For centuries, many East Asian countries had a unique way of counting age, differing from the rest of the world. This practice originated from an ancient culture that believed the time spent in the womb should be included in one's age.

The other day, I was talking with my college friend Jeff, whose athletic spirit has always impressed me. He is pushing his mid-60s, telling me he’s about to embark upon the 250-mile John Muir Trail for an extended hiking and camping trip.

One of my most treasured books is the classic Self-Renewal by John Gardner, which deals with the decay and renewal of societies, organizations, and individuals.

Many years ago, I was seeing two late eighty-something women in my psychotherapy practice.

I saw this headline in the New York Times Ethicist column and was intrigued by how the “Dear Abby” of Ethics would answer this question. I’ve excerpted it below along with a question for you at the end.

One of the beauties of getting older is making sense of our experiences. Our painful lessons of the past become the raw material for our future wisdom. And not just our wisdom but the insight we pass on to those in our lives. After all, wisdom is not taught, it’s shared. So, how might you package up your metabolized experience and deliver it as distilled compassion to someone younger than you?

Long ago, Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Who you are speaks so loudly, I can’t hear what you’re saying.” If you’re on the left, this might apply to Donald Trump. Or, on the right, Bernie Sanders. And, for Joe Biden, it might be, “Your age speaks so loudly, I can’t hear what you’re saying or see what you’re doing.”

David Brooks wrote a book, “The Second Mountain,” a few years ago that aptly defined some of the fundamental principles of our MEA program. He suggests that during the first half of our adult life, we often become fixated on personal goals based on family and cultural influences.

Mark Twain didn’t dabble in psychological focus groups, but he certainly knew something about human nature when he wrote, “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

On June 8, 1970, my mentor at Brandeis University, Abraham Maslow, collapsed and died suddenly from a massive heart attack. He’d had a cardiac event nineteen months earlier and knew that his risk of another heart attack was considerable. Earlier that year, in an interview published in Psychology Today, Maslow expressed gratitude for the time he had been given: “My attitude toward life changed. The word I use for it now is postmortem life. I could just as easily have died, so my living constitutes a kind of extra, a bonus…. I may just as well live as if I had already died…every single moment of every single day is transformed.”