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By Root 1235 0

government organizations, and by word of mouth. I was looking for people who had “succeeded significantly in some way,” I would say. Sometimes, my inquiries met with resistance, as if I might only mean financial wealth or celebrity. Some feared it was a mistake to define success narrowly or too traditionally. Ultimately, I knew I would know what I wanted when I saw it, but I knew it would have to include some way in which a goal had been reached and had received some kind of public recognition. What I came to see in the people whom I chose was how well they fit into Henry David Thoreau’s belief about how success happens: “I have learned that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.”

Usually, it was not solely the accomplishment that attracted me to a subject, it was the whole skein of events and accidents that had brought success unexpectedly in common hours. And those tales filled me with curiosity about the worlds and families into which my subjects were born, the ways they shook off failure and overcame grief, and where they found the courage to take risks and persevere in later years in spite of the collective chorus of doubt.

As unique as each is, as a group the individuals in What Should I Do with the Rest of My Life? have done what the scientists tell us we should do: they maintain healthy diets, exercise regularly, challenge themselves, fill their lives with novel experiences and varied social connections. They are, for the most part, thin. They like to dance and to exercise. They tend to be more spiritual than religious. Even those who are of a more solitary nature interact and communicate daily with extensive networks of people. And despite occasional complaints about minor forgetfulness, they have exquisite memories. Listening closely to their own desires, and not to prescriptions for aging well, they have followed their own curiosity on paths of learning and discovery. And in doing so, they have fed their passions and given themselves permission to achieve success.

Many of them possess ample wisdom, a virtue long attributed to aging. Remarkably, brain studies may be providing some insight into that, too. Neuropsychologist Elkhonon Goldberg says wisdom may be the result of cognitive processes that occur in the brain as we age. In The Wisdom Paradox, he notes that pattern recognition is the primary means by which we learn. As we age, we accumulate templates for pattern recognition, and they, in turn, allow for relatively quick and effortless decision-making. The decision-making appears intuitive, but it is actually the result of pre-analysis, compressed and crystallized. “Aging,” Goldberg writes, “is the price we must pay for accumulating wisdom patterns.”

It is also striking that the many subjects in this book who suffered profound pain and loss were willing and able to revisit their traumas, even when it meant returning to moments most of us hope never to see. Remarkably—and instructively—they do not remain rooted in rumination or regret. They live their lives forward, actively attending to the present and moving optimistically toward what they hope to create. Many were motivated by generativity, the act of producing out of concern for future generations. But even more often they expressed their interest in helping to improve lives today.

From the hot summer morning when I first sat in a booth with Loretta Thayer in the Silver Leaf Diner in upstate Canton, New York, to the moment Betty Reid Soskin, driving her sporty red BMW, dropped me off at the Oakland International Airport, I have experienced my own awakening about aging. Each of the elders in this book has challenged my thinking, not simply with the fact of their age, but with the quality and intelligence of their pursuits and the integrity of their characters. My conversations with them have altered my own time line. They have convinced me that past failing can as easily prove preparatory as predictive. Age does not of itself limit