Retirement As You Want It

Are You a Work in Progress - Unfinished and Learning and Growing?

Not too long ago developmental psychologists thought that all of our growth and learning cemented before age 20 or so. After that, it was downhill - we'd be losing brain cells, rather than gaining them. Now, new research (see last post) corrects that error. We are capable of learning and growing in many dimensions until the day we die.

So, here's a lovely memoir written by then-50ish Joan Anderson, called A Year By the Sea: Thoughts of an Unfinished Woman.  Joan's journey is very much a female version of this path, but a book could well be written about the male version.

A Year By the Sea chronicles Joan's decision not to follow her husband across country to his new job, but rather to spend a year alone in the family's cottage on Cape Cod. She knows she's lost her real self in the daily ministrations she's accustomed to have made for decades as a wife and mother, fitting in her writing of children's books around all that. It seemed more compelling and inevitable to this woman to do so, having been raised to be a caretaker of others, as many women have.

"I'm tired of swimming upstream, against the current, only to arrive at unnatural destinations with little sense of where to yield, when to sow, what to ask, how to find," she wrote. So, off she went, all by herself, to find her "self," in a resort town on the sea.

What did she find? "I must live a little each day, greet the sun as it rises and revel in its setting, swim naked [with the seals], sip coffee and wine by the shore [camping alone on an island, dropped off and picked up next day by a fisherman], generate new ideas, admire myself, talk to animals, meditate, laugh, risk adventures. I must try to be soft, not hard; fluid, not rigid; tender, not cold, find rather than seek."

Rather than being lonely or scared or bored, she found she became "utterly content, tranquil in my aloneness, serene." A worthwhile book for those who feel their work life or relationships have become stale and barren. Joan now holds retreats and recommends we all take 2 days per year to be completely alone.

See info about her workshops here. "My six step process is all about retreating in order to retrieve lost strength, repair our inner selves, and then regroup by lightening our load, regenerating our spirits, and returning new to an old place. A weekend by the sea (and elsewhere) helps a woman rearrange her life in her own image," writes Joan about her retreats for women.

Searching Favorite Topics on Internet Lights Up the Brain

I come from a reading mindset. I love to read - always have to have an engaging book at my bedside table. Since I'm here with you, you realize that I'm also turned on to all the advantages of the Internet. Ageless in America, Carleen MacKay and Brad Taft's online journal mentioned some new research into brain activity that's intriguing.

Functional MRI brain scans demonstrate that when we're searching the Internet, our neural networks light up even more so than when we're reading in the traditional way, according to new research reported in The American Journal of Geriatric Psychiatry in 2/09.  The image on the right is the brain searching the Internet (credit: UCLA Newsroom).

What do you do on the Internet? It would be interesting to know what kind of searching so dramatically increases our brain activity -does searching the latest bargain or movie review give us the same neuronal boost that reading news reports or this mind-stretching blog does? Perhaps it's the fast shifts from 1 site to another that causes more of those red lights in the brain.

What do you search for and read on the Internet? What holds your attention? Click the little "Comment" link below with your thoughts.

 

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Live With Purpose – Going From Success to Significance

"Live life with urgency as if time is running out," wrote Ken Dychtwald in With Purpose: Going From Success to Significance.` Are you feeling this sense of urgency as you get into your 50s and 60? I must be feeling that, as I'm going full steam ahead on all kinds of fronts. Publishing my next book: Women Riders Who Could -- and Did. Expanding my coaching practice. Speaking in public forums about retiring retirement. Getting comfortable with spirituality. Moving ahead in learning new things on my horse. Started my own TV show and have interviewed a dozen wonderful encore careerists. Becoming social networking- savvy. I'm having the time of my life.

Dychtwald sees the convergence of 3 trends that change the landscape of the traditional retirement:

• Boomers are maturing
• People want to balance leisure and leaving a legacy
• Giving has a new face - philanthropists are younger, entrepreneurial, and socially conscious. They want solutions and measurable results and want to give back their skills and talents and see the impact they've made.

“To live with purpose or without is a choice. And the choice is ours,” is Dychtwald’s mantra. He believes that to make life truly worth living, one must have a sense of purpose. That doesn’t have to be saving the world in a big sense; rather it can be finding how to bring meaning and purpose to everyday activities – eating, reading, traveling, decorating, tipping.

Can we make choices about what we eat based on our values – values about sustainability, e.g., by eating local foods, by growing our own? Or tipping well at restaurants and hotels to reward human encounters by servers? Or renovating our homes with green materials? Or planning our travels to coincide with volunteering?

There are many paths to “legacy,” to fulfillment in the arena of giving back. Here are a few mentioned in the book:

·         Becoming a “vacateer,” a vacation where you volunteer your services for a few weeks to months (see Brian Kurth’s Test-Drive Your Dream Job) to Peace Corps and Americorps.

·         Mentoring (see Tuesdays With Morrie and Maggie Kuhn’s Grey Panthers) where you pass on your wisdom to younger people

·         Join Habitat for Humanity and similar programs

·         Philanthropy from very small scale where you give micro-loans to aspiring communities across the world to much larger feats (that most of us can’t afford, but many new entrepreneurs are doing now)

What do people get when they give? Here’s Dychtwald’s ideas:

• Doing the right thing just feels good
• Making a difference brings meaning – think about what you’ve been exposed to that you care a lot about. Health care for all? Affordable housing? Environment? Public transportation rather than more roads?
• Builds a new social network, one where you connect deeply with your new friends
• Recognition – maybe your efforts will result in seeing your name on a letterhead for an organization or entry to a new club
• The “helper’s high”

Many people want to give back, but don’t know what would really grab them. Or they have so many interests, they fritter away their time. Or their lives seem too busy already. That’s the case for most of us. My expertise is in helping people like you find your niche, find what you really are good at, what your gift is that you can offer to the world. Are you good at managing, at being entrepreneurial, at being a team player, being a cheerleader, a mentor? How can you parlay your gift into giving back, even a little at a time?

Dychtwald’s book, With Purpose, is one which triggers our sensibility about who we are and what we are here to do. What do you want your legacy to be?

 

See a longer version of this article at www.WorkForce50.com in my column called "Meaning and Purpose."

 

Does Social Networking Grab You?

Boomers and older are flocking to social networking sites in droves. Even "seniors" (over age 60) can find a host of sites created for their needs. See listing here of the 50 best social networking sites, compiled as of November 2008. These sites reportedly are more grounded and less superficial than Facebook and Twitter. They offer opportunities to connect with other like-minded people, for romance, or for matching people with their interests like hiking, travel, or bridge.

Since we know that social isolation is one of the biggest culprits leading to depression in single older people, it makes sense to incorporate computer literacy in programs for seniors. Once they get past any shyness about communicating with strangers and also master the basic requirements and social etiquette of networking online,the medium can offer lots of fulfillment.

Here are a sampling of the kinds of sites especially relevant to people over age 40:

• Maple and Leek for 50+ who want to meet adventurous and entrepreneurial people 
• Life Two, "Midlife Improved"  
• Senior Friend Finder, a dating site 
• Mango Tree, to find travel partners 
• Dogster for dog lovers 
• Patients Like Me for people who share similar health problems 

Write your experiences or those of your older relatives with social networking. Are they finding satisfaction with whom and what they find on these sites? Are they disappointed about the quality of people whom they meet? Are they subjected to hard sell advertising? What is the downside?

Artists are Role Models for Aging Well

Recently I interviewed Riva Berkovitz for my TV show, called Alivelihood: New Careers As We Age. Riva started a new "career" as a photographer 3 years ago at age 77. She discovered her love for taking pictures with a "macro" lens after gazing at a beautiful park near her house. Knowing that she couldn't draw it and do justice to the look of the early spring leaves of weeping willows, she decided to try photographing it with her digital camera. This led to her examination of minute sections of plants and flowers she bought from her florist and her experimentation with different lenses and with cropping the photos using an online program. Cropping captured her attention and she's never stopped shooting and cropping flowers, trees, and plants. She's having the time of her life.

The magazine Aging Well published an article called: "Retirement Redefined: Lessons From Aging Artists" based on a survey undertaken by Joan Jeffri, Director of the Research Center for Arts and Culture at Teachers College, Columbia University.

The author, Juliann Schaeffer, sees retirement as being a fluid process. She describes Jeffri's study of aging artists to see what accounts for their immense life satisfaction. "Artists don't retire... They see life full of possibility vs. seeing life coming to a close... They are often called 'see-ers' - people that see beyond what's there," said Gay Hanna, executive director of the National Center for Creative Aging.

Jeffri studies 146 educated professional artists and found that there was no disconnect with older age. They stay connected with their artistic community, they have a firm sense of self, the majority stated that their self esteem is good to excellent. They've adapted their life to fit their art; for example, when one woman could no longer manage working with safety pins because of her arthritis, she shifted her medium.

Hanna said, "Life's real happiness lies in finding some area of work that you can feel passionate about and then using it to stay connected with others and continue lifelong learning."

According to the researcher Jeffri, "The life of the aging artist is a microcosm of resilience and the artist's response to materials ... provides an extraordinarily special place..." See full article.