the slums of large cities and counseled the children of migrant workers. We have travelled the highways of much of the world, and have conversed and supped with both the great and the small. Throughout it all, life has been exciting and wondrously good to us. We count ourselves fortunate among humans because, when we had need, we learned about Natural Hygiene.

Life has taught us that living is itself a challenge. It represents, at birth, an unknown potential with goals to be won, an opportunity 10 change small dreams into large realities. In the end, life represents a parade of failures and successes. We are favored, indeed, when the successes of life outweight our defeats.

We ask you to remember that every senior citizen who seeks your advice will represent a person who has succeeded. Dr. Robert H. Schuller says that "Tough times don't last, but tough people do!" These are the tough ones! They have met life head on, they have successfully met the challenges and problems of life which felled many, if not most, of their peers. These older clients have survived while literally millions around them disappeared. They obviously entered life with a strong inheritance and, unlike their felled peers, they took better care of themselves as they lived their years.

Each older person will represent a challenge to you, a personal challenge to become his friend, perhaps the only person he can truly call a friend. Melville H. Nahin in an article, "The Problem Solver" in New Age magazine, March 1983, compares life to a train ride. As we grow older and come to the end of our ride, the friends of yesteryear, the weaker ones who boarded the train with us at the same station, seem suddenly to have all disappeared. They got off the train here and there as the ride progressed. Suddenly, the older person looks around and sees that all the seats are empty: his friends are no more! Then it is that older people become consciously aware that they are devastatingly alone. The knowledgeable practitioner, the one with a social empathy, can often have the privilege of stepping in and filling this often unplanned-for void.