Live Long and Prosper, How to Add Years to Your Life

In that foggy state between the time I crawled out of bed in the morning and I lay there with my brain still half asleep, I wrote an entire blog post in my head. It was cleaver and thought provoking and I woke up excited that I had something valuable to share. Then I made the mistake of thinking I’d remember the topic long enough to put the coffee pot on but as I scooped the grounds into the basket the fogginess in my head lifted and the entire thing went with it. So here I am sitting at the computer trying to conjure it back by over-stirring my coffee as if I were a witch hovering over a vat of boiling brew of black magic. 

I love that half asleep, half awake state of mind. The colors are brighter. The actions are faster. The storylines are epic and more than once I’ve woke up thinking that Steven Spielberg and Stephen King have figured out a way to channel this state of their minds into fiction for the ages. If I'm ever stuck in that place between awake and sleep and my heirs are debating whether or not to pull the plug, I hope there's a way of letting them know if I am stuck in a Stephen King-like nightmare or if am in outer space on an adventure with Spielberg’s E.T. Let me just say it now, in case that happens, I have very few nightmares. My dreamscapes are more likely about the adult versions of chasing rainbows and puppy dog tails.

They had a Ted Talk lecture here on campus last week titled How to Live to a Hundred. You’d be surprised---or maybe you wouldn’t---at how many people said they weren’t going to it because they have no interest in living that long. If you took these people seriously there would be an opening for a sharp shooter on campus to pick off the ones who say, “Just shoot me if it’s time to move me to assisted living or memory care.” We could build a sharp shooter's nest in a tree along the path leading towards those buildings and paint a big X on the chests of those who don't want to go.

Up until I moved here I used to say it all the time that I want to live to be a hundred. I still do but I don’t say it out loud anymore because other residents would ask "Why?" with distaste and disdain in their voices. And I don’t have a good answer other than I've been saying it so long I can't take it back. My mom had three great-aunts who lived to be over 100 and that made them famous in their small home town and in our family genealogy. I’m pathetic, aren’t I, competing with dead people in my family tree. Of course, in my mind I envision me being as full of life and as interested in the world around me as The Aunts were. They ran an antique store and printing business until nearly the end of their lives. I used to wonder what it would take to be a bride and worry about three elderly women living long enough to get my invitations printed.

At the lecture we learned that there are seven places in the world (Blue Zones) where longevity is the norm and I don’t live in one of them and I doubt anyone reading this does either. Most of us don’t walk everywhere or graze instead of eating three times a day. Drinking wine every day---some people here do that very well but living on nuts, grains, berries and other plant based foods, not so much. Heck, they don’t even serve a heart healthy diet around here. It’s like they want to give us all diabetes and heart disease, knock us off so they can resell our apartments. 

But living to be 100 has more to do with our genes and our location that anything else. We can’t control those things but one factor we can control that is common to all seven places in the world where longevity is norm is to have a tribe of people around us, five to six close friends and family to socialize with daily.

Here’s a summary of the ‘Ted Talk’ given by Dan Buettner, a National Geographics Writer and Explorer: 

1) Eat less: eat a low-calorie, mostly vegetarian (and in some cases vegan) diet, eating more in the morning and less at night

2) Keep moving: intentionally build physical activity into everyday life, including walking in nature and gardening

3) Rest and slow down: make time to de-stress, relax, and nap 

4) Loved ones first: include and celebrate family

5) Maintain connections: have a network of friends who reduce loneliness and act as a positive influence 

6) Have a sense of purpose: know your "ikigai" – your reason for being alive and getting up in the morning 

That sixth one on the list gets me every time. I struggle with finding my sense of purpose since I moved to this community fourteen months ago. You'd think by eighty years old I'd have a better sense of who I want to be when I grow up, wouldn't you. I'm so busy cultivating the fifth thing on the list---building connections---that I'm doing very little else. It's a fun way to live but in the middle of the night when I can't fall back to sleep I have this hollowness inside me that feels like I'm just marking time until I die. ©

Summary points are from Make Life Fun  

The Nature of Friendships

My Gathering Girls group--seven of us who spun out selves off from an official, monthly event down at the senior hall for people looking for friends---has been meeting twice a month for brunch since last May. And occasionally we’ve gotten together to do other things around the community. I was worried we wouldn’t hold together over the winter because the weather here in Michigan puts a kink in everything we do and, sadly, our ages are also playing into the equation. One of our ladies has breathing issues and is resisting going on oxygen, another has back issues so these two often bow out of going places that requires a little walking. Another in our group is starting dialysis and doesn’t know how that’s going to affect her free-to-gather time and we have another who just this week joined the Widows’ World where the rest of us have been living for a long time.

The ladies mentioned above are on average ten years older than the three of us not mentioned. Once this winter it was just we ‘youngsters’ who showed up for brunch. And someone commented that our absence friends are a cautionary tale telling us that we need to keep moving, keep having fun together for as long as we can because when we see what they are going through with heath issues we are looking at ourselves in ten years. And since dark humor is often served at our brunches we joked about having to go back to the senior hall to troll for more friends to entice into our group if it gets too small. That led to a discussion about how friends come and go through-out our lives for various reasons---some moving on literally, other moving on metaphorically as we grow in different directions. “All our lives we’ve had to keep making new friends,” someone said. And that’s never easy to do whether in grade school or at the senior hall. 

I’ve been lucky that I’ve had two best friends in my life. One I met in kindergarten and we were best friends until she got married after college and moved out of state, but over the years we’ve stayed in touch first through letters and now with email. I must say, though, at one time I resented her husband for taking her away from me. I missed having a best friend in my life until Don came along and took on that role. Now, looking back I wonder if N.B. and I had lived in the same city all this time how that might have affected our relationships with our husbands. We taught each other how to be best friends and we transferred what we learned to being best friends with our spouses. Correct me if I’m wrong but I don’t think it’s possible to have two best friends at the same time. And a spouse will usually (and rightly so) come first because you’re building a family and life together. I say “usually” because I’ve known a few women who have giggled, cried, plotted, and passed more secrets back and forth with their girlfriends than with their spouses. I’m guessing their marriages weren’t all they could have been because, in my book, spouses who are best friends have the best marriages. Still, no one can be everything to another person so I may be wrong about the ability of people to maintain two best friends at the same time. Oh, I’m so confused! The only thing I know for sure is I ignored the whole issues of maintaining a circle of friends until the loneliness of widowhood drove me to face the fact that I screwed up in thinking I’d never need more than Don. Oops. 

The word ‘friend’ is hard to define without an adjective, isn’t it. We pigeonhole friendships. We have casual friends, work friends, fair weather friends, cyber friends, church friends, common interest friends, family friends, close friends and best friends but what is a friend really? A best friend is easiest to define: it’s a connection that binds our spirits together, an unbreakable trust that we can be ourselves around that person, no matter if our moods are joyful or pitiful. Best friends can talk about anything and trust one another not to past on anything personal or told in confidence. They know where all our bones are buried, know our strengths and weaknesses and they only use that knowledge to help us be the best version of ourselves. 

Monday was my Gathering Girls First Mondays Brunch and only four of the seven of us attended. That makes me so nervous! I don’t want our circle of budding friendships to break up or get smaller before we even get to our first anniversary. And the TED TALK below with life-long friends Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin on the nature of female friendship inspires me to keep trying to building our sisterhood group. Their humor, like that of my Gathering Girls, comes together like peanut butter and jelly---so natural and easy---and I don’t want to lose that! O. Henry said, "No friendship is an accident” which is probably another way of saying, we have to work at maintaining our friendships. Okay, that’s my summer marching orders. Again. It was the same last summer and look what I’ve gained in the trying...and how much more I can gain if I keep on trying! ©

Sharing Secrets and the Vulnerability to Connect

Did you ever have your mood change so fast from bleak and dark to sunny and light that you had to go back and dissect the reasons why that happened? If I were thirteen or forty-five when puberty or menopause could explain things I probably wouldn’t have even noticed my U-turn because, well, hormone induced craziness often escapes its victim’s attention. It’s the rest of the world that’s wrong. 1-800 Waa-Waaa and if I had an eye rolling icon, I’d use it here. I don’t know about other women but if I could go back and give my parents and my husband trophies for surviving my puberty and menopause, I would. The catch-phrase “cry me a river” was probably inspired by my older brother back in the days when my hangnails took on the same importance as a pile-up on the expressway. And I think I’ve already written about the time my husband found me balling my eyes out over a broken pencil lead and in a naïve sweet guy way, he thought sharping the pencil would fix what ailed me. 

As I examined my changing mood this week it would be easy to assign a Bermuda Triangle-Like mystery explanation but on closer examination that wouldn’t be true. I can point to several things that converged on point A to bring me to point B. One was The Gathering at the senior hall on Monday, the new start-up group for people who are looking for friends. Again, we played a get-to-know-each-other game. With this month’s game we had to reach into a bag without looking and pull out an object, then tell a story about how that object tells something about our personalities, ending our talk-time by sharing a secret. One lady pulled out a wooden spoon with a hole in the center and she joked that it was her brain and the older she gets the bigger that hole grows. Another woman’s object led to a story about how she ended up living in Cairo, Egypt for twelve years. One woman confessed to streaking across a lawn to ring a bell and she made us promise that her secret would stay in the room. Oops, I guess I’m not good at keeping secrets. I love how these games help us carry conversations beyond the norm for strangers getting to know one another.

When it was my turn to share a secret I said, “I only have one secret”---I was thinking about how I blab my every thought in the bloggers’ world---“but I’ll tell you half the secret: I once slept overnight on a gravesite and the reason why is the half I won't share." I also didn't share that I dated a newly minted Vietnam veteran for a year before I met Don and until that guy dies I probably won’t talk about the pain he caused me which includes the reason for the night in the cemetery. I think about doing it, writing about that era of my life but it would be a complicated story to tell and I’m not sure it’s worth revisiting in my head. I've googled him a couple of times and know our paths could easily cross again and it would be interesting to see if the attraction is still there after all these years. You see human interest stories on the news about old people who were sweethearts in their youth reconnecting fifty-sixty years later in a nursing home and getting married. Ohmygod, I can see how that happens if you're both the kind of people who only carries the happy memories forward and leaves the rest back in the past.

Back on topic: The second thing that factored into turning my mood around was going on Facebook and reading a post by an acquaintance that on some levels mirrored my own thoughts. “It occurred to me,” she wrote, “that in the realm of friendship, I have pretty much wasted mine because of shyness (often mistaken for being ‘stuck up’) and, yes, shame. I have many friendly acquaintances, but no one to have mini-reunions, girl getaways and the like. When I see posts of women laughing in restaurants, or touring places I love, I feel a great deal of self-pity, which is not noble.” Let me tell, this woman is someone I never, ever would have guessed could feel that way. She’s poised, well spoken, warm, extremely interesting and is someone I have admired from afar. I pictured her with many close friends. We chatted back and forth on her public Facebook post---my least favorite format for sharing feelings---but we ended up making plans for an outing this holiday weekend. 

“In order to connect we have to allow ourselves to be seen, really seen.” That’s a quote from New York Times bestselling author Brene Brown and I realize that's what my Facebook acquaintance was doing in her post, she was having the courage to be seen---insecurities, flaws and all. Ms. Brown also says, “Connection is why we are here. It’s what give meaning and purpose in our lives.” If you’ve never seen her Ted Talk on the power of vulnerability it's well worth watching. It's funny, insightful and you'll probably see yourself or someone you know in the stories she tells. ©