The Wonder of Aging: A New Approach to Embracing Life After Fifty - Softcover

Michael Gurian is a marriage and family counselor in private practice, and the New York Times bestselling author of twenty-seven books. Michael cofounded the Gurian Institute, a training and research organization, in 1996 and frequently speaks at and consults with corporations, physicians, hospitals, schools, and other professionals. He has been called “the people’s philosopher” for his ability to combine cutting-edge science with people’s everyday lives.

The Wounder of Aging Chapter 1

Toward a New Spirit of Aging

In order to come fully to the encounter with whatever gives ultimate meaning, in order to really wrestle with the angel, one must be a free agent, not defined by another, or by cultural imperatives.

—Marilyn Sewell, Cries of the Spirit

In 2011, my research team and I developed three surveys, asking 2,752 people to provide insights about life after fifty. We were basically asking baby boomer subjects to define “a new spirit of aging” for the new millennium. More women than men responded to our survey, at about 70 percent to 30 percent. In our work in gender studies over the last two decades, we have found this result to be consistent and robust. We have also found that, in general, men write fewer words than women.

Craig, fifty-three, from Los Angeles, responded in this brief but cogent way. “I’ve experienced deaths in my family and some early health problems, but I understand where I am. I am finally able to handle what is on my plate—and what is on my plate is more than it’s ever been. One thing I’m especially doing is listening to life (and listening to some very good and wise friends). The metaphor in my mind is that I’ve now entered the middle weekend of a wonderful two-week vacation. I still have a week of vacation left but I am not entirely unaware that the plane is leaving next Sunday and the vacation will end. I call this next week of my life ‘Christmases Yet to Come.’ ”

As I followed up with Craig, he talked about the new freedom he was seeking now in his fifties. It was not the freedom of “escape” but rather of new engagement with life. Craig had married for the first time in his forties, started a new family (his daughter was six), and had decided to leave the business world to get a teaching degree. He was also volunteering in his daughter’s school and had started an educational foundation with some of the money he had made in the financial services industry. Craig was stepping forward into the second half of life with vigor, vision, and wonder.

Marcy, fifty-six, wrote a longer story, also revelatory of a new spirit of aging in her life.

“My husband and I are originally from the Northeast and have been living in Georgia for 18 years. My daughter is 19 and a sophomore at college, and my son is 23, and graduated. I am working to cut apron strings with him and give us both a new kind of freedom. My daughter left for school a year ago August, and our dog passed away in May. I decided that I would get a dog, a French shepherd, so that I could participate in outdoor activities, walking, hiking, and training her for things. That has worked out very well; it has provided for me a new set of folks that I have met (lots of people within 10 years on either side of my age). I have sort of re-created myself in this role, more laid-back, no makeup, lots of enjoyment from watching dogs play together and chatting with their owners.

“Nine years ago, my mother, 88, lived in New England on her own, but I realized that as an only child I could not hop on a plane from Georgia and help her when she needed it. So I insisted that she move here. She did and is now 97. Sometimes, being with her makes me afraid of being that old; it doesn’t seem like much fun at all, especially since I’ve realized I could live another thirty or forty years or more. But at the same time, being with Mom more has made me want to do and try new things. Caring for her makes me want to finally become the fearless and free person I’ve always wanted to be, and now I think I definitely have the time to do that.”

“I want to become the fearless and free person I’ve always wanted to be. . . . ” How many of us have said those words, or something like them, over the decades of our youth and middle adulthood? Many of us. Perhaps all of us. In the survey questions, neither I nor anyone on my team used the word “freedom,” but that word and its meanings showed up in many of the responses. As people revealed wanting happier, growth-ful, fearless, and vital ways of living now, they discussed their sense of living in a new time in life when they could develop a new sense of freedom. They talked about a sense of now-more-than-ever and now-as-never-before. Freedom became the spiritual goal within all other goals. In reading the surveys, I understood people to be using the word “freedom” as a sign of spiritual growth at deep levels. People were hoping to redefine and spiritualize their lives so that “problems” became “challenges” and difficult parts of life became no longer “enemies to battle” but spiritually meaningful, complimentary facets of real life, an evolving part of each person’s development of a philosophy of personal completion.

There is a wonderful film about some of this called The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. In it, the character played by Judi Dench speaks about aging and new adventures: “This is a new and different world . . . the challenge is not just to cope, but to thrive.” Dench’s character and a number of others leave England and move to a retirement hotel in Jaipur, India. They enter a completely new world filled with challenges that ultimately help them find new meaning. They grow into a kind of wisdom that frees them to care for others and themselves in vital ways. Where they felt unworthy of success or love in the past, they discover worthiness and love in the present. They reassess what they do and think, becoming the role models people need in order to see where to walk and rediscover a sense of wonder. They realize they have sown many miracles in their lifetimes, and there are more to sow. They sense that pain and sorrow are beautiful evidence of a life lived for purpose. The whole film, from beginning through denouement, “breathes into the void” a sense of what freedom and fearlessness can be for people who age with vision, growth, and self-discovery.

My wife, Gail, and I went to see this film as I was developing this chapter. The goal of this chapter is to concentrate on key standards for what might constitute a new, free, and fearless spirit of aging today. Seeing the film helped me to fully understand why freedom is so important to us as we age, so crucial to positive aging and the continuation or rediscovery of wonder as we age. It is a theme at the center of the spirituality of aging, as we will explore in this chapter and this book. We may lose a lot of our childhood wonder as we move through adulthood and middle age, but as we age we have a chance to live in wonder again (and freshly, maturely) as never before.

By way of coincidence (if there is any such thing), the evening after seeing the film I spoke by phone with my father, eighty-three, who, with my mother, had taken me to India to live in the 1960s (we lived not far from Jaipur, in Hyderabad). He and I talked about the film and about his life as an octogenarian. A number of times recently he had fallen and injured himself, so he had moved into a retirement community where he could get more immediate care. Because of ongoing issues with his lungs, he also needed to move away from Santa Rosa, California, where he and my mother had lived, to a drier climate. When my mother passed away, he chose to move to a retirement community in Las Vegas, where my sister and my aunt live.

I shared with my father the “freedom” that was emerging as a theme in this book. He responded, “It’s true for me, too. People say these retirement communities shrivel them up, but that’s not what I’m feeling. I’m in a whole new phase of life. I’m doing a lot, I have a lot of new friends, I teach an adult education class online, and I have the three-times-a-day hilarious entertainment of people-watching in the dining room! I’m not worrying anymore about whether I’ll fall down and die alone in the house. I definitely feel a new freedom. I tell you, Mike, it never ends, the growing-up stuff.”
Forging a New Spirit of Aging

“Freedom” is a multifaceted word emerging not only in anecdotal research but in the scientific and psychological research on aging. One specific area of science-based research on this subject exists in and from regions of the world called “blue zones.” The term “blue zones” reflects the sense of “blue sky for miles to come” in places like Sardinia, Italy; Okinawa, Japan; the Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica; Abkhazia, Georgia; and Loma Linda, California. In these locations, researchers have studied women and men who are living a full, chronological second half of life—to one hundred and beyond. The researchers want to know: Why do so many people in these cities and regions live so long, and with such high quality of life?

Researchers have discovered that while some answers involve genetics and healthy food intake (eating more fish, less meat; more fresh foods, nothing processed; eating small portions, and no refined sugars to speak of), many other answers involve personal choices of positivity and spiritual principles of growth. Older people in blue zones often move into the second half of their lifetimes building more freedom into their lives. They do so by focusing on four particular elements of life, elements my team and I also found in our survey, focus group, and interview results. These elements, I believe, can comprise a foundation for the wonder of aging, and what, specifically, I would like to term “the new spirit of aging.” We will explore each one in this chapter.

1. Healthy aging requires concentration, over a period of years, on de-stressing one or more of the physical, mental, and emotional aspects of our lives. Physical and mental well-being are now crucial, whether in the face of a pivotal health event or just as a part of natural aging; we need to develop discipline regarding nutrition, exercise, improving mental functioning, and working through psychological and relational issues that cause chronic stress. We need to gradually or immediately remove these chronic stressors from our lives if we are to thrive in our second lifetime. Our new discipline of lifestyle, and our working to decrease areas of significant stress, give us quality of life and longevity.

2. Healthy aging requires us to embrace realistic optimism about aging. This requires a lot of active life and, often, an attitude change that sees aging as filled with free potential on all fronts, from personal to professional. Embracing age and rediscovering wonder is about rebirth.

3. Healthy aging requires us to form and join new communities. Most specifically, we need to develop or join a small circle of friends who share similar values, ideas, interests, and visions of age. If we move to a different city, one circle of friends may dissolve but a new circle of friends can form in the new place or new stage of age.

4. The second lifetime is the time to grow from “adult” to elder. This involves becoming or remaining visible, engaging in spiritual practice, practicing concentrated service to the world, and mentoring young people. The move to become an elder is a transformational experience that we need to accomplish consciously. Elder is not just given to us as we become chronologically “old”—elder is grown, created, made, and shared.

Abkhazia, Georgia, is one of the blue zones in which these four elements are prevalent. People who live to one hundred or older focus on new attitudes (they increase the time they spend joking, socializing, and working while singing, for instance); they increase their time in small circles of influence, including circles of like-minded friends; they consciously pursue mentoring of the young (the anthropologist Sula Benet, who studied them and lived among them for many years, saw a culture that lived by its proverb: “Besides God, we also need our elders”); and they specifically de-stress their lives (the physician Alexander Leaf, who studied the Abkhazians for years, noticed that elder Abkhazians try to avoid being rushed as much as possible—they really concentrate on that; they plan their day to be able to include long periods of walking from place to place, rather than rushing from place to place).

While our busy lives involve more rushing around than in a village, especially for those of us still in our prime working years, the blue zone research is helpful in begging each of us to ask questions of ourselves that can help us focus on greater health and freedom as we age.

■ Do I feel an internal pull to begin de-stressing and de-cluttering my life? At certain times of the day, do I feel like slowing down a little and fully entering my senses and “the now”? Do I let myself feel this pull, or do I remain too busy to feel it or give in to it?

■ Do I feel like now is the time to look at what a “good attitude” and a “bad attitude” are regarding age, health, mission, and “time left”? Where does complaining get me? Am I optimistic? Am I so optimistic that I’m not realistic about my age, or am I avoiding age by doing everything possible to pretend it isn’t happening?

■ Do I feel pulled toward a circle of family and friends who can become my rock as I age? Do I have close friends? If not, why not? If my spouse used to be the “friend maker” but now I am alone, how can I find a circle of friends on my own?

■ Do I feel a pull to explore what “elder” might mean for me? All my life I have been building a personal legacy—working, caring for others, serving, accomplishing. Am I becoming an elder who shares wisdom, or am I just subsisting? Is my community allowing me to become an elder? How do I become an elder?

We have the freedom now, in a miraculous second lifetime, to soul-search and soul-find. Wherever we are in our personal journey, if we are near or have passed the fifty milestone, we are psychologically driven toward a new spirit of aging. At fifty, we’re just starting to feel the call; by sixty, then seventy, then eighty, it will become even louder. I’ve felt it, you’ve felt it, people in blue zones have felt it, and everyone around us, wherever they live, have felt it as they cross the threshold into the second half of life.
Stress as the Catalyst of Spirit

Contemporary science-based research on aging and stress gives us a profound window into the urge we have all felt (even if unconsciously) to be reborn and develop new focus as we age. In this way, stress is a primary driver toward early death and low quality of life, or increased freedom and a new, deep happiness.

Bruce McEwen, a neuroscientist at Rockefeller University who studies the effect of the environment and lifestyle on aging cells in both our bodies and our brains, has discovered that any significant, ongoing stressor you experience as you age attacks cells equally in the sympathetic nervous system and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis (the system that connects your body and brain). This attack signals the frontal lobe of the brain to try to compel personal and spiritual growth at a cellular level.

So, if you are under some kind of constant negative stress in your psychophysical environment—from lack of sleep to a diet of destructive foods to depression to relationship issues to overwork—your frontal lobe and parts of your limbic system (your emotional centers) will most likely try to deal with this ongoing negative stress by pushing/pulling you toward new activations, new ways of being, new solutions that will counter the stress. You may override your own antistress decision making with an even more powerful executive choice—that is, to disregard the chronic stress your cells are under and continue doing the things that are bad for you—but your cells, body, and frontal lobe will keep pushing you toward...