Finding Purpose: The Five P's

This blog entry was originally posted on March 19, 2007.  I had just returned from Botswana when I wrote it.  I recently chatted with Bonnie Orton, the then 70-year old Peace Corps volunteer who hosted me while I was there.  She called me from JFK on her way home to Chicago from another trip to Africa.  One of these days we plan to go back together. 

We are born to dream.

Think about it. Where would we be, who would we be, without our dreams? Most of the great inventions of the world, much of the forward movement of human civilization, has been fueled by dreams. So it should come as no surprise that for many of us, finding purpose means putting our dreams into action.

For the past seven years I’ve been interviewing people who later in life did just that, and in writing a book about the experience, I realized a dream of my own. Analyzing what I've learned in the process and how it might apply to people of all ages, I've come up with what I call "The Five P’s of Finding Purpose."

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.

Use It Or Lose It

Show me a group of healthy and vibrant “super seniors,” and I’ll show you a group of people who regularly  exercise.  Like Art White, the ninety-nine year old I recently interviewed for my TV show, these individuals might not use the “e” word to describe what they do to keep moving, but move they do.  Yoga master Tao Porchon-Lynch (see below) is a perfect example of this and an inspiration to anyone who needs a little push to get off the couch.

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?

See a Problem, Summon a Life

Follow your dreams or be practical?—that’s the question WNYC host Brian Lehrer (photo below) posed on-air yesterday to the Class of 2011.

This either/or approach works great for talk radio, but not so well for everyday life.  Who says you can't have a paying job and pursue a passion on the side, that being practical means your dreams must be deferred?

Perhaps a better question would have been: "Is it reasonable to expect young people who've just graduated from college to know what their calling is?"  

As NYT op-ed columnist David Brooks (photo below) says in a piece titled  "It’s Not About You":

[V]ery few people at age 22 or 24 can take an inward journey and come out having discovered a developed self.  Most successful young people don’t look inside and plan a life.  They look outside and find a problem, which summons their life.

That’s certainly what happened to me with Defying Gravity.  I was looking for a way to inspire my community college students to stay in school and stick with their dreams.  I saw a problem--a high drop-out rate--and discovered a calling.  Mind you, I was in my forties at the time, not my twenties.

Brooks ends by saying, “The purpose in life is not to find yourself.  It’s to lose yourself.”

Credits:  Brian Lehrer photo: MarcoAntonio.com.  David Brooks photo: Josh Haner/NYT

The Guilt Trap

I guilt easily.  Or at least I used to.  Like many women, I reproached myself for not being the mother, daughter, friend, teacher, writer, and coworker I thought I should be.  I’d beat myself up for exercising too little and snacking too much, for being too organized—yup, I’m serious—and not productive enough.  Oh and I even felt guilty about genocide and world hunger, things over which I obviously have no control.

When I say "like many women," what I really mean is most.  A recent survey by Stylist magazine found that more than 96 percent of us feel guilty at least once a day.  As Erica Jong once famously said: “Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.”

Some of this can be attributed to wiring.  According to researchers, women are generally more empathic than men.  But some of this also comes down to women’s generalized lack of self-worth, reinforced over the millennia by cultural and religious tenets.  We’ve been taught from an early age to be “good” and that being good means putting others first.  When we don’t, we quickly feel bad.

Whatever the cause of my guilt, I realized somewhere along the line that I was wasting a lot of precious energy on it, energy that once freed up, could be used in more fruitful ways.  I also realized that if I didn’t value myself, others wouldn’t either.

So how did I get out of the guilt trap?  Believe me, it’s on ongoing process, but basically…

My Inner Wimp

This probably won’t come as a shock to you, dear reader, but I'm quite opinionated--at least on paper.  When it comes to voicing my ideas to an actual flesh-and-blood person, however, my inner wimp occasionally emerges.

Earlier this week, for example, I said to the producer of the TV show I host, “I think we should do more close-ups of our guests.”  Her response was, shall I say, tepid.

I backpedaled.  “No problem,” I replied.  “You’re the expert.”  

“Do you feel strongly about this?” she asked.

“I do,” I answered. 

“Then don’t back down,” she said crisply.  “Stand by your words.”

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.  

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:

Remind me who I am

Stanley Kunitz won the Pulitzer Prize at the age of 63, became the United States Poet Laureate at 95 and published his last book in 2005 when he was 99 years old.  He died the following year at age 100.  His passion for language and his powers of observation were every bit as acute at the twilight of his career as they were at the dawn.

Kunitz was fortunate that his faculties never failed him.  I'm not sure to what degree his genetic makeup and health habits contributed to his vitality, but his work as both a poet and an avid gardener clearly sustained him.

"Touch Me" is the final poem in his Collected Poems.  With Valentine's Day coming up next Monday and spring right around the corner, today felt like the perfect time to share it.  If you read to the end, you'll understand why I titled this post "Remind me who I am."

The above video was filmed in 2002 at the Geraldine R. Dodge Poetry Festival.  Here's the text of the poem:

Quote of the Day

“The only difference between a rut and a grave is their dimensions.” 

Pulitzer Prize winning American Novelist Ellen Glasgow

One Story at a Time

I have several stories piled up on my desk that I want want to tell you today. There's Dave Timmons, who left his high-paying corporate career to become a musician and national speaker; Chris Holliday, who became a working actress in her 40's; Chloe Jon Paul, who just published a book with the lovely title Entering the Age of Elegance: A Rite of Passage & Practical Guide for the Modern Maturing Woman; Paul Cadre, a man who is passionate about owls; as well as updates on some of the women profiled in my book--Maureen Horkan and Jane Work specifically.

But all these stories will have to wait. If I'm going to keep making progress on my novel, all I have time to share with you this afternoon is an anecdote I read in the Metropolitan Diary section of Monday's New York Times. It took my breath away.

Dear Diary:

(This is a true story. It took place in Sheepshead Bay this winter.)

In Dunkin' Donuts this morning,
an old lady wearing a tattered watch cap
started speaking to no one in particular.
"I can't sleep at night.
I have pains in my chest all the time.
My leg hurts and my children do not love me."
People waiting in line
hid in their cellphones, looked away
or stared straight ahead.
"I don't know what to do.
I don't know where to turn.
My husband died two years ago on the 27th."
Everyone pretended she wasn't there.
The girls behind the counter took the next customers.
The line inched forward. At a side table, a beautiful young lady
with matching purple scarf and hat
looked at the old woman and said, simply,
"Honey, please sit down with me,
and tell me your story."

It's possible, you see,
for one person to save the world.

--Mel Glen

Choices

Occasionally, my blog postings are republished on Vibrant Nation, a wonderful website where women 50+ exchange ideas and join in smart conversation. In one such exchange prompted by my Jan. 27th posting (which Vibrant Nation re-titled "What Quote or Poem Inspires You?"), a woman shared the following:

CHOICES
By Nikki Giovanni

if i can't do
what i want to do
then my job is to not
do what i don't want
to do

Penny Pearlman on the Importance of Showing Up

For the past two years, I've been watching my dear friend Penny Pearlman conceive, gestate and birth her first book: Pretty Smart: Lessons from Our Miss Americas.

After traveling all across the country interviewing 22 former Miss Americas (including Phyllis George and Gretchen Carlson of Fox & Friends), Penny has much wisdom to share about going for a dream. In a future posting, I'll tell her wonderful story in greater depth, but here's a quick taste from her own blog:

Earlier this week I gave a talk before a group called the Passion Project here in Connecticut. Each month the moderator (my dear friend and fellow author, Prill Boyle) invites a woman to share her journey and her passion.

As I thought about what I would say and listed the seminal moments in my life, I realized that the thread that ran through my various travels towards achievement, around obstacles and through my own self doubts is that I showed up. I showed up when opportunity presented itself. I showed up when I was looking for a new path. I showed up even though my knees were quaking.

"Come to the Edge"

From French poet Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918 ):

"Come to the edge."

"We can't. We're afraid."
"Come to the edge."
"We can't. We will fall!"
"Come to the edge."
And they came.
And he pushed them.

And they flew.

Dreams Matter

The inauguration of America's first black President on the heels of Martin Luther King Day attests to the fact that no matter how far our economy sinks, how difficult our lives become, our noblest hopes and dreams will continue--as they always have--to try and steer humanity to a brighter future.

Five years after publishing Defying Gravity, I still stand by these words from my introduction: