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After listening to all these experts, I realized that my being able to experience Positivity is, in part, simply because I am older. But I have also worked at it. Doing my life review helped a lot. There is something wonderful about self-examination—looking, devoting enough time and energy, interest, and psychological openness to understand what your trajectory was that made you who you are today. The next step is taking responsibility for it, owning it. Physical exercise, which releases feel-good endorphins, helps with Positivity, and so, for me, does meditation.

I talked to Dr. Matheny about this. He said, “It is sort of like, well, in the Buddhist tradition, they refer to it as ‘the witness.’ We probably all had the experience where we’ve been dreaming and very upset and then—it’s almost like a nourishing parent part of us comes in and says, ‘Don’t worry. This is just a dream. You are going to wake up.’ That voice, that very wise part of us that Jung referred to as ‘the soul,’ a depository of wisdom that goes far beyond consciousness—older people have an advantage there. One key goal of mindful meditation is to allow us to become more conscious of what we are doing while we are doing it, and not merely after the fact. We observe ourselves and maybe stop acting out our roles, getting caught up in our own dramas and our conditioning, and only thinking about what we did later. We are always in acting roles, and they are important to us, but if we are not careful we forget who we are and we just become a role enactor. And if the role is not working out well, then we are very, very unhappy and stressed.”

I have subsequently thought about how much unconscious acting out of roles I did in my earlier life and how much stress it caused me and others. Stress is definitely what we want to minimize in the Third Act, when, more than ever, it can take a toll on our bodies, even damaging our brains—as I talked about in
Chapter 8
. I am grateful to have discovered meditation at age seventy. I know meditation can actually develop new neural pathways in your brain that can help lead you away from depression and anxiety. Meditation is a human override of the production of stress hormones. I encourage you to explore the practice of mindful meditation, and in
Appendix V
you will find a guide for doing so.

Guess what else you can do to develop new neural pathways that will lead you out of sourpussness? Smile! That’s right. By smiling, you actually change the pattern of information going from the muscles in your body—in this case, the muscles around your mouth and eyes—to your brain. This has a big impact on health and well-being, both short-term and long-term. Dr. Norman Cousins believed he cured himself of bone cancer and other diseases by watching funny movies and laughing and smiling, which mobilized his endorphins and the healing keys of his immune system, like T cells, lymphocytes, leucocytes, and phagocytes, into action to fight the disease.

I interviewed 104-year-old Rachel Lehman for this book; she told me about creating “an epidemic of love” by smiling at everyone who came her way, especially the sourpusses. Remembering this, I started experimenting with a smile. It began with yoga. I would put on a slight, Mona Lisa–type smile as I held the poses. I would try to maintain the smile while I meditated. And sure enough, it would make me feel better, lighter. Even if I didn’t feel like smiling, I would put a smile on my face, and it would make me feel more buoyant. I found this to be similar to the effects of good posture. When I pull my shoulders back and make sure my head is right on top of my neck and not jutting forward, I feel stronger, more powerful. And, just as with smiling, I look better, too.

I’ve since discovered interesting research showing that the physiology of smiling creates a biochemical response, activating neurotransmitters, hormones, and endorphins, and releases nitric oxide that makes you feel better.

Dr. Rollin McCraty, executive vice president and director of research at the Institute of HeartMath, says,

Research shows that the brain functions as a complex pattern-matching system. The messages it receives from the heart, facial muscles, and other bodily organs are some of the many input patterns that the brain is constantly processing. An important point is that as recurring patterns of input to the brain become familiar, the brain attempts to maintain these familiar patterns as a stable baseline, or norm. This occurs even if a familiar pattern is one that is ultimately detrimental to our health and well-being, such as living with constant stress. This mechanism actually provides a psychophysiological basis for understanding why chronic stress can be so difficult to change: The brain learns to recognize the stressful patterns as familiar, and thus attempts to maintain and reinforce them, even though they are unhealthy.

However, just like resetting a thermostat, it is also possible to introduce a new set of patterns, which, by repetition, become familiar to the brain and become established as a new baseline. So, if we consciously make efforts to smile and activate positive emotions, eventually the brain will recognize these coherent, “feeling-good” patterns as familiar and will reinforce them and they become much more a part of our natural state.

Dr. McCraty adds that having this new, more positive baseline pattern makes it easier for us to bounce back when we do experience stress or challenges.

Elan Sun Star, a photographer, writer, and teacher at Global Creative Networking Media, has written extensively about the power of the smile. He says, “So, what do you do when you don’t feel like smiling and you don’t even feel like faking it? Well, you can be grateful that you are not being forced to smile, and that may make you smile. Of course we must realize that there are authentic smiles and inauthentic smiles, but we can also realize there is an authentic try at being happy, and an authentic try at smiling.”

In 1862, the French neurologist Guillaume Duchenne mapped one hundred facial muscles. He demonstrated that false or even halfhearted smiles involve only muscles of the mouth, but that authentic, deep-from-the-heart smiles activate the muscles around the eyes as well, causing the skin around the eyes to crinkle, the eyelids to drop a little, the cheeks and corners of the mouth to lift.

Mr. Sun Star suggests standing in front of a mirror and practicing putting on a Duchenne smile that crinkles up your eyes and turns up your mouth. Think of it as a new workout, and work those smile muscles! Breathe while you do it and stand up tall. Happy, erect posture adds credibility to the smile. I don’t associate a happy, empowered, smiling person with someone slumped over.

I have become a much more inviting and optimistic person since I entered my Third Act. Whenever someone tries to make me feel dopey about it, I remind myself of the findings of a 2002 study, the Ohio Longitudinal Study of Aging and Retirement, which revealed that older people with a more positive attitude toward old age lived seven and a half years longer!

CHAPTER 10

Actually Doing a Life Review

It’s never too late to be what you might have been.

—GEORGE ELIOT

The compensation of growing old, Peter Walsh thought, coming out of Regent’s Park, and holding his hat in hand, was simply this: that the passions remain as strong as ever, but one had gained—at last!—the power which adds the supreme flavour to existence—the power of taking hold of experience, of turning it round, slowly, in the light.

—VIRGINIA WOOLF,
Mrs. Dalloway

I
HAVE INCLUDED DOING A LIFE REVIEW AMONG THE INGREDIENTS of successful aging because, in my experience (and to paraphrase George Eliot), doing so may help you become what you might have been. You may discover your essential self … that you are not who you think you are.

We all needed our parents to have loved and respected us independent of how we did or didn’t perform in the world. A good number of us didn’t have this. Some of us look back and feel as if our lives are failures, or less than they might have been. Perhaps we still feel the pain of an early disabling psychic wound or we haven’t had closure in our relationships, and so we don’t feel entirely finished. As the psychologist Terrence Real has written, “Our areas of immaturity always represent unfinished business, incomplete conversations, with one or both parents, because it was they who should have steered us toward the relational maturity we now lack as adults.”
¹

One way of finishing up the task of finishing ourselves is to go back over our earlier lives and, if it is called for, work to change our relationship to the realities—the people and the events—that composed them. A life review, as discussed in
Chapter 2
, assists us in doing this. The author and psychologist Stephen Levine calls it a “going-out-of-unfinished business sale.” It is easier for us when we have some mileage, some experience, under our belts, when the conflicts and traumas are less affect-laden, and time and adulthood have rounded some of the sharp edges.

Simone Scharff is an attractive, petite, seventy-eight-year-old Frenchwoman I knew during the 1960s, when I was married to my first husband, the French film director Roger Vadim, and we all hung out together on the beach in Malibu. I ran into her again after almost fifty years at WISE & Healthy Aging, a senior center in Santa Monica, where she is a member of a group of twelve women who meet weekly to share their writings. Ethel Schatz, now a dynamic woman of ninety-three, started the group twenty years ago as a way to encourage older women to write about themselves and then discuss what they’d written with the group.

Simone said that her first reaction to the idea of joining the writing group was that she couldn’t write. She’d grown up in France during the Nazi occupation and had received only what she called “street schooling.” “Not being good enough was a theme of my life. It was always so strong in me,” she said in her lovely French accent. “But writing my life, all the things I have been through, gave me a certain kind of respect for myself. You know, ‘Wow, I did that, and I did that, and that and that!’ But I would have never done it if it wasn’t for the light that Ethel gave me, the permission to just express it, to write it, to think about it, not to be embarrassed. It gave me a freedom, made me flexible. My whole attitude has changed.” Simone had always been too shy and embarrassed to tell her children about her life, but now she is giving them what she’s writing and they are interested, as are her grandchildren, and she feels it is helping them.

While being in a writing group isn’t exactly the same as writing a life review, it can jump-start the process, as it did for Simone.

I don’t believe that you need, necessarily, to show your writing to anyone else. Just the act of writing for yourself, in an openhearted, thoughtful, and detailed way, can be transforming. Nevertheless, there may come a time when your children or family members will find great benefit in reading what you write, the way I benefited from reading what my mother wrote when she was admitted to a mental institution before she died.

My friend Nathaniel Bickford, now sixty-five years old, began writing a book about his life right after he retired from corporate law. Two traumas had happened to him during high school that had haunted him all his life. First, a teacher who had been Nat’s hero turned on him for no apparent reason and emotionally tortured him until he was forced to change schools. Then, in his new school, his best friend turned out to be homosexual and made a pass at him—this was in the mid-1950s, and it traumatized Nat. Not knowing what else to do, he told the headmaster, and his friend committed suicide.

“I was sure if I had handled it better, he would still be alive,” Nat told me one day in his New York apartment. “Therefore, I felt I was a direct cause of his death. Not having been able to talk to anyone about it for so long a time, I wanted to write the book to try and figure it all out, including trying to understand the psychology of the teacher who so tortured me. What did I do that made him so mad?” I asked Nat if writing the book had helped him understand that the teacher’s behavior had nothing to do with him.

“It is amazing,” Nat answered. “You can say you are not responsible, that the man obviously had some other problems. Intellectually, you can do that until the cows come home. But you really can’t get rid of the residue of whatever emotional damage it’s caused—scar tissue, whatever—unless and until you really almost relive the whole damn thing. So I had to write what my friend was actually saying when he was embracing me, and it was just horrible, but it was the only way. I had to go through it again in order to then be able to understand my young self. A curious thing happens when you go back: The little you becomes a third person, and you can forgive that little guy. That little guy was really not responsible for what happened. He doesn’t have to go through all that now. And that works. It does. It is really amazing.”

I told Nat how moved I was hearing him recount this because I, too, had not been able to expunge certain demons from my life until, in writing my life review, I saw that I had to go into enough detail for things to become embodied experiences—I had to
feel
them again.

Nat’s book,
Late Bloomer,
was published in 2008 by Tidepool Press. Now Nat is free of his ghosts and is moving on into happy retirement with his wife of forty-six years.

So, I challenge you to be like Simone and Nat, to gather all that you have done, have been, all that you have had—things on the outside and internal things—to claim them, gather them all together into your center so as to possess who you are. All this is not to revisit what others have said you are, what others want or need you to be; the point is to get at who you feel you are in the deepest recesses of your soul. What things happened to you when you were little? What experiences were bad and scary? What was beautiful? How did you feel when you walked into your first school? How did the other kids make you feel? Did you do anything you were ashamed of or don’t like to think about now? Did you have a teacher who made you feel wonderful and curious? A teacher who made you feel dumb? Did your parents make you feel safe? Proud of yourself? Accepting of yourself? Take hold of your experiences. Feel them. Go into them in your body and then make notes about them so you will remember. Don’t edit; just let the ideas flow. Turn them around, slowly, in the light, and try to see past the surfaces. If you are like me, experiencing the transition into elderhood will be far more meaningful and enjoyable if you see it in the context of the full arc of your life, with some of your old business dealt with and tidied up.