Courageous Aging: Your Best Years Ever Reimagined

Introduction

AN INVITATION

Courage is the most important virtue. Without courage, you cannot practice any of the other virtues consistently.

—Maya Angelou

Getting older can be both glorious and treacherous, uplifting and frightening. Whether your hair is graying at forty, you’re entering a midlife crossroads at fifty, running marathons at sixty, or blithely enjoying senior discounts at seventy-two, aging is no simple matter. Having turned sixty-seven this year, I have never felt so calm, confident, unrestrained, grateful, loving, or loved as I do right now. But I’ve also never felt so fragile, vulnerable, or—well—old.

So let’s start by getting real. As we age, things can get better and worse. Take retirement, for example. Whether your career was out in the workforce or at home taking care of your children, the transition to retirement can be the start of a more relaxed, enjoyable life. As you look back on your life as a whole, you may feel a newfound sense of pride as you think about what you’ve accomplished. You may even feel overcome with gratitude as the door opens into this new chapter of life.

At the same time, letting go of your career may be painfully difficult. And if your job was raising children full-time, when they are grown and busy living the lives they have created apart from you, it can leave you feeling empty. You might feel like you’re losing an enormous part of your identity. And that change might leave you feeling lost.

Two close friends of mine, Sarah and Jack, recently dealt with this exact issue. Sarah, a newly retired restaurant owner, told me how excited she is about finally having the time and energy to really live. Throttling back from the relentless stresses and pressures of running a business for thirty years, Sarah’s feeling a freedom she’s never experienced before.

It’s a new beginning! she told me, smiling with what was practically childish delight. I have my fears, sure, and my aches and pains like anyone else, but most of all I’m excited for what’s to come. I’m a really happy camper!

Jack also retired this year, and he’s having the opposite experience. All he can think about is how useless and disposable he is. Jack feels like he’s past his prime and is not sure what to do with his time. Dreading old age and fearing death, he’s let his imagination take over. He’s convinced that time is running out, and the best parts of his life are ending, or behind him. Jack’s retirement has become a black hole.

So what makes one person feel despondent and useless while someone else, facing the very same circumstances, feels like life is just beginning? Even more importantly, how can we turn a time that many of us fear will be our worst years ever into some of our best?

Welcome to Courageous Aging.

Though we live in a society that worships youth and devalues aging, in this book we will unabashedly celebrate the great benefits of becoming our wiser, more seasoned, and very best selves at whatever age. Whether you’re approaching midlife or well past it, this book will show you how.

You might be interested to know that Benjamin Franklin, a forefather of the United States and a renowned thinker, did not sign the Declaration of Independence until he was seventy years old. Or that Nelson Mandela, known as one of the greatest civil rights leaders in the world, spent almost twenty-eight years serving a life sentence in prison, and it wasn’t until after he was liberated, at age seventy-one, that he became president of South Africa in the first election open to all races in the country’s history. I could go on and on about men and women from every walk of life and every period of history whose enthusiasm, generosity, and creative juices were flowing mightily in the second half of their lives. Many of them have their best and most deeply meaningful years well after they turned fifty, not because they could still do cartwheels in their sixties and seventies, but because they were able to reimagine the future and ripen as human beings.

So the way that we approach aging has everything to do with the way we see ourselves and the changing landscapes of our lives. To test this, ask anyone over twenty-eight, How old are you? It will likely set off an emotional charge. We ascribe tremendous meaning and status to our age, often more than we admit. And we judge ourselves on a continuum from harsh self-rejection to boastful pride depending on how we’re faring. We can move through the years and seasons of life harboring untold feelings of shame and embarrassment, comparing ourselves to the younger version of who we were, or to others. Or we can move through our years with enthusiasm and excitement, coming to terms with the past and dealing effectively with the changes that occur as we get older.

In these pages we will take inventory of where you stand on the issue of aging. Facing it all, from your fears and sorrows, including the fact of your own impermanence, and the possibility of losing people you love, to your hopes and dreams of finding joy, meaning, and peace. This journey will take curiosity, courage, and of course, audacity—the audacity to tackle issues you’ve been avoiding. We will audaciously come to view this new phase of life as a shining opportunity to reimagine the future and do what’s necessary to have our best years ever.

Making that happen means embracing the greater possibilities for the second half of our lives and choosing a path of courage and curiosity over one of passive indifference and complacency. It also means rejecting dangerous anti-aging messages that, left unchecked, can become self-fulfilling prophesies. This will require that we put our houses in order. I don’t mean your legal documents, though we will discuss that later on, both because it’s important for the legacy you leave behind and because it can hang over you like a dark cloud. Even more significantly, though, when I say putting your house in order, I’m talking primarily about matters of the heart.

Putting our houses in order starts with taking stock of our thoughts and feelings about getting older. It involves tending to sensitive matters in our relationships, those that bring our greatest joys, and our deepest sorrows. Putting our houses in order means sorting through and updating our goals and aspirations—because yes, each season of life affords us new opportunities for setting goals and living out our dreams, including those we might have given up on long ago. (We’ll talk more about this in Chapter 9.) And putting our house in order means unveiling and paying close attention to what matters most in our heart of hearts.

At its core, Courageous Aging is devoted to helping you craft a vision for the life you want to lead and assisting you to step into that life. In the interest of doing this, I will continually invite you to reconsider every assumption you’ve ever made about aging and take steps to free yourself of the myths, misconceptions, and biases that stand directly in the way of your best possible future. Forward movement in the area of courageous living and aging, like everything else, requires your active participation and willingness to open up to a new way of thinking and embrace a new line of inquiry. By boldly entering the conversations How do I really feel about getting older and What do I want my future to look like? you are setting yourself up for success in addressing the tough issues and the hidden treasures of aging.

Much as we’ve been uncovering the injustices of racial and gender discrimination, it is time for us to awaken to the negative effects of age bias. Deeply woven into the fabric of our beliefs and attitudes about getting older, they can be subtle, pervasive, and difficult to weed out. Like racism and sexism, they are riddled with dangerous and misleading misconceptions. And they can be stubbornly resistant to change. Whether we use them against ourselves or others, age biases hurt and limit us.

It’s time to set the record straight by calling out and clearing the slate of those judgments and prejudices we’ve been allowing to define who we are at fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, or ninety. Being profiled, or profiling ourselves, as too old or putting these issues on hold stands directly in the way of determining for ourselves what our lives can be as we get older.

Now here’s the part usually reserved for the small print. Much of this will not be easy. Putting our houses in order—emotionally, spiritually, and in our closest relationships—will require willful diligence and some hard work on your part. Above all else, it will require a special kind of courage my older daughter, Jenna, called strength of heart. In this book you will be invited and inspired to summon your strength of heart as you get clearer and clearer about what really matters. For you, living and aging courageously could turn out to be any number of things, no matter what your age, including the following:

•showing yourself kindness, compassion, and patience as you face the changes and challenges of getting older

•facing and conquering what you most fear about aging

•allowing your heart to fill with gratitude, celebrating the blessings in your life, and then figuring out how to pay them forward

•opting out of society’s blueprint for aging, which typically involves avoidance, denial, and youth-worshiping and, instead, fashioning one of your own

•taking the mantle of social responsibility as you consider what sort of world you want to leave behind

•making peace with life’s terms as you learn to embrace the larger scheme of things

•developing an honor code for the second half of your life along with the health, spiritual, and interpersonal practices that make it possible

Why did my two newly retired friends find themselves in such different positions as they embarked on the same phase of life? Because each of us gets to decide how we interpret the circumstances that we face. One friend chose an interpretation that life was over, while the other saw great possibility for a new season of life. In the chapters ahead, we will free ourselves of the interpretations and narratives that hold us down and boldly explore the greater possibilities in front of us. This is the special sauce of courageous aging.

All of this magic begins with what I call the Courageous Aging Self-Audit.

"An audit? you might be thinking. But audits stink and are something I avoid at all costs."

Don’t worry. The Courageous Aging Self-Audit is like kicking the tires and looking under the hood of your car at 40,000 miles. Or searching your heart. It lets us know where we are now and which areas need attention as we prepare for our best possible future. Think about it: If life came with a Fifty-Plus Owner’s Manual, there might be chapters on Reconciling Life’s Terms and Processing How You Feel About Getting Older and Finding Joy After Fifty. But it doesn’t. We have to figure it out and make it up as we go. Taking care of the real business of your life—so that you can live as fully as possible—begins with taking inventory. The coming chapters allow you to begin doing exactly that at your own pace.

Preface

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

Have you ever had moments when you suddenly knew that you wanted to make some change in your life? For me, those moments tend to come at 4:00 a.m. Some weighty realization will hit me—perhaps along the lines of I have to figure out what’s next in my life! or I need to talk about this!—and it’s like a light has switched on and I can’t fall back asleep. I see what I need to do. And I know it’s time to begin doing it.

Afterwards, though, I face the more difficult questions:

Will I seize that moment of insight or just let it pass?

Will I allow an epiphany that could change my life to fade back into oblivion or live courageously and transform my life?

Will I resist these changes? Or will I persist by ushering in much-welcomed changes that I have pondered or delayed—perhaps for many years—and summon the will, and the strength of heart, to actually see them through?

To that positive end, this book comes in four parts. The first three chapters will help you take inventory of where you are, where you’ve been, and where you want to go next. By the end of Chapter 3 you will have completed your Courageous Aging Self-Audit and crafted a vision for your path forward.

Chapters 4 through 7 will then help you clear away your roadblocks—whether