A man’s liberal and conservative phases seem to follow each other in a succession of waves from the time he is born. Children are radicals. Youths are conservatives, with a dash of criminal negligence. Men in their prime are liberals (as long as their digestion keeps pace with their intellect). The middle-aged . . . run to shelter: they insure their life, draft a will, accumulate mementos and occasional tables, and hope for security. And then comes old age, which repeats childhood— a time full of humors and sadness, but often full of courage and even prophecy.1
—E. B. WHITE
Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.2
—FRANCIS BACON
Backward or forward? That’s your choice. You can choose to look backward and relive the past’s failures, injuries, and missed opportunities. Or you can choose to learn from the past and look ahead to the adventures and possibilities that lie in your future. Which you choose to do will have a great deal to do with whether you spend your Second Prime active, vigorous, and hopeful or bitter, angry, and frail.
If age is a coat of many colors, attitude is what determines the color the coat will be.A positive attitude is the color of life: vibrant magenta, rich vermillion, emerald green. A negative attitude drapes you in the hues of death and loneliness: black, ash gray,muddy brown. Your attitude is nothing more or less than how you respond to and explain the multitudinous events, people, and turns of fortune that life throws your way every day. Earlier, we looked at Martin Seligman’s concept of “learned helplessness,” in which each of us chooses how to explain our failures—either internalized and due to personal shortcomings we are doomed to suffer with or externalized and due to circumstances that we can change. Attitude in general is based on the same concept: how you choose to explain the events of life determines your attitude toward life and, in turn, the quality of that life.
For example, you’re an old person living in a retirement community. One day you notice that a small piece of statuary that stands outside your charming house is gone. You react to this by:
a. Concluding that some young vandals must have gotten into your gated Nirvana and stolen your statue, and calling down angry damnation on everyone under twenty-five for the rest of your days.
b. Chalking it up to some person or persons and harrumphing that it’s just one more example of how messed up the world is.
c. Scratching your head and thinking, “Hmm, that’s funny,” and starting an investigation. Eventually, you realize that you removed the statue because your late mother-in-law gave it to you and your wife, and you always thought it was ugly. You put it in the garage and, because you’re an Old Geezer whose mind is going, forgot about it. Case solved.
The point (other than that you need a new statue and a trip to the Home Depot is in order) is that the way you choose to explain the things that happen to you determines your attitude. Attitude is a habit. You either choose to perceive yourself as a victim of a specific target (“young people are all punks”), a victim of the whole world (“the whole world is going to hell in a handbasket”), or as the recipient, not of any specific malice, but of random chance or even misunderstanding. It’s easy to see how the first two choices would lead you to develop a bunker mentality in which everyone else is the enemy. With the third choice, you simply have a “stuff happens”mentality in which you shrug and let the problem go or figure there must be a sensible reason behind it and set out to find it.
HOPE TRAINING
Even the way you regard positive occurrences becomes a habit. Some people, as the bumper stickers say, expect a miracle. They know that if they do good, good comes back to them. When positive things happen, they’re not surprised. Others assume that good fortune is a fluke and that fate will turn around and bite them as payback for having something good happen. These are the kinds of folks who, if they won the lottery, would say, “Sure, and I bet I get run down by a bus next week.”
Do you know people like this? Tiring, aren’t they? You want to shake their eyes open so they’ll see their blessings. In the end, some people have trained themselves for hope while others have trained themselves for despair.You can sense them a mile off; they have their own body language, their own aura. We call the hope-trained “mailbox watchers” because they’re like the kids who, once upon a time, would wait for the mailman to deliver the new Saturday Evening Post or Collier’s magazine, certain that something good was on the way every day. They’re relentlessly positive and powerful, always expecting good things, confident that even though things might not look so great now, they’re sure to get better. Frequently, they’re people of very deep faith who draw a sense that “something better is coming” from their beliefs. The funny thing is, it’s not uncommon for such people to be poor, live in the worst areas, or suffer from debilitating physical conditions. And yet they achieve great things.
The late Christopher Reeve was such a hope-trained individual.Here was a man who, due to a terrible accident, had gone from being physically unstoppable to being a quadriplegic. If any man had a right to be furious at God and fate, it was this man. But he made a choice to train for hope, and that hope carried him not only back to acting and directing but also to becoming a global spokesman for research into treating spinal cord injury. We throw the word hero around pretty blithely these days, but Chris Reeve was the genuine article.
At the same time, it’s not hard to find people who seem to have everything—money, power, position—who are trained in despair. They are the people we call “duck and covers” because they’re always expecting disaster. They might drive a beautiful car and live in a huge house, but they’re always convinced someone is about to mount an assault on what they have. They regard much of the world—especially people who are not exactly like them—with suspicion, distrust, and fear.
It’s like the two boys who were each placed in a room. One boy was put in a room with a pony, and he spent all his time crying, worried that someone would take the pony away. The other boy was put in a room with a pile of horse manure, and he immediately dove into the pile and started digging, crowing, “There’s got to be a pony in here somewhere!”
As you move into your old age—as you decide how you will be old— you must choose whether you will look forward or look back.As we’ll talk about in this chapter, everything comes down to a single word: regret.
Agelessness Secret #9
See Your Dentist
Nobody likes going to the dentist, but if you want to keep your teeth well into old age, you go anyway. But there’s evidence that going regularly might do a lot more than help you avoid dentures and implants.
In a 2004 journal report, the American Heart Association revealed that numerous studies had shown that oral health was a more reliable predictor of coronary disease than many other markers. In short, your oral health affects your risk for coronary disease.
Researchers identified five types of oral disease that are now thought to produce the inflammation associated with cardiac disease. And inflammation is now thought to be one of the major causes for many of the deadliest diseases that kill older Americans. There isn’t a firm link yet that says that oral disease causes heart disease, but the two definitely appear to be linked.
Still not enough to get you in for a cleaning every six months? Well, there’s more. Research now also shows that Caucasians with periodontal disease (bone loss due to infection) have a 15 to 18 percent greater stroke risk than those with healthy teeth. Scientists think this is due to the high risk of infection so close to the brain. Think about it; bacteria only need to travel a few inches from your jawbone to the blood vessels in your brain, which can lead to clots and eventually stroke.
Most dentists and dental researchers agree that poor oral hygiene is a health risk because it introduces infection into the body on a daily basis. So it becomes more important than you thought to see your dentist regularly for a thorough cleaning. And there’s one more factor linked to good oral health: people with poor oral hygiene—and thus, poor teeth—tend not to get the proper nutrition that their body, especially their heart, needs. If you can’t eat a balanced diet becaused your mouth hurts, you’re going to lack some nutrients.3
If you’ve been going like clockwork to the dentist for years, congratulations. Good for you. If you don’t go anymore, maybe it’s time to ask for a referral.
REGRET IS A TIME MACHINE
Physicists and experts in relativity will tell you that there is no such thing as time travel. Nonsense. Time travel is real; it exists in our minds. We choose to live forward or backward, in the future or the past, all while our bodies continue to exist in the present.
Regret, or the lack of it, is the only real time machine. Regret is the fuel behind the dark negative clouds that some older people seem to live under. These are the people who live out the unfortunate stereotype of old people as cranky, resentful, fearful, and cynical. Nobody gets to seventy and says, “Well, I’m going to be a nasty, unpleasant humbug without a kind word to say to anyone because darned if that won’t make my golden years more enjoyable!”No, such people are assembled one grudge at a time, over decades. These are the curmudgeons who can’t seem to get their heads out of the past; if they’re not dwelling on a hurt that happened thirty years ago, they’re approaching the affairs of today as though the same hurt is waiting to pounce on them again.
We feel regret over missed opportunities, risks not taken, loves lost. When we fail to embrace life, chase our passions, and try to live our dreams, we build an armor of regrets. In the end, that armor keeps out the rest of the world, separating us from those who might bring hope and love into our lives. Worst of all, regret makes us despise those who have lived their dreams because in them, we see our own failures. A senior living a life filled with regret is living in the past, traveling back in time every day to relive decisions that might have been made a different way but cannot be. It’s the time travel paradox: you might be able to travel to the past, but you can’t change it.
One more thing about regret: it’s a mistake reminding you to learn. Don’t relive your regrets, but learn from them. If a decision caused you pain in the past, don’t make the same mistake again. That’s how you turn past pain into future joy.
• Musical Recliners
• Spin the Bottle of Mylanta
• Simon Says Something Incoherent
• Doc, Doc Goose
• Red Rover, Red Rover, the Nurse Says Bend Over
• Kick the Bucket
• Twenty Questions Shouted into Your Good Ear
• Pin the Toupee on the Bald Guy
• Sag, You’re It!
DON’T REGRET. RE-GREAT!
A life built on regret is a tragedy. But that’s not the only choice. You can choose to live with the opposite of regret, which we call re-great. That means every day you’re looking forward to a future of optimism and possibility. You’ve made peace with the choices of your past, and while you’ve gained wisdom from them, you don’t dwell on them. The past is done. The future is ahead of you, and the possibilities are without limit. Every day is a revival of hope and potential.
Living with re-great is also time travel, but in this case you’re traveling into the future, imagining what can be. This is what Dr. Norman Vincent Peale called “positive thinking.” Peale was a true visionary, the man who inspired Art Linkletter to turn his life toward preventing drug abuse after the drug-related suicide of Art’s daughter. Dr. Peale taught that you can condition your mind to think positively. In doing so, you create your own reality. Where regret leads you to see the world with suspicion and fear, re-great leads you to regard life as a canvas waiting for you to create your masterpiece.
This is the power of attitude in determining whether you get old or grow old:
No matter what money or abilities you bring to your plan for your old age, your attitude will determine its outcome.
Think about that. You could be a multimillionaire, but if you enter your later years with a negative, defeatist attitude full of resentments and grudges, you will not have a Second Prime. You will rot away in a dark room. Your attitude toward life shapes your ability to shape the future. A positive attitude attracts people to you, energizes you to make changes, inspires you to “color outside the lines.”A negative attitude drives people away, makes you quit at the first sign of difficulty, convinces you that things are beyond your abilities. Attitude affects the outcome.
Regret chains you to the past, both its injuries and its failures, and takes energy from you. Positive thinking or re-great makes peace with the past, points you to the possibilities of a hopeful future, and gives you more energy.
ATTITUDE AFFECTS YOUR HEALTH
All right, so a positive attitude is motivating and empowering. No surprise there. But what if we told you that rejecting regret and living with re-great is actually good for your health and longevity?
The process of maturing is an art to be learned, an effort to be sustained. By the age of fifty you have made yourself what you are, and if it is good, it is better than your youth. 4
—MARYA MANNES
It’s part of our collective wisdom—along with eating your vegetables and getting a good night’s sleep—that keeping a positive outlook is good for our health. But in the rush to give our genetics credit or blame for everything that happens to our bodies, that bit of wisdom was forgotten. Now with the new knowledge that lifestyle is 70 to 75 percent of our longevity, we’re starting to accept that where the mind goes, the body follows. And there’s scientific evidence that a positive attitude does equal living longer.
A 2002 Yale University study of 338 men and 322 women in the same small Ohio town looked at how the subjects responded to certain statements about aging such as, “As you get older, you are less useful.” The responses allowed the researchers to categorize the people according to their self-perceptions about age and age-related stereotypes. Then they waited. The results were shocking: the test subjects with a positive self-image lived seven-and-a-half years longer than those with a negative self-image—a greater benefit than is gained by maintaining a healthy weight, exercising regularly, or not smoking! Even after taking into account factors such as age, gender, socioeconomic status, self-reported health, and level of social interaction, those people with a sunny outlook outlived the others.
The researchers found that people acquire stereotypes about aging decades before they themselves become old, and thus are preconditioned to think about age in a certain way that they never question. If they see old people as wise, they will think themselves wise in their old age, whereas if they are conditioned to think of seniors as senile, that will become their self-fulfilling self-perception. The researchers also wrote something that validates the mission of this book: “The negative self-perceptions of aging reported in this study may reflect a societally sanctioned denigration of the aged, and . . . ideally an effort will be made to counter these views and actions directed at the elderly.”5
Remember the Ten Myths? That’s precisely what we’re talking about: the stereotypes of the old as frail, flatulent, and feeble. It’s absolutely critical that you and all Baby Boomers learn to defy and refute those debilitating ideas because they do become self-fulfilling prophecies. Writing about the Yale study, public health specialist Amy Scholten says the researchers suggest a variety of approaches to combat negative societal stereotypes of aging:
• Emphasizing positive stereotypes of aging among young people by promoting more interaction and activities between the generations
• Encouraging older people to become more aware of the negative stereotypes about aging that they receive from others
• Helping older people become aware of the ways in which they target themselves with negative stereotypes about aging
• Increasing awareness of the negative impact of stigmatization6
We’d like to add one more: making sure you pass your copy of How to Make the Rest of Your Life the Best of Your Life on to at least three other people. At long last, we’ve outlived and outlasted the timeworn stereotypes.
AS ARCHIE BUNKER WOULD SAY, “LAUGH, DINGBAT!”
Author and Georgetown University Medical School professor Dr. Candace Pert states in her book, The Molecules of Emotion, that the messages of the emotions we experience are stored in our bodies—and particularly our brains—as chemical messages. These chemical messages influence how easily we get sick and how well our bodies’ natural defense systems respond to disease. Maintain a positive attitude and a sense of humor, she says, and your chemical messages are more likely to work for you, rather than against you.7
But you’ve always known that laughter and humor feel great. Physiologists and physicians have known for years that the act of laughing has real cardiovascular benefits. Laughter lowers stress, reduces blood pressure, and even enhances the body’s immune system. Beyond the laboratory benefits, humor just feels great. When you have a terrific sense of humor, you attract others to you, handle the ups and downs of life more easily, and walk around in a much better mood. Think about grandparents or other elders you’ve known in your life, and think about how much you enjoyed the ones who always seemed to have jokes to tell and always had a twinkle in their eye. Humor and shared pleasure with others improve life.
In the central place of every heart there is a recording chamber. So long as it receives a message of beauty, hope, cheer, and courage—so long are you young. When the wires are all down and our heart is covered with the snow of pessimism and the ice of cynicism, then, and only then, are you grown old indeed! 8
—SAMUEL ULLMAN
One man who knows that intimately is television legend Norman Lear, who created such landmark programs as All in the Family and Maude, and who, along with luminaries like Sid Caesar, Neil Simon, and Mel Brooks, is often credited with inventing modern television comedy. Lear, a spry eighty-three, still has a wicked sense of humor, but after becoming a father again late in life, this former hard-driving TV writer who loved eating dinners alone with his thoughts is revitalized by time with his family. In our interview, Lear says, “My ambition is to be the best that I can be in every moment, whatever that moment happens to be about. This morning I woke up at 6:15, woke up one daughter who had an early medical appointment, woke up the other daughter a little bit later, made breakfast for both, then woke up my son. Those moments were as important to me as receiving an award or picking up the newspaper and reading my name. They’re the moments that are really what success is all about. Robert Louis Stevenson said it is a better thing to travel hopefully than to arrive. That says it all too.”
Senior Achiever
Richard Hankins, 76, American Airlines mechanic
Dick Hankins started working as an aircraft mechanic at TWA when the Korean War was raging and air travel was an adventure. Fifty-five years later, he still works a full week at American Airlines (which merged with TWA in 2001) doing nondestructive testing on aircraft, looking for flaws that might damage a plane in flight. A Christian, fit grandfather of two who still plays beach volleyball at family reunions, he relishes the fact that his work plays such an important role in safety.
“You don’t wait until something’s broken; you try to anticipate,” he says. “A plane is not like a taxicab where you can pull it over to the curb when something goes wrong. There’s only one place for that aircraft to go, and that’s down.”
For his long service, Hankins earned the prestigious Charles Taylor Master Mechanic Award in 2001. The honor is named for the bicycle mechanic who, working with the Wright Brothers, became the first aviation mechanic in powered flight. “It’s an elite group, because you’ve been drawing Social Security for some time before you’re even eligible,” says Hankins. “It’s hard to find people who have been working continuously that long.”
But Hankins has discovered other passions as well. Late in life, he has become a lay humanitarian activist, having visited South Africa during a world peace conference, helped ferry supplies to the poor in Haiti, and now is planning a trip to Jordan to talk about aviation careers. There’s the possibility of even more travel as he considers turning to a consulting role as his fifty-fifth anniversary in aviation looms. But, he insists, he will always work.
“In the words of my longtime friend Bessie Baldwin, ‘I’d rather wear out than rust out,’” he says. “I work because there’s work to do.”
LIVING REGRETLESS
Here’s the difficult part: If you’ve reached fifty, fifty-five, or sixty with a negative outlook on life, a cargo of regret on your shoulders, or no sense of humor, how do you develop positive thinking habits? Like most of us, you know from experience that it’s very difficult to change the habits of years or decades. So how do you live without regret?
Like all things in this book, you make a choice. That choice has four aspects to it:
1. Close the book of past pains. If you constantly dwell on the slights, injuries, heartbreaks, and failures of your past, the first step to living regretless is to stop dwelling on them. Haul them out into the light, have one last long look at them, and let them go. Close those chapters of your life that make you feel like sitting in a dark room and fingering worry beads. Of course, letting go of a painful past is more than just a matter of saying, “I let it go.” But you have to start somewhere, and that means one day standing up and saying, “I will no longer be haunted by the past,” then reaffirming that again and again until you develop a new set of mental habits that look forward, not back. That’s training for hope.
2. Set goals for the future. Goal setting is a proven aspect of any self-improvement program. To get where you want to go, you need to have some idea of where you’re going. Living without regret means living with purpose and passion, and both demand that you strive toward something. That means setting specific goals for yourself. Goals give you something to look forward to, get you moving and keep you moving, and help you formulate defined plans. Without goals, life is ill-defined and hazy. With goals, life sharpens. The unimportant drops away, and the important comes into focus. Look at setting goals in different areas:
• Career
• Art
• Health
• Relationships
• Travel
• Money
3. Do what you’ve always wanted to do. This is the most important aspect of the regretless lifestyle. Many of life’s harshest regrets are of the “I wish I had” school. We believe there’s no greater sadness than someone on his deathbed saying, “I wish I had . . .” So to live regretless, give yourself permission to do the things you’ve always wanted to do. Was there something you wanted to do in your 30s but didn’t? Do it now. Is there something you want to do now but have been saying, “Maybe next year . . .”? Forget next year. Do it now. The beauty of doing what you’ve always wanted is that you’re following your passion, and there’s nothing more energizing and revivifying than that.
4. Affirm your new view every day. Affirmations have tremendous power. Simply speaking an idea increases the chances of it coming to pass. Each day when you wake up, repeat to yourself a mantra that represents your new view of your past and your future. Try such positive statements as:
• “The events of my past are finished and have no power over me.”
• “I am a force for positive change and I am moving ahead to do great things.”
• “My past failures are only lessons that I apply in gaining wisdom.”
• “There is no limit to what I can achieve in the next twenty years.”
• “I am vital and powerful, and I am living my dreams each day.”
These phrases and others like them will help you retrain your mind for hope, optimism, and positive action. A life-affirming attitude—just like smoking, exercise, or watching a certain TV program—can become a habit. With discipline you will rewire your brain and transform your thought process until thinking positively is as natural as breathing.
Try the Live Regretless exercise to begin your journey toward a life without regret and full of promise and purpose.
LIVE AT FULL VOLUME, IN FULL COLOR
Have you always wanted to have adventures? Live in the lap of luxury for a time if you can afford it? Climb a mountain? If you’re financially secure and in good health, why aren’t you doing what you’ve always wanted to? It’s not uncommon for older people to get so set in their ways that they set up barriers for themselves in which any act that lies outside their narrow experience is reflexively rejected. Financial gerontologist Donald Haas told us about clients of his who have always wanted to fly first class or buy a flashy new car, and have the cash to do so, but won’t let themselves do it. They still think like financially constrained people, or they tell themselves that pleasure is somehow unseemly.
Don’t buy it! Living with pleasure and joy is one of the purposes of living at all! When you live your life with the maximum delight and accomplishment, you’re honoring creation. You’re living as you were intended to. Have adventures. Give yourself permission to do things you’ve never done before. Remember, your Second Prime is a new era of your life. Travel on your own, without a tour group, relying on your mind and instincts to navigate the medina of Marrakech or the tracks of the Australian outback. Work with organizations like Earthwatch to get your hands dirty in scientific projects around the globe, tagging sea turtles or digging for Etruscan artifacts. Write a book and get it published. Run your first marathon. Read the collected works of Dickens, Hemingway, and Swift. Make your life a masterpiece.
1. Things to Do
• Examine past failures or hurts and identify the ones that hold you back.
• Resolve to close the book on your past, relying on it only for wisdom.
• Develop daily affirmations that train your mind to think about the future.
• Find the things you had always wanted to do in your younger days and do them.
• Develop a list of a few things you want to do now and do them.
• Set goals for five, ten, and twenty years hence.
• Associate with people who are positive.
2. Changes You Need to Make to Develop a Regretless Attitude
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3. Your Attitude Goals for Your Second Prime
Example: “Meet ten new people who have a relentlessly positive outlook on life.”
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4. Attitude Resources
• AARP (www.aarp.org)
• Time Goes By (www.timegoesby.net)
• Fearless Aging (www.fearless-aging.com)
• Positive Attitude Institute (www.positiveinstitute.com)
• Dr. Wayne Dyer (www.drwaynedyer.com)