Live Long, Die Short (25 page)

When asked at the conclusion of our interview what advice she would give for aging successfully, she is more forthcoming. “Don’t worry about
what may happen. Take each day a time. Do something that makes a difference. Be mindful of what others are experiencing.” Optimism, purposeful living, and compassion, this is Mary’s formula for lowering her own risks and for aging successfully.

Masterpiece Living Pearls for Lowering Your Risks

1. Find out what your personal risks are.
   Use the Lifestyle Inventory to assess your risks. Seek out a health-risk appraisal (there are many available online and from medical insurance companies) for a more comprehensive evaluation. Consult with your physician to get a full understanding of where you are at risk and what she recommends.
   
2. Using
   chapter 3
   , make a plan for
   small changes
   in order to lower risk.
   Do not attempt to address all risks at once.
   Seek small, incremental, single changes in order to lower risk. For instance, if you’re overweight, begin by eating 10 percent less of your favorite food. When that is a new standard, consider further reducing the amount or adding a second favorite food to reduce incrementally. Or, if you’re not eating enough fruits, vegetables, or nuts, add just one helping of one of them that you like each day. The ultimate goal is eating less, eating better foods, and increasing activity, but give yourself as long as it takes to keep moving in a positive direction toward those goals.
   Be patient, be kind, be positive.
   
3. If the description of “stressed out” fits you, read Tip Seven for more understanding of why you are stressed and what you might do about it. As I write this, I am sitting in a garden in Sedona, Arizona, a very spiritually energizing place for me. I could be out looking for a new restaurant to brag about. I could be out looking for a new trail to hike. I could be worrying about my friends with cancer. But I can also choose to be energized by this garden. To be here alone with the cactus, with the birds singing, with the breeze wafting over my skin, and
   not
   with my “problems” or my to-do list. I am here in this moment, and it is joyful. Realize that it’s not life that is stressing you out—it’s your response or interpretation of the never-ending parade of life situations you encounter that is stressing you out. You are the problem. You are the answer!
   
4. Schedule two or three days to pay careful attention to your eating: what you eat, when you eat, how much you eat, what you are feeling or thinking when you eat. Take a few notes. Now set aside an hour to sit
   down, read your notes, and make some decisions on what you would like to change. Make sure you are clear on exactly what you want to achieve. Do you want to be thinner? Do you want more energy? Do you want to lower your risk of cancer? Or heart attack? Do you want to live longer? With that outcome in mind, decide on your first step. Don’t get too ambitious! For example, say you want to have less knee pain. You should lose some weight. You think you eat too much dessert. So, you might make a plan to leave one small bit of your dessert on your plate. Then you might leave a little more. Next, you might decide to not eat a dessert on one day per week. On that day, do something you enjoy right after eating instead of eating that dessert. Play with your dog; do your hobby; call the grandkids—anything. The rest of your plan will become clear as you see and feel proud of your success with each small step. If you don’t accomplish what you’d planned for that day,
   do not give up
   ! You’re still better than where you were before, so reboot, redo, or just get back on track.
   Guilt and surrender are your enemies
   , as are goals that are too ambitious. Do not allow them in your head. You are a warrior, and you can do this.
   
5. Make sure you partner with a medical practitioner who believes strongly in prevention. You’ll know her when she takes time, or has someone on her team take time, to educate you on your risks and risk-lowering strategies. You’ll know her when she never gives up on finding ways to
   prevent
   as well as treat conditions. If you ever hear “Well, you’re getting older now, what do you expect?” it’s time to move on to another medical practitioner, one who will coach you to lower risk and prevent disease. That, I believe, should be a physician’s first role—even before treating and curing disease.
   
6. Seek out friends who live healthy lifestyles, or at least the lifestyle you are seeking. Whether they intend to or not, they will share it with you. Just as your mother told you, don’t hang out with the wrong crowd. Remember that motivational speaker Jim Rohn tell us, “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”
   

I’m much too young to be this damn old
.
—GARTH BROOKS

I’m not old. I was just born a long time ago.
—JOHN BLOSSOM, AGE NINETY-TWO

How old would you be, if you didn’t know how old you were?
—SATCHEL PAIGE

Men do not quit playing because they grow old; they grow old because they quit playing.
—OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

E
xpectations kill joy. You’ve experienced this. You’re going to lose twenty pounds before the wedding. You lose ten. You’re disappointed. Your sister is coming to visit. At last you can resolve all those bad feelings. You have some initial warm moments together but the old resentments come up after only a few hours. You’re off to Hawaii for seven days of sun, surf, and relaxation. It rains two days and is cloudy another. Bummer. Yes, we have a penchant for setting expectations high and then
lamenting when they don’t happen. We can also, however, set expectations too low. Out of ignorance of what’s possible, fear of failure, or an attempt to conform to the misguided expectations of family, friends, or peer group, we can sell ourselves short.

And so it is with our expectations of our own aging. It seems the only stories about aging successfully show ninety-year-olds running marathons or jumping out of airplanes. True, these people are most likely aging successfully, but just as you don’t have to win a gold medal to be an excellent tennis player, we can age successfully without doing something that 99 percent of our peer group cannot. Likewise, aging well is much more than what the unenlightened stereotypes prevalent today say it is (e.g., we can expect more than to play bingo regularly).

So, if we can err by shooting too high or too low, how do we find the middle ground? Don’t give up! Read on. I can help. Whether we act our age or not is determined by expectations, our own and others’, so we need to discuss them.

The message of this chapter is simple: Don’t let anyone else set the expectations for your aging. Just keep growing in all aspects of your life. No matter what the specific results are, you will be aging successfully.

Setting expectations is not all bad. We need goals or targets to shoot for. Goals provide us direction and a destination. They become problematic, however, when they become fixed and inflexible. If we set them too high, we will inevitably be disappointed. So, as in the case of the situations I mentioned in the opening of this section, we rob ourselves of the satisfaction of achieving some of our goals. Even more tragic than not achieving whatever expectation we had for ourselves is loss of the competence and pride that come with achieving something, anything. In most cases, I believe this sense of joy far outweighs the actual goal. If we are flexible, resetting expectations along our journey of growth, we can preserve this sense of accomplishment even as we fall short of our original goals.

We are a society obsessed with youth. We have a preference for portraying beautiful, youthful people in our ads, magazines, videos, TV shows, and movies, with the implication that it is only the young who are out there doing exciting things and living life. Even more disturbing than this unexamined obsession with youth is the stacking of the deck against older
adults that occurs when we judge whether someone is old or impaired or “losing it” using criteria developed by young people. This youth-driven blindness virtually guarantees that growing old in our society becomes a dissatisfying, even dehumanizing, experience. Dr. Bill Thomas, an international expert on elderhood, observes that many within our society think of older adults as
broken versions of younger adults
. Ironically, this unenlightened view of aging results in markedly diminished expectations for the entire group of older adults. We lump all older people together as a group in decline as if the variability and diversity we see and expect in youth fades with age.

In Okinawa, if you ask an older adult how old she is, she will, in many cases, lie to you. An older Okinawan may very well tell you she is
older
than her true age. To be old in Okinawa is not only to be revered, but it is to be an essential part of the community and society: an envied source of wisdom and experience. This status comes with responsibilities, which remain as strong expectations for all Okinawans, no matter what their age. These expectations are rooted in the Okinawan concept of
yuimaru
, best translated as “reciprocity,” and meaning that all are obligated to help others.
¹
The older Okinawan is no less obligated than those younger. So although it may be that as they age they may need more assistance, it is also expected that they continue to assist others.

In our society, we have examples of remarkably vital, robust, and iconic older adults (usually celebrities), but they are clearly considered the exception. This is, in fact, why we see news stories of a parachuting George H. W. Bush and of marathon-running eighty-year-olds, because they are markedly inconsistent with our prevailing view of aging. And because we have low expectations, it is not surprising that over the last century we have observed a self-fulfilling picture of the aging process that is dominated by decline. Research on aging, and a new generation of older adults with expectations more consistent with this research, will rock our traditional views and significantly raise the bar. But it will take time.

So, with a still-prevailing view of aging as a decline-only process, we can easily set low expectations for ourselves. We can accept that it is unseemly or delusional to dress in younger clothes, to seek out new experiences, to continue to learn or try new things, to keep up with technology. Such behavior, we might easily believe, will demonstrate an unwillingness to gracefully accept our aging, will invite criticism that we are not acting in a way consistent with our station in life (or worse, that we are “losing it”), will set us up for disappointment, will show the world we are not
acting our age.

Likewise, if we allow the diminished expectations of those close to us—family, friends, and peers—to determine our own expectations, we will undoubtedly set our bar too low and miss opportunities for continued growth. Even when given with the best intentions, the advice to “act our age” throws water on the embers of our potential. The fire of what still could be is extinguished and we ultimately settle into a world of privileges without obligations or purpose—a scenario now known to accelerate our own decline.

As Masterpiece Living developed the tools to help older adults identify where they are at risk for not aging optimally and then to coach them toward better lifestyle choices, it became clear to us that this process was exponentially more successful when the individual was in a supportive environment: one that helped them believe in and
expect
continued growth. The
environment
was absolutely critical as a positive or negative influence on the outcome. People living where others were negative about aging or had only expectations of decline with aging, or in places where comfort and security were the dominant characteristics of the community, did not have the outcomes of those who lived in more nurturing environments. In communities where there was an overriding belief that older adults can continue to grow no matter what age or impairment, we saw startling growth: physically, intellectually, socially, and spiritually.

We knew that we now had to focus on helping to build these environments, and that focus paid off. Our Masterpiece Living network of nearly one hundred communities is a treasure house of what we hope will become models for communities of all types, including mixed-age, non-retirement communities. Creating places with village-like characteristics, no matter what the size of the community, is the goal. Creating places that respect and value older adults, that help them believe in their potential, and that incorporate them into the very fabric of the community is what Masterpiece Living has been doing, and is dedicated to continue. These are environments counter to the ageism-tainted ones still dominating our current culture, but they are precisely the environments where older adults flourish.

“Acting your age” in these places had to mean continuing to grow. This is, in fact, the reason many experts discourage living with one’s adult
children. On the surface it looks like a reasonable thing to do: Accept the love and protection of our grown children and let them assist us and free us of responsibility, right? It does indeed sound like a rational plan, but within these loving arms of our family, there are often entrenched and confining expectations of what you are capable of. There is a nurturing, albeit paternalistic, hovering that commonly characterizes this live-in arrangement. Appreciative of all you’ve done for them, expecting decline, and desiring to minimize, if not eliminate, the risk of injury, adult children and their families will often perform tasks that their parents are perfectly capable of doing. As we’ve seen in
chapter 1
, we lose what we do not use, and therefore, this time-honored, nurture-based approach to aging parents potentially raises risks.