health crisis. No one knows better than me the importance of support from others when confronted with health issues, because I learned firsthand how family and friends can help you manage the suffering and lift your spirit.
My wife, family, and caring friends came through for me and gave me the emotional support, strength, and positivity I needed to get through the excruciating grind of cancer treatment. When I was nauseous, gagging on food, and vomiting from the cumulative effects of the poisonous chemotherapy, my wife was by my side to help me. My family surrounded me with an endless amount of love while my friends volunteered to help with weekly household chores.
My support network literally saved my life during my battle with cancer. Nobody lives in isolation; life is a group outing.
Balance
Finding the right balance in your life as you age is critical to successful aging. The challenge is that we become increasingly out of balance as we age. Aging leaves many of us feeling unsettled, anxious, and confused about who we are. Life balancing includes making adjustments to your lifestyle, social interactions, priorities, and expectations.
United We Age
Conventional wisdom says older people should retire, shrivel up, and fade into the sunset. We live in a youth-dominated society with heavy doses of celebrity worship and the persistent message that old is not cool. Older people are relegated to the backside of society. Conventional wisdom needs to be turned inside out and on its head, and I hope that this book can help change the way our society views aging while also changing the way we age.
Parents and educators teach children how to be firemen, lawyers, doctors, teachers, and construction workers, but no one teaches us how to be 70, 80, or 90 years old. No one teaches us how to deal with life-threatening diseases or wrinkles, failing eyesight, deteriorating mobility, and memory loss. We don’t know how to grow old, and we don’t know how to treat the elderly in our society.
In some cultures, senior citizens are not cast aside. In China, young people are expected to defer to older people, let them speak first, sit only after their elders are seated, and not contradict them. In some African communities, older citizens command great respect. But as China and other senior-friendly societies become modernized, cultural norms—including honoring elders—wither away.
We live in a youth-obsessed nation where aging is out and being young is in. Young celebrities like Kim Kardashian are revered, while the elderly are put out to pasture. People spend billions of dollars on antiaging creams and surgical procedures to eliminate wrinkles because wrinkles make them look old. What if we viewed wrinkled faces as reflections of life’s experiences that took years to create?
Many older people are ashamed or embarrassed to display marks of aging in our forever-young society because they fear being labeled frail and useless. Wrinkles are ugly, wheelchairs represent helplessness, and hearing aids reflect weakness. The cultural belief that aging equals decline and poor health has created self-fulfilling prophecies as seniors surrender to infirmities and sink into depression, believing their usefulness is gone.
Others fight to stay relevant with antiaging products and current fashion. There is nothing inherently wrong with wanting to appear young if it makes you feel good, raises your confidence, and promotes a healthier lifestyle. The problem comes when you buy into the societal messaging that staying young is superior to growing old.
My hope is to inspire Americans to unite as we age. There are literally millions of senior citizens living alone in America today experiencing quality-of-life decline with no support network. Without social support, they are having a difficult time coping. Quality of life and life expectancy decline for people lacking a social support network (e.g., spouse, family, friends).
We need local networks of support across America for people with life-threatening diseases/conditions and for people experiencing quality-of-life decline due to aging, especially for people living alone. These networks can bring together people of all ages to lift the spirits and enhance the quality of life for aging people across the country.
Our Western ways continue to promote forever-young attitudes that ignore the spirituality, wisdom, and creativity of older adults. Older people need to feel relevant, respected, and useful if they are to live meaningful lives with dignity. Their lives need to be celebrated, not marginalized. People need to support each other as they confront the marks of aging. It would be commendable if people of all generations joined (figuratively or literally) a united we age movement to offer the emotional support necessary to make a difference in an older person’s life.
A Journey of Inconvenience
From a positive aging perspective, cancer is an inconvenience of aging, and so is every other mark of aging. They are inconveniences because life is precious at all ages and in all stages—not just when we are young and healthy and strong. We live on this Earth and we die on this Earth, so while we are living every moment is precious. That is why we live in the moment. As long as we can smell the roses and hear the ocean waves hit the shoreline, we have a quality of life worth savoring.
The remainder of this book serves as a guide that will, hopefully, place you on the wondrous journey of positive aging. This book will help you tap into your spirit, seek and find social support, and practice any combination of mindfulness, positivity, the Four A’s, and balance as you confront the inconveniences of aging. I’ve learned we are not at war with Father Time; we never have been. We are only battling ourselves when we resist the natural process of aging. Aging is God’s (or the universe’s) way of telling us it’s time to transition to the other side. From a spiritual perspective, it’s the beginning of a new journey.
Writing this book has been profoundly therapeutic. I had a difficult time coping with cancer at 62 years old; I became bitter about my diagnosis and developed a heightened fear of finality. But my social network lifted my spirit, and, in turn, my spirit rediscovered a passion for living. Although my post-cancer self is physically weaker than my pre-cancer self, I am spiritually stronger than I’ve ever been before. My journey has taken a different path today, and it is a more robust and satisfying path. I now have a positive aging attitude, and I want to help you find and maintain your own positive aging attitude while also encouraging our society to recognize the worth of aging.
Hopefully, “We are in this together” will become a mantra for all of us.
CHAPTER THREE
The Power of Me: Inner Spirit
If we imagine the practice of positive aging as an orchestra playing beautiful music, our inner spirit is the conductor.
A story I love is about a poor panhandler sitting on an old storage trunk begging for money. A wealthy man dressed in a dapper suit stopped to give him a few dollars and asked, “How long have you been sitting on this trunk soliciting for money?” The beggar answered, “I’ve been sitting on this old trunk for over three years. This is a pretty good street corner; some days I do well and some days I go hungry.”
“Have you ever opened the trunk to see what’s inside?” the man asked.
“No, I never thought to open it; it’s locked,” the beggar replied.
The man put down his briefcase and picked up a rock and pounded on the trunk’s lock until it broke. The beggar opened the trunk to find a treasure of gold. He had not known how wealthy he was until he looked inside.
Just as there was treasure inside that trunk, even though
