Prime Time - Jane Fonda [58]
Knowing what is nonessential and letting it go. The philosopher and psychologist William James observed, “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”
The willingness to embrace uncertainty.
Though I know young people who demonstrate some or all of these qualities, I cannot help but feel that these are attributes that tend to come to the fore as we age and gain experience. Mary Catherine Bateson says, “Experience doesn’t make people wise. It is reflection on experience that makes us wise.” Many of us don’t take time to reflect until age provides us the time to do it. Doing a life review forces us to reflect on our experiences; thus, I believe, it can help lead us to wisdom.
I asked Dr. Matheny why he thought some seniors can adjust and adapt to the challenges of age with humor when others can’t. Is it possible, I asked, to get better at that if it hasn’t been your character style?
“Look, an awful lot of people suffer terribly in old age, so I’m not judging anybody,” he replied. “I am sure that being positive is not all just a matter of willpower. In other words, there is a whole history of conditioning experiences people have—in childhood and throughout their entire lives. So it’d be cruel to say that you should just be able to be positive. But I think this is where you want to get to if you can, and apparently a lot of centenarians have.”
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