No Time Like the Present

Reading about Steve Jobs’ death tonight at the age of 56, I feel a renewed sense of urgency to seize the moment.  I’ve already lived a year more than he did.  With that in mind, today I’ve chosen to re-run a post I published on February 10, 2008.  When I wrote this, my friend Laurie’s husband Jim had just died of a brain tumor.

A memorial celebration was held yesterday for Jim McKennan, the husband of my friend Laurie Gordon. He was only 54 years old and the father of four school-age children. Over 700 people came to the service.

I was fortunate to be able to spend some time with Jim the last few weeks before he died. On each occasion, I left with the conviction that our connections with others nourish and sustain us as much as our dreams.

Throughout his life, Jim’s priority was his loved ones. He was enormously successful in business, the creative genius behind the Wendy’s campaign that featured founder Dave Thomas. But he almost never left his house before nine in the morning and tried to be home by six each night. He didn’t want to miss seeing his children off to school and hearing about their day when they returned.

Bearing Witness

Here's a post I wrote on 9/11/08. I can't believe ten years have passed:

On a crystal clear morning eight years ago today, my husband and I were sitting in our car at a beach in Greens Farms, Connecticut, watching the Twin Towers burn. We couldn’t see the flames, but from across Long Island Sound we could see plumes of smoke blackening the sky. Minutes earlier on television we'd watched in horror as the towers came down, the debris cascading through the canyons of lower Manhattan.

At one time my husband had an office at the World Trade Center, but I only knew one person who was there that day—a friend who was working at her desk on the 83rd floor when the second plane hit. She made it out. I didn't know a single soul who died.

Even so, I cried every day for months. The New York Times ran a regular feature titled "Portraits of Grief" to commemorate the victims of the attack. Perhaps I would have been less emotional had I not been a regular reader of the section. In all, 140 reporters spent more than a year writing brief portraits of more than 2,400 of that day’s roughly 2,800 victims, bearing witness to their lives.

The stories are heartstopping. Each one beckons us, the living, to be braver with our dreams.

61-Year Old Swimmer Holds Head Up High

Yesterday, in a stretch of sea half-way between Cuba and Key West, 61-year old marathon swimmer Diana Nyad abandoned a dream.  

Ms. Nyad's quest was to complete the 60-hour, 103-mile journey without a shark cage.  For two years she had been in training, swimming 12 hours every other day and lifting weights in between.  Years before, at the age of 29, she had set a record for the longest ocean swim:  102.5 miles from Bimini to Jupiter, FL.  Now she was determined to set another.  She wanted to show people that life isn’t over at 60.  “People  my age must try to live vital, energetic lives,” she told Don Van Natta of the NYT.  "We're still young.  We're not our mothers' generation at 60."

Leading Questions

Where is your work coming from?  Why are you doing it?  What is it you see?  These are questions pioneering photographer Jerome Leibling, who died last week at the age of 87, continually asked his students, one of whom was documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. 

In a 2006 NYT interview, Burns said about Leibling:  “You wanted to be like him. You wanted to tell the truth. You’d go out to take pictures with him, and we all saw the same things he did, and then we’d come back, and he’d put up his prints, and you’d put up yours, and you were devastated.”

What does all this have to do with defying gravity?  More than you might think.  To overcome the weight of societal expectations of age and gender, to overcome the weight of family history, to overcome the weight of our ideas of ourselves—in other words, to be truly authentic—these are precisely the questions one needs to ask.

The Force of Habit

Even though personality stabilizes by 20 and is virtually solidified by 50, this doesn't mean that all opportunity for growth stops in midlife. No matter what your age, it's still possible to change some of those habits that are holding you back from fulfilling your dreams.

In a new book titled Making Sense of People:  Decoding the Mysteries of Personality, leading neuroscientist Samuel Barondes cites the example of Benjamin Franklin. 

From his early twenties until he died at 85, Franklin worked to "guard...against the unremitting attraction of ancient habits and the force of perpetual temptations."

Art White: Part 3

I've been busy this week creating a new website for the TV show I do (www.ageless-tv.com) and uploading clips to it.  Here's one of me interviewing Art White, the 99-year old I've been blogging about the past two weeks.  If a picture is worth a thousand words, a video is priceless.  Today I'm meeting with an equally active 99-year old woman.  Stay tuned!

Art White, 99

Art White changed my life last week.  How?  By replacing my mom as my primary role model for aging.

As loyal readers of this blog know, my mom is now 88.  She still lives alone, still walks every day, still reads voraciously (she just finished Ann Patchett’s newest book State of Wonder), still laughs at the slightest provocation and still has a killer wink that melts me every time I see it.  She sounds amazing, right?

But that’s only part of the picture.  Besides fighting breast cancer and a brain tumor, she’s also increasingly frail and unsure on her feet.  Everywhere we go, I hold her hand to keep her from toppling over.  Oh, and did I mention that she’s almost totally deaf?  I see her practically every day and invariably think to myself, “Is this what I’m going to be like in 30 years?"

So when I interviewed Art White last Monday for my TV show, he gave me needed hope.  Yes, I might end up being as deaf and frail as my mom, but it's also possible that I could remain as active as Art.

Here's a sampling of Art's responses, some given on-air, some in the Green Room before the show.

Questions for a 99-Year Old

This past Monday I had a remarkable guest on my TV show.  His name is Art White, and he's turning 99 this coming Friday.  Somehow Art has managed to outlive the vast majority of his peers and stay astonishingly active.  Since retiring at age 95 from his third career, he still bowls twice a week, does Tai Chi once a week, plays bridge four times a week, eats anything he wants and takes no pills--not even vitamins.  He's aiming to be 110.

To prepare for the interview, I went on Facebook and asked my "friends" to post questions for Art.  I heard from people all over the U.S.  I even got a reply from a woman in London, England.  Most of the respondents are middle-aged, but one is in her twenties and two are in their seventies.

Next week I'll relay some of Art's answers, but first I thought it would be interesting to pass along the questions and give you a chance to answer them yourself.  If you keep a journal, you might consider addressing one a day.  Why wait until you're 99?

The Longevity Paradox

I'm worried about aging.  There, I said it.  I might be the Defying-Gravity gal, but I'm as afraid as the next person of outliving my money, my loved ones and perhaps even my usefulness.

Keep in mind that I'm luckier than most--a member of an all-too-exclusive group of people who have investments, health insurance and an extensive, multigenerational support network.  An alarming percentage of my close friends lack at least one of the three, and I can't even count the number of my acquaintances for whom retirement is not even an option.

What I'm getting at is that as much as I believe in letting our passions guide us as we segue from one stage of life to another, I realize that heroic reinvention is still the exception rather than the rule.

Part of the problem is that boomers are caught in a longevity paradox.

Two Recommendations

1)  Martin Seligman's new book Flourish.

Ever since the Framers of the Constitution claimed that the pursuit of happiness is an inalienable right, Americans have been obsessed with feeling good.  At some universities, the study of happiness has even become an academic discipline. Seligman, the father of positive psychology, was at the helm of this movement.

Now he's done an about-face.  He argues that to flourish, we shouldn't obsess about happiness but instead focus on five separate elements of well-being, each pursued for its own sake: positive emotion, engagement (the feeling of being lost in a task), relationships, meaning and accomplishment.  

Want to learn more?  Click here to read a recent NYT article that describes each element in greater depth.

2)  Brene Brown's TED Talk (below).  In this riveting video, a professor of social work at the University of Houston speaks about the importance of vulnerability in increasing our connectedness to others.  She says that the more vulnerable and less perfect we allow ourselves to be, the better our relationships and sense of well-being.  

Happy Birthday to Me!

Today I turn fifty-seven.  A lot of people my age aren’t that keen on getting older, but I’m jazzed about my birthday coming around again.  I'm still breathing!  Other than experiencing some annoying hot flashes and an increasing number of arthritic joints, I’m happier now than I can remember ever having been.  Of course, my mind these days is like a sieve, and the fact that I can’t recall ever having been in a better headspace might just mean that my memory isn't what it used to be.  (Ha!)

Anyway, each year on my birthday I review my calendar to see what I’ve been up to during the past twelve months.  In case you're curious, here’s the raw data from 2010-2011.

No-List Saturdays

These days who doesn’t have a zillion things to do?

The way I cope is by making lists.  Each morning I think about the day ahead, decide what I want to accomplish, and jot down on a piece of paper my game plan.  The upside is that I get things done.  I send in my taxes early.  I always usually return from the grocery store with all the supplies I need.  I eventually even finish writing books.

The downside is that sometimes I get so caught up in ticking items off my list that my life devolves into an endless loop of tasks.  Like the mythical Sisyphus, I no sooner complete one round of to-dos than I start another.  (Sometimes I think that the ancient Greeks understood more about the human condition than we do.)

Haunting Words

A single bad review.  That’s all the negative feedback I received when Defying Gravity was first published.  Tons of praise and just one pan.  The reviewer said my writing was “cliché-ridden, saccharine, and uninspired….  Nothing in it cuts to the bone.” 

Ouch!

Among the myriad of glowing reviews, that one scathing judgment validated every insecurity I'd ever had about my writing and made me slightly ashamed of the book itself.  

Believe me, I knew I was crazy to focus on the negative.  I tried to ignore the reviewer's words, but they haunted me.  It didn’t matter that my aim in Defying Gravity wasn’t to publish great prose or win a Pulitzer.  It didn't matter that I'd accomplished my goal, which was to write a quick and easy read that would inspire people to not give up on their dreams as they age.  (I'm being trite again, I know.)  From that point on, I almost always prefaced my comments about the book with the words, “It’s not that well-written, but....”

Then two things happened that changed my thinking.  First, a woman I work with at the Mercy Learning Center mentioned to me this week that she's reading the book and loving it.  I could see in her eyes and hear in her voice that she was being totally sincere.  “I want to give it to all my girlfriends,” she said.  "Every middle-aged woman I know needs to read this book."

Mind you, I’ve heard this comment before.  Actually, I’ve heard it again and again.  But something about how Diane said it made me see that I’ve been getting in the way of the book’s power to transform lives.  

When I told my husband what Diane said and the epiphany I'd had as a result, he sent me a link to the video below.  Some of you might find it, well, saccharine, cliché-ridden, even offensive in terms of its religious slant.  (For being three letters, God is such a huge term, isn’t it?)  But I’d rather have Marianne Williamson's words--often erroneously attributed to Nelson Mandela--stick in my mind than the judgment of some isolated reviewer.  

The Big Shift

If you’re a boomer contemplating a life change, Marc Freedman’s newest book The Big Shift:  Navigating the New Stage Beyond Midlife is a must-read.  Not only is the writing unusually clear and compelling for this genre but Freedman presents a provocative idea.  As the press release I received with my review copy states:

Freedman's book is an impassioned call for breaking free from old habits like clinging to lost youth ("60 is the new 40"), or prematurely aging people long before their time (senior discounts at 50 or 60).  It's time to accept the decades opening up between midlife and anything approximating old age for what they really are, Freedman says--an entirely new stage of life.

A boomer himself and the father of two toddlers (yes, you read that right), Freedman isn't just spewing hot air.  As the founder of Civic Ventures, cofounder of both The Purpose Prize and Experience Corps, and author of several other books including Encore:  Finding Work That Matters in the Second Half of Life, Freedman is a towering expert in the field of midlife transition.  The New York Times calls him "the voice [emphasis mine]of aging baby boomers who are eschewing retirement for meaningful and sustaining work later in life.”  

This book shows why Freedman deserves this kind of praise.

The Hero Within

In light of recent events in the Persian Gulf and Japan, I want to mention once again how important it is to make a habit of being courageous. 

(I’m saying this as much for myself as I am for anyone else.)

Who, in other words, doesn’t long to speak out against injustice? And if, heaven forbid, a flood rises around our house or a building crashes at our feet, who wouldn’t prefer to be the one who reaches out and lends a hand rather than the one who ignores others’ pleas and saves only herself?

But just as our "bold muscles" need to be exercised in order to attain our dreams, so too do we have to continually practice doing the right thing when the stakes are small if we are to have any chance of doing it when lives are on the line.

Which reminds me of one of my favorite quotes:

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?   ~Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Photo Credit:   Reuters/Aly Song  

The Longevity Project

Taking it easy can subtract years from your life.

That’s just one of the surprising conclusions reached by health scientists Howard S. Friedman and Leslie R. Martin, authors of The Longevity Project.  What’s even more surprising is that having a sustained work life correlates with living longer, even if the work you do is stressful.

Here's a short video of the authors explaining the scope of the Project: 

The book is filled with lots of other interesting, counter-intuitive tidbits about what sorts of behaviors increase longevity and it's well worth a read.

Still, the authors’ findings about work disturbed me.  I’m all for staying active and remaining on the job if your work gives you pleasure and a sense of purpose.  But I worry that books like this one and, dare I say, Defying Gravity, have the unintended effect of making people feel guilty about wanting to slow down and enjoy the fruits of their labor.

Besides, when did a long life become a goal in itself?

I don’t particularly care how old I am when I die.  What I care about is trying to make the world a better place and enjoying myself while I’m at it.  

What about you?

What do you know for sure?

Several years ago film critic Gene Siskel asked Oprah a simple question: "What do you know for sure?"  Caught off guard, the talk-show queen said she needed to go home and think about it--or so she claims in an O magazine subscription offer I recently received.

At first I was going to toss the flier in the trash.  I don’t need any more magazine subscriptions, thank you.  But the question grabbed me.  On the verge of getting lost in a philosophical rumination on the nature of space-time, I stopped and skimmed Oprah's answer.  My list isn't the same as hers (all I can say for certain is that I'm breathing and that I believe in the transformative power of love), but her top ten are worth a look:

Staying out of the Storm

(Photo Credit: Bob Eckman for WestportNow.com)

I was scheduled  to fly back to NYC from Los Angeles yesterday.  My bags were packed.  My boarding pass was printed.   I was already thinking about what I was going to wear to a meeting I was supposed to attend in Connecticut today.  

Then my flight was cancelled.  

At first I was upset that my plans had been disrupted.   My pulse started racing.  My face became flushed.  I immediately picked up the phone to rebook and was just as quickly put on hold.  

Waiting my turn to speak with a live agent, I finally stopped to take a long breath.

I asked myself why I was going crazy about something over which I had no control.  I can't change the weather.  I can't make Virgin America fly their planes when they don't want to.  Besides, Southern California is beautiful this time of year.  The mountains are green.  The temps are mild.  The sunsets are gorgeous.  Not a bad place to be stranded.  Who knows what people I'll meet during the extra days I've got here.  Who knows what I'll learn.  

My new flight isn't until Friday, but needless to say, I started defying gravity the moment I began thinking I was on an adventure.

(Note: The photo above, titled "The Calm Before the Storm,"  was taken at Compo Beach in Westport, CT yesterday evening before the snow started falling.)

I'm Back

Well, really, I've been here all along, sitting in front of my computer writing up a storm. I just haven't been posting. By eliminating blogging from my daily to-do list, I was able to finish my novel and revise it twice. That's the good news.

The not-so-good news is that the story, despite my best efforts, is not ready to be published. Turns out I still have a lot to learn about writing fiction. I'm not giving up; I'm just acknowledging that I'm in the middle of a creative process.

On the other hand, Larry Portzline and I continue to make serious progress with Defying Gravity, Too. I'm cautiously optimistic that our long-awaited male sequel to the original Defying Gravity will come out this year.

So why am I blogging again?

Mostly because I've been silent for so long that I've once more got something to say. I'm also taking on some fresh challenges this winter, which will hopefully keep my entries honest. I've not only started flying lessons but have begun hosting a long-running, local television show called "Ageless," a weekly interview program featuring men and women over 50 who are living their lives with passion and purpose.

My plan is to blog every Wednesday until I stop enjoying it or get so wrapped up in my novel again that I don't have energy to spare. I'm not sure right now whether that will be in a few weeks or a few years. No matter what, you'll still be able to follow Defying Gravity on Facebook and Twitter.

Understanding Our Differences

Watching my seven-month old granddaughter yesterday, I was struck by how similar our temperaments are.  Both of us light up around people, but grow tired with too much stimulation.  Solitude recharges our batteries.  Naps for Lydia Rose.  Walks for me.

Not so my husband.  He’s the kind of man who could socialize every night of the week.  My daughter-in-law says her mother is the same way. 

Keeping biological differences in mind as we navigate our dreams helps us stay healthy and happy.  (I, for one, try not to schedule too many back-to-back engagements.)  The bottom line is that as much as defying gravity necessitates going beyond our natural limitations, it also implies that, in large measure, we accept who we are.