Author Archives: Admin

Spend More Time in the Slow Lane

Posted on by

Wonderful advice from Rick, age 80. Maybe this can be a New Year’s resolution?

Spend more time in the slow lane. Everything looks better and the rewards are greater. You get a much better perspective and a sense of accomplishment in enjoying the little pleasures that life has to offer. Savor the journey; there is a greater likelihood the pathway will provide the rewards that may elude you at the end.

You don’t have to do something special every day, but there are a myriad of ways that you can make everyday special.

Embrace intimacy. Don’t be afraid to let those close to you know how you feel and what makes the relationship work. Learn the difference between sex and true intimacy. Most people are capable of sex, but fewer make the effort to enjoy a deep sense of connection.

Don’t be afraid to make lifestyle changes that enhance your quality of life. Listen to your body and make changes that can increase your chances of being dealt a winning hand. There are no guarantees in life; do everything in your power to stack the deck in your favor.

Have Faith – But How You Do It Is Up to You

Posted on by

I wasn’t surprised that the elders often profess a very deep faith in God. But I was struck by the degree to which they also stressed tolerance for the beliefs of others. Over and over, they reported that a spiritual life is important, but the form it takes is up to you.

Grace, 84: Well, it all depends on your denomination. Regardless of whether we bow to the east or west or whatever, there’s only one guy up there. We just have to have that faith. Faith gets difficult sometimes because we’re a species that likes instant gratification and solutions, and life is not about that. So we have to have faith. Also, don’t do wrong things for the sake of religion.

Ruth, 83: My parents were religious Jews, nothing Orthodox like that, but they observed the Sabbath and the meat was Kosher, you know. But we always had Christian friends, we had Jewish friends. My parents weren’t that tight, you know, they accepted anybody- “I don’t care what you are, you’re a nice person.”  Thank you Mama and Papa, because this is what they taught me. The thing is that if there’s a God, there’s only one God. There can only be one God. And everybody prays in a different way. Tolerance is very important. Especially since the way that I grew up, and the fact that we had Christian friends.

Oscar, 76: Well, I have very strong feelings about my faith but I would not impose them upon other people, that’s strictly a one on one decision between them and God or whatever they choose to worship. I observe one school of thought and that’s very real to me and it would be up to everybody else to come to that same decision or a different one, so they would choose. But I think that everybody should believe in, preferably what I believe in, but then that’s not likely. But you should have something to center your life on, to sustain you.

Juanita, 71: We all have to believe in something, I think, and whether you’re Catholic or Protestant, it doesn’t really matter to me, there’s God. And how you get to Him through Catholicism, Judaism, it really doesn’t matter, but just to believe in something. We just didn’t appear, you know? I think faith is important because we have to realize there is a higher being, just look around, look at life itself, so everybody should have something to believe in.

Among the 1200 elders we interviewed for the book 30 Lessons for Living, only a small number had no use for spirituality or religion; faith of some kind was seen as a key to happiness by almost everyone. But what seems to grow in old age is a sense of tolerance for others’ beliefs, and a sense that there are many paths to spiritual fulfillment.

Don’t Rush into Marriage

Posted on by

The elders have seen many people rush into marriage – and they believe that’s a big mistake. They exhort us to think twice, three times, or however many times it takes before you take the step into marriage. Investigate it more thoroughly than any other decision, weigh your options, and in particular examine your motives. If you are doing it for the wrong reasons, you have every reason to wait.

Henry, 82, told me:

I don’t know what set of rules or guidelines to use to ascertain who is the best life partner for you, but don’t be hasty, take your time. Let the partner know you’re taking your time. Invite the partner also to take his or her time. Don’t be hasty, try to avoid pitfalls down the road.

If you take your time you can at least be somewhat surer of selecting a life mate correctly and not capriciously. This can let you avoid the business of divorce or separation – divorce is a very unpleasant process. So try to be very selective in your life partner early on and avoid if possible the trauma and the unpleasantness associated with divorce.

Roxanne, 74, urges people to fight the urge to get married just because “everyone else is doing it”:

Of course, you have to pick the right person. When I married my husband he was – well I just felt there was nobody like him. And I wanted to feel that way the rest of my life. Because of the way I felt about him, I wanted to be a good wife, good mother, good grandmother, and so far God has allowed me to be that. I just think you have to have a lot of love, true love. But what a lot of young people don’t know these days is what true love is and what commitment is. And when they say, “I do,” what it is they are really saying? Younger people think they have to get married because somebody else got married, one of their friends got married, or whatever. That’s not what it’s all about. And that is a serious mistake.

Rushing to quickly into marriage was one of the major regrets expressed by the elders in 30 Lessons for Living. So it’s worth thinking twice (or more) before saying “I do!”

Looking for Love? Look Beyond Appearances

Posted on by

I visited Agnes, 87, in the bright sunroom of her assisted living facility. She sat upright at the table, immaculately dressed, and warmly welcomed me. I learned not to be fooled by the prim exterior. Agnes is a risk-taker and believes in living life to the fullest. Her family did not have enough money to send her to college, so she went to work as a telphone operator.

Then, on an impulse, she decided to become an airplane pilot, so that she could serve in the Women’s Airforce Service. The WAS was just being organized at that time to allow women to fly non-combat missions (and thus free up men to fly in combat). She received her license and underwent extensive training, but, the war ended before she was called up (“I cried!,” she told me).

Around this time, however, John came into the picture. Here’s Agnes’s story:

John lived around the corner from me, him and his family did, and there was one sister that I associated with, like that. And I used to go up to the house and I’d tease him even though he was six years older than we were. So we sort of grew up together.

Well, I used to go with a fellow right after  high school, name of Bob. And Bob calls me one night, and says “I can’t go to the dance tonight with you. I’ve got the measles.”  Well, I really wanted to go, and I didn’t want to go alone because it was formal and I thought, “What on earth am I going to do?” And then I said to myself:  “I’m going to ask John.” I don’t know why, but I did.  And I went up and said, “Bob’s got the measles and he can’t go to the dance, will you go with me?”  And John says, “Sure.”  We went out, had a wonderful time, and that was the start of it.

Then one day John shows up at the air field and I said, “What are you doing down here? You know you’re not supposed to come here.”  And he said, “I’m just making sure you’re enjoying yourself.”  So one of the flying instructors was there and he said to me, “Take him up.” So we went up, and then John helped me clean up the plane. Then John heads down to the instructor and right in front of me he says, “When do I start taking lessons?” Right then and there! His mother was his first passenger. That day pretty much sealed it for us.

He was an honest man, and humble. He had an injured right hand because he was burned as a baby. He could not go into WW II because of his hand. And some of the girls would say to me, “How could you go out with him with a hand like that?”  I said, “I don’t look at the hand. I look at him and he’s a good man.”  John was very calm, I’m the hyper type, and he was soothing. I’d get mad – one time I threw a dish because I was so mad at him so he picked another dish out of the cupboard and handed it to me and said, “Here, do you want another one?”

Oh, he was a good man!

Hard Work is Good Work

Posted on by

In my interviews for the Legacy Project, I loved listening to the Texas accent. Apparently, some say the classic Texas accent is disappearing, but not among these folks. Many of these elders were from East Texas, with its soft, musical drawl and slow cadence. Twenty-five cents becomes “twenny-fi cints,” kid becomes “kee-ud,” business to “bid-ness,” and government to “gummint.” There was a lulling quality in my conversations with very old Texans, but also a remarkably clear way of condensing the past and expressing their feelings about it. And Texans are polite; no one hurried me along or refused to at least try to answer a question.

One thing that almost all the Texans had in common was that they grew up working – and working hard. Martin, 78, was typical. From a very early age, he was expected to work, and it taught him valuable life lessons. He grew up on a farm during the Great Depression, he told me, and that’s what kept the family alive. “We had enough to eat because of the vegetable garden.”

We chopped cotton, we picked cotton, we milked cows, we carried wood for the cookstove and the fireplace – we cooked over a wood cook stove. They cooked that way until the 1940s. The didn’t have electricity or running water until after I left home. We drew water from the well to do wash. You had to draw the water, put it in the tub. With everything that had to be done on a farm, we tagged along and helped.

Martin embodies the work history of many of the elder I interviewed, and he shows the legacy over his life course.

The family home that I grew up in was very religious, and the community I grew up in was about three hundred people. And we had church and family and our farm where we worked all the time, we worked round the clock and nobody had any money. There was school and work and that was it. And that was my life. And all during the Depression my family farmed that farm and when you could get little or nothing for anything, we managed to keep everything together. And when everybody around us was going belly up, we came through it. Just being around for those years, I got a lot of what I learned over my life.

At a young age, age fourteen, I guess, I was working seven days a week when I wasn’t in school and many days before school and after school, I was working on that farm. And I rode a school bus from school back to the farm and then work until dark and then my dad and I got the truck and we came home. But that was a normal work day. And like I said, nobody had any money. This is something that most people today can’t fathom, they can’t realize. We lived at a time when there was no money and you just really didn’t think about it because all of our friends were doing the same thing. And it gave me a value where I knew what a day of working was. I knew what it meant. I knew what hard work was and when your fifteen or sixteen, that’s a pretty good lesson.

He went on to a distinguished career in the military, serving in Europe, Korea, and Vietnam. After retirement, he worked for several corporations. Throughout the course of his career, what he learned from a childhood of hard work stayed with him. “I enjoyed working, sure, I made the work a part of my life. A job to me was a set of requirements and a group of people that you work with, you get along with, and you do the best you can.”

This vision of work came from a kind of childhood shared by many of the elders, but known to few younger Americans today:

I attribute any success I’ve had to my family because of the way I was taught. You know, when you’re thirteen and you’re getting up at four in the morning and milk the cows and feed the cattle and then going to school at seven thirty. Getting out of school at three thirty in the afternoon and then getting on the school bus and then going back out to the farm and working til after dark, and that’s before you even started studying.

I am still determined to be productive. Nowhere in the Bible do you find a retirement plan. We’re here for a purpose and I like to think that we need to find out what that purpose is and get about doing it, no matter how old we are.

Marriage Advice: Find Someone a Lot Like You

Posted on by

According to the poet Tennyson, “in the spring a young man’s (and woman’s)  fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.”  So  here’s another post on our elders’ asvice on marriage.

When it comes to selecting a life partner, the elders we interviewed had one very strong suggestion: Marry someone a lot like you. Opposites may attract, they told us, but they don’t necessarily make for lasting relationshps. And most important is shared values.

April Stern,71, and her husband, Steve, were married for 47 years, until Steve’s death. April is a highly respected community leader who directed several local organizations, and Steve was a well-known local psychotherapist. They were deeply in love throughout their long relationship. “I think we modeled a good marriage, our children even talked about that as being important to them,” says April.

It sounds simple, but you have to like each other. Be friends, try to get past the initial heaving and panting, and make sure there’s a real friendship underneath that. I don’t think you have to have identical interests, but you’ve got to have shared values. That is quite important. That was critical. Yeah, I think values are probably the most important thing.

And we both loved certain kinds of things. We both loved movies, good movies, and part of our courtship involved staying up all night and figuring out what an Ingmar Bergman film really meant. We both loved to read, and we loved to talk about what we’d read.

A similar sense of humor — that was a very important part of our life together. In fact, just two weeks before he died, we were talking one night, and he said something and I just dissolved in laughter, and he looked at me so self-satisfied and said, ‘I can still make you laugh after all these years!’ And he could.

A Heart, a Message, and the Magic of Growing Old

Posted on by

I once had the incredible privilege of keynoting an annual event hosted by a hospice federatrion. It’s an amazing group of devoted staff and volunteers who make sure that people’s last days on Earth are as pain-free and fulfilling as possible.

At the end of the luncheon, hospice volunteers brought out cloth bags filled with small ceramic hearts. Each heart had an inspirational word engraved on it, and we were asked to choose one without looking.

The word engraved on my heart was “MAGIC.” I had just been talking about my book, 30 Lessons for Living, and suddenly an image flooded my mind. One of the hundreds of elders we surveyed about their life wisdom had impressed me especially deeply. And that was because she used the word “magic” in a very surprising way.

Edwina, 94, had a fascinating life. Her father homesteaded in northeastern Montana, and she grew up on a small farm near the North Dakota border (she chuckled: “You probably don’t know anything about Montana since you’re a New Yorker!”).

She reflected on her experiences:

“We were never hungry.  And it was a wonderful place to grow up.  I had a good childhood.  And I had four brothers and a sister.  It was a wonderful place to live.  We learned so many things that you don’t have to teach your children.

For one thing, I had a horse all my own.  I learned that you took care of your horse.  You treated it like you should and you learned to take care of things.  And we had good neighbors and we were good neighbors.  We either had to walk to school or ride to school for two and a half miles.  While I was a child, we had to get up early because we had cows to milk, cows to go get, chickens to feed and things, before we went to school.  We learned how to work.  We learned the joy of getting up in the morning and seeing the sun come up.  And to this day I get up early.

One of the most important things that I have learned is be yourself.  My mother had an old saying, “Straighten up your back Edwina, and be somebody. Be proud of yourself and be proud of your name.  Be careful.  When you have a name, it’s precious.  You want to protect it.” And I guess that’s about all I have to say about that.  I could probably talk forever.

Edwina had two wonderful marriages. Her first husband died after 32 years of marriage, and Bertha waited a long time to get married again: “I was eighty-five!” He had died shortly before our interview after nearly a decade of happiness together.

But what rushed into my mind when I was handed the heart that said “MAGIC” was what Edwina had to say about aging. She was asked: “What advice would you give to younger people about growing older?  What do you think you would tell them?” There was a pause, almost as if she was casting a glance back over such a long and full life. Then she replied:

I’d tell them to find the magic!

 The world is a magical place in lots of ways.  To enjoy getting up in the morning and watching the sun come up.  And that’s something that you can do when you are growing older.  You can be grateful, happy for the things that have happened.  You should enjoy your life.  Do something for people.  Grow a little.  Just because you’re getting older doesn’t mean that you need to sit back in a rocking chair and let the world go by.  Well, that’s not for me and that’s not for a lot of people.  I can’t dance anymore, but if I could I would.

There’s no reason for anybody in this world to ever be bored.  That’s one thing I’ve always said.  Well, if I died and went to heaven, I’d be bored to death with how they say heaven is.  There’s no need for you to be bored in this world.  There’s so much out there.  And your attitude, be optimistic.  I’ve been optimistic all my life.  Even as a little girl I can remember that no matter what happened it would turn out all right.  And that’s great if you can do it.

Even the Depression, which was a bad thing.  The Great Depression.  But actually, we came out of it and I wouldn’t have missed it for the world.  We had the best friends, I never was hungry a day in my life.  I had a happy family, and they worked hard.  They didn’t have much, but we helped each other.  I think that’s one of the biggest things.  What in the world, if you make a million dollars, why do you need another million?

I will say that everybody, if they want to grow older they must take care of their health.  They’ve got to learn to look after themselves.  And almost always, whether you’re a man or a woman, at the end of your life there’s a rule.  One of the other is left alone.  So you have to prepare for that.  That it’s possible and it happens.  Of course it happened with me.  But when the tears stopped flowing I got better.  I guess that’s what you can expect when you grow old.

Lessons for Living: From You!

Posted on by

Thanks to the many readers who have submitted their own wise elders’; lessons for living to this site. The holidays are a great time to ask for their legacy of wisdom: Why not interview one of your favorite older relatives and submit his or her most important lesson over the July 4 holiday?

Here are a few of our readers’ contributions:.

From Kim:

My lesson can from my Grandmother –

I was calling to tell her about my new boyfriend and that I would introduce her to him on her next visit. I also wanted to tell her that my parents did not agree with my choice and that they were not willing to meet him. The phone grew quite for a minute and then she asked one simple but most important question, “Do you love him?” At that point the tears started to flow and she told me that through out her life she has learned many lessons and this was most important, “if you love him, you stand by him and anyone that doesn’t agree with your decision will have to live with it.” Then she asked me which of my parents doesn’t agree with me. I told her it was both of my parents, and then she said she was going to call my Mom and remind her of the importance of love and give her a piece of her mind. I hung up with a heavy burden lifted and a true reminder of what is really important in life.

From Eileen:

My Dad  was the elder that taught my most valuable life lesson.
Daddy forever stressed that having been born a woman ought to never stand in my way of fulfilling my dreams as I journeyed life’s path alone. Because of his lifelong encouragement, I have let nothing stop me from following my heart’s desire; whether it was pedaling my bicycle 100+ miles, figuring out how to take trips across the USA, or making arrangements to attend Auctioneer College.

And from George:

As a young boy growing up in the heart of the Great Depression our family had very limited income and hardly any material possessions. I wore hand-me- down clothes that didn’t fit and had no toys like the other kids. I was being raised by a wonderful grandma whose simple advice to a little boy has stuck with me my entire 68 years.
Knowing I felt out of place and embarassed, grandma told me “keep your head up, a smile on your face, and your shoes shined, and you will be all right”. It wasn’t how I looked, or the toys I didn’t have. It was about having a positive attitude.

Thanks to these three, and many others, for their wonderful gifts of elder wisdom!

Beware of Multi-Tasking

Posted on by

Oliver’s (age 81)  lesson: Do one thing at a time, or you get “stress and chaos.”

It’s a scientific fact that you can only think of one thing at a time. Accept that  fact and work accordingly. Make a list of your projects and follow each one as far as convenient, then tackle the next. Many people take pride in handling several things at once without a plan. Their attention is constantly redirected, allowing stress and chaos to build, with nothing completed.

Adapting to Aging, with a Positive Attitude

Posted on by

One thing I learned from the elders in the Legacy Project is that they generally do not see aging as a fearsome process of decline. Instead, it can be enjoyed, based on a positive attitude, despite problems.

Rebecca, 92, told me:

Aging can be a wonderful experience. Don’t misunderstand me, there are aches and pains, they do come along and you think when you’re young, that’s not going to happen – but, oh yes, it does. But you learn to live with it and enjoy what you have been given by God.

And Sharon, 76, put it this way:

It’s hard sometimes, growing old is hard. But you just have to accept it and live each day to the fullest. A lot of people, if they get an ache or a pain or something then they think, “This is it.” Well you’ve got to just keep going and get the most out of every day.