Older or Elder
Friends!
I am still high. By that, I mean elevated. The last few weeks of reflection and writing have only made me more committed to staying at a higher altitude. Altitude helps attitude, and attitude shapes emotional latitude. Last week I celebrated elevation broadly, and I hope you will stay with me up here.
This week, I am going to bring up something very difficult: getting older. As Bette Davies often reminded us: It ain't for sissies. But, yet it's happening to all of us. And lately, it has been hitting very close to home with the passing of a dear friend's mother and friends and close family members dealing with very difficult health challenges.
I wrote early in this newsletter series about PAUSING and the importance of recognizing the critical space between stimuli and response. We are wired biologically to act quickly and instinctively respond to whatever is coming our way. Sometimes that is good – it could be a matter of survival. Like when you’re behind the wheel or when something catches fire that shouldn’t while you’re cooking. However, since most of humanity has left the hunter-gather phase, oftentimes taking pause and allowing yourself some time to reflect on what just happened will give you a better perspective. It helps you to intentionally shape your response in a more relevant and contextual way, rather than relying on your knee-jerk reaction. In the moment, we often exaggerate the importance of what JUST happened (recency bias), and with the benefit of some time, our emotions calm down and we can move on to more important matters.
But then, there is, of course, the ultimate pause. Leaving the world as we know it. We all will face that someday, and we all move closer by the day. But how do you better prepare? What can you do to help embrace older age with a different attitude?
I was introduced, at a very young age, to the philosophy behind The Tibetan Book of the Dead. The idea, at its core, is that you really can't live fully unless you are prepared to die. I know this might seem to be too extreme, and possibly a contradiction to many of you, but the more I thought about it the more it made sense to me. We do get "invested" in our possessions, our positions, and our powers, and sometimes (I would probably argue closer to always) we end up being more fearful about what we might lose than what we might gain. We become prisoners of our habits.
There are many schools of thought that can help us think about the various transitions in life. Much like the five stages of grief or steps to overcoming addiction. They are similar in nature as they move from a first stage characterized by some type of awareness (or denial) that best can be thought of as the beginning of the end. The next stage is messy and is often referred to as the neutral zone or the messy middle, mainly characterized by confusion, a feeling of disorientation, and loss. And finally, you enter your new beginning, the reshaping of a new reality, and hopefully the exit of the transitory stage.
What is truly paradoxical and counterintuitive here is that transitions start with the end and end with the beginning. I think that is fundamentally also why so many of us struggle. I mean, who wants to deal with the end first?
But back to aging. What is true for most of us is that we started our lives by spending our childhood preparing for adulthood. Our societal institutions were designed for those two primary phases of life; childhood and adulthood. But with the way we now work, the way we now live, and also how long we live, many humans now face the third age. The elderhood age. A time when you might leave your job, but where the idea of "retirement" feels completely inadequate and no longer serves the modern age.
Below I am posting a link to a fantastic podcast with Dr. Mark Hyman and Chip Conley. Chip has founded something called the Modern Elder Academy (MEA). Their conversation inspired the simple drawing above. It is definitely worth your time.
The basic idea of the MEA (powerful as it is) is that we have pre-schools for kids, universities for adolescence. But what about "middlescence"? We could all use some help through that transition?
Barbara Waxman, someone who has devoted significant energy towards transitionary leadership, defined middlescence this way:
"A transitional period between the ages of about 45 to 65, marked by an increased desire to find or create greater meaning in one's life."
In the podcast, Chip shares many valuable insights into these types of transitions. Things like the value of purpose, wellness, community, and the anatomy of transitions, as well as the 4 key tenets of their program, all resonated so much with me. Ideas around changing your mindset from a fixed to a growing one and about regeneration and how your soil and your soul both must be nourished by a healthy microbiome and surrounding environment.
For many of us playing on our "back nine," this topic is probably the most important of all topics. How do we refresh, upgrade, and regenerate ourselves? How do we keep our curiosity, lust, appetite for life's full adventures alive and kicking? How do we show vulnerability and embrace the unknown when these are not qualities often on display around us?
I would love to engage with this community on this topic. I need lots of help here. Please share stories of inspiring transitions into the kind of elder we all aspire to become. It's not about the end. It is about a new beginning.
Here are some sources of inspiration for this important topic:
The book that changed my perspective many years ago - The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Rinpoche
The great book by Bruce Feiler on Life in the transitions - mastering change in a non-linear age.
I liked Jane Fonda's TED talk many years ago on the transition to a third phase.
I will end with a quote that Chip used in the podcast (but as with so much wisdom it is unclear who really said it.) Let it be attributed to the elder wisdom whose we all aspire to live up to.
The meaning of your life is to find your gift. The purpose of your life is to give it away.
Here's to a beautiful life in transition!
