August 8
Waking Up: Using what our bodies know.
“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”― Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
There’s a bar in our town that has live music on Friday nights and a four-couple-max sized dance floor. The regulars have been welcoming, and, for the price of a drink, we get to be face to face with a different extremely good blues band every week, so we’ve been showing up whenever we can. On nights when everything in the world is on his side, my honey even dances with me. I love to dance. He worries about being a spectacle, so we don't dance as much as I want to. “Listen,” I beg, “Listen! When it comes to dancing it’s about getting lost in our bodies and not worrying how you look. Don’t think. There are no steps to follow. You can’t dance your own dance wrong. Don’t look around. If you can feel the beat, you win.” Convincing? Not for him, but last night was a miraculous exception. For reasons I can only feel grateful for, we danced all night, and I felt like a seed about to break open, there was so much energy.
This blog is about energy and how moving our bodies can optimize the changes that comes naturally with aging. Aging changes us, and how we connect with our bodies can change how we age. By paying attention in ways we might never have before, we can uncover information we hold inside that we didn’t know was there. Discovering more meaning in life comes naturally when we wake up buried parts of ourselves, release where we are stuck, connect with the energy all living things share, and amp up our joy.
Energy, vitality, buoyancy, stamina, forcefulness, power, drive, passion, zeal, zip, oomph, moxie, mojo, get-up-and go; whatever the words you use for the pulse we share; what matters is how we can experience that energy, how it is always moving through us, how there is nothing we need to do beyond feeling it and what that energy has to do with being older. Learning how all this works fascinates me, and as Austin Keon says in his book, Show Your Work, sharing your process can be the most helpful information you can make available to someone else. Maybe my ideas will work for you, maybe they won’t, but seeking answers that fit your life will work, Questioning, examining attitudes, and taking action is more possible now that we have the time and wisdom to go forward.
What to expect:
Information about how aging changes our bodies, brains, and emotions, about accessing intuition through movement and about what our bodies know.
Stories about the life-changing, personal questions that become most relevant when we become elders. Jack Kornfield, a founder of Spirit Rock insight meditation center, said “In the end, these things matter most: How well did you love? How fully did you live? How deeply did you learn to let go?” Questions like those.
“Try this:” open-ended exercises to help you access your own accumulated experiences and knowledge, provide new insights, and answer personal questions. Aging gives the process of learning from our bodies urgency because we don’t have unlimited time left to become fully ourselves.
Guided imagery prompts: Sensory-based stories to help you relax and get in the mood for movement. Guided imagery is an easy, non-threatening method to direct your imagination to bridge the gap between your conscious and unconscious minds. All you have to do is close your eyes, and sink into a story you will be able to see, hear, taste, smell, touch, or feel in your body. The stories are designed to encourage you to explore new things and feel that change is possible. You do not need to think about them, you simply need to receive them. Taking in ideas through your senses is a shortcut to understanding them in a more immediate way than through your mind. These tools address the common grounds of aging: loss, living with limitations, forgiveness, making sense of and enjoying your personal narratives, and experiencing new personal freedom. Without disregarding the challenges of living longer, our last great adventure celebrates our capabilities and potential.
Why am I writing this? This blog is about things I care about: feeling more alive, seeking joy, loving, belonging, and connecting. Some people will think my stories are too personal but I’ve learned the most from people who’ told their truth— so here is mine.
August 12
Story of the ring
My mother inherited my grandmother’s diamond ring when Nana died. The stone was so enormous it almost covered Mom’s knuckle and she never took it off; we used to tease her because she began grandly sweeping her hand through the air so the world could appreciate the sparkle. I received the ring when she died.
It was a great honor, and I loved being chosen, but I didn’t know what to do with it. I had grown up afraid of my mother and her power to make me feel not good enough. “You have laymanaka hands,” she’d say in a hoarse, angry voice when I spilled my milk or couldn’t tie my shoes. “Everything you touch turns to shit.” She never said she was sorry because she didn’t believe her words had power, and if I cried, she laughed and called me Sarah Bernhardt. In all fairness, I think she was repeating the words that had rained on her as a child but I became timid about my hands, unsure I could do anything right with them. That’s why I was so shocked when I found out she had left me the ring, something to wear on my incompetent hand. I would never have imagined she would give me her biggest treasure until she did.
Nana’s ring was expensive, an icon of family success, and considering how hard my mother and I were on each other while I was growing up, it touched me deeply that she had chosen me to be the one to wear it. I expected her to leave it to my sister. The problem was that it messed with my sense of myself. Ostentatious overkill didn’t match the earthy image I felt comfortable with. When I got married, I didn’t want diamonds, just a plain gold band. How could I wear a flashing diamond ring everyday? But how could I not?
Walt Whitman described a narcissism he called the “Great American Experiment of Me.” Taking myself too seriously smacked of that, and I was the daughter of a narcissist, but I couldn’t just put Nana’s ring away in a drawer.
I was a little angry too. Inheriting something with so much meaning is solely an end-of-life question; it only came up because my mother died. I wasn’t ready. I wasn’t finished with the questions that had started in kindergarten like, am I good enough? Do I need to worry about x? What should I do about y right now? Those were the questions I was used to, old friends I carried in my gut and could count on to pop up on bad days, perhaps forever. My new concerns, that were surfacing because of a back-of-the-brain awareness that I was running out of time, that my future was limited and that today was all I could count on, were scary. It boiled down to trying to figure out who I was by looking at the ways I was different from who I had been before, and then, to figure out how I wanted to live going forward.
Researchers note that a significant late-life attainment is to become expert at reflecting on one’s own feelings. I’m working on it but as slowly as institutional change, or pulling out of quick sand by shaking yourself free. Then again, maybe being slow is not so bad. I used to think that I had to deal with everything quickly, because if I missed an opportunity, I might never get another chance. At this point very little seems that urgent. The ring had to sit in my drawer while I figured out what to do with it. When I asked myself what I was feeling in my 70’s that I didn’t feel when I was 40 or 50 the unexpected thing was the realization that I was beginning feel sufficient. What a surprise. Caused by the fierce changes in my life after my husband’s death and my children’s launches into adulthood, I lived alone for the first time and found myself taking really good care of myself, becoming newly resource-full, following my own energy, doing only what I wanted to do, and enjoying being alone. For me, those were paradigm changes. In “The Structure of Scientific Revolution,” Thomas Kuhn popularized the idea of “paradigm shift,” calling it a “series of peaceful interludes punctuated by intellectually violent revolutions where one world view is replaced by another.” I have experienced some huge emotional changes from one way of feeling to another and I've watched my friends do the same. It helps to think we're not going crazy, we're just getting older.
The things that made me happy had become abundantly clear (dancing, a great read, gardening, being in love, enjoying my dear ones, glorious sex, painting, writing, a nice glass of wine with my dinner, some excellent gelato when I could find it, and being open to just letting things happen.) I didn’t have time or access to some of those things when I was younger. At seventy, I may have become more consistently happy than I had ever been before. Don’t get me wrong, I adored my husband and will always miss him. I don’t even want to get completely over losing him because that would be like throwing away treasure. that come on rainy days to go away, knowing they won't, but still rolling in the new spring grass when the sun shines, every time you get the chance. When the light is just right I daydream about when my kids were little, how sweet and loving those days of the whole family around the table were. But what is happening right now is good in a new way. That was then and this is now. My immediate goal has become to be more present.
I care more about connectedness than anything that might pay off in the future. Most valuable, are the moments when I felt 100 percent present.
Being happy seems to be easier. I have more time. I used to say that time was the most valuable thing in my life because there was such a scarcity. Now I have all day to do exactly what I want. What I want is to be happy. The question is how.
I surprise myself all the time, doing or saying things I never thought I’d say or do. I finally say whatever comes up without rehearsing every word in advance. I think I've started mellowing.
When I was a kid, my mother and I argued incessantly about what she wanted me to do that I didn’t want to do. As she got older, she mellowed and I began to love spending time with her. She stopped caring about what other people would think and gave up trying to be perfect. She became living proof that people can change and I finally took seriously that she had done as well as she could and had probably been just as good a mother as any other Jewish-child-of-the-depression who grew up trying to keep a low profile to hide from anti-semites. When she died what I missed most was her new goofy sense of humor and easy going way of letting go of the details. What was and was not important to her had changed. The lesson she taught me is to think about what I still do that is no longer important and the things I can finally try that are more important than ever. That's what I think of when I look at her redesigned ring on my finger. Thanks mom.