Aging

As someone who started a hotel company based upon the premise of “joie de vivre,” I’m intrigued by my fellow joy entrepreneurs (like MEA alum Jack Abbott who created Made for Joy five years ago). And ever since Ingrid Fetell Lee’s bestselling book “Joyful” came out, I’ve been following her as well.

I approached turning 70 with mixed emotions. On the one hand, sadness. On the other, curiosity.

“It’s not that we have a short time to live, but we waste much of it. Life is long enough, and it’s been given to us in generous measure for accomplishing the greatest things if the whole of it is well invested. But when life is squandered through soft and careless living, and when it’s spent on no worthwhile pursuit, death finally presses on and we realize that the life of which we didn’t notice has passed away.” - Seneca

My eldest child, Vaughn, was eight months old when I needed to return to work. Those first few weeks of dropping him off were so stressful. He’d bawl as I was leaving and I’d worry about the long-term emotional damage I was causing him. Fortunately, I had a wise support network.

In February I will turn 55. It is a lovely number and an easy milestone to slide into. It turns out I am the poster child for our most common demographic at MEA, age 54. Does that mean our average age will… age along with me?

CATALYST January 2020. I’m sitting in my stylist Danica’s sunny San Francisco salon, both of us gazing at my reflection in the mirror. My eyes zero in on the reason I’m there: The ¼ inch of grey that’s pushed out from my scalp.

I’m looking forward to reading David Robson’s new book, “The Expectation Effect: How Your Mindset Can Transform Your Life,” that he excerpted in a recent The Guardian article. This book follows ample research done by well-respected academics like Ellen Langer and Becca Levy, demonstrating how reframing from a negative to a positive can add more than a half-dozen years to your life. For the record, those are happy years, given the mindset shift.

“Very early in the new year, I will turn sixty, an age I never imagined I would see. My older friends told me what a big deal forty would be, and then fifty, but neither of them felt like a big deal to me. Forty felt like permission; fifty felt like letting go of whatever filters remained. Forty and fifty were signposts, or maybe toll booths, on the road to becoming increasingly okay with who I am.

Living part-time in the American Southwest liberates me. The roads are wide open, the “legal” speed limit touches 75, and, let’s face it, I like to drive fast.

I remember when I first read this article in "The Atlantic" seven years ago. I was shocked by it as both of my parents were older than 75, and I didn’t want them leaving their bodily form anytime soon.