Category — Living Counterclockwise

My mother inherited great genes. Her mother lived a vibrant, socially engaged life until — upbeat, chatty and disease-free — she died in her sleep at age 94. My mother’s great grandmother, known as “Old Oldie,” was the stuff of family legend, a woman who, it is said, awoke before dawn every day, braided her long white hair, wrapped the coils around her head and walked down three flights of stairs (her bedroom was in the attic) to bake biscuits or rolls for breakfast. Until the day she didn’t. She had died in her sleep. She was 97. Or 102. It depended on who was telling the story.

My mother was 77 when she died. In a care facility. Of Alzheimer’s.

Forgive me if this sounds clinical, but my mother was a poster child for Lifestyle Trumps Genes. We usually think of Lifestyle Trumps Genes as taking purposeful, healthy steps to blunt or negate the ills our parents suffered so as to avoid the same “fate.” Her life was the reverse.

My mother smoked. A lot. She drank. More than enough. She was sedentary. But maybe more importantly, or at least new research is suggesting just as importantly, she was socially isolated. She was deep-down lonely.

The new research I’m referring to, conducted by psychologists at Brigham Young University, suggests that social connections (or lack thereof) ought to be added to the short list of lifestyle factors that significantly shorten life.

Well, a lot more than “suggests.” The meta-study – an analysis of 70 studies conducted between 1980 and 2014, including more than 3 million participants – found that social isolation increased the likelihood of premature death by 29 percent. Loneliness increased the risk 26 percent. The data included information regarding loneliness, social isolation and living alone. The analysis controlled for variables such as age, gender, socioeconomic status and pre-existing health conditions. The researchers concluded that social isolation heightened risk for mortality more than obesity, a much studied, widely implicated risk factor. “We need to start taking our social relationships more seriously,” said the lead author of the study.

My mother did not live out in the woods somewhere. Isolation is not about geography. It is about lack of connection and meaningful interaction. My mother did not live alone. Loneliness is not about living alone. It is about lack of connection and meaningful interaction. She made choices or failed to make choices or waited to have choices made for her that constricted her life and may very well have shortened it, perhaps by two decades. I realize this sounds as if I am blaming her for her illness. I am not. I am saying that we all have responsibility for our well-being.

Growing up, I thought good health and longevity were my birthright. I don’t think that anymore.

Most medical research focuses on understanding and combating disease. That’s good, especially when it alleviates suffering and leads to insights about prevention. But here’s something you will find very very interesting (well, at least I did). Delaying aging – that is, slowly the aging process, living the counterclockwise lifestyle –would have a greater impact on health, longevity, disability and quality of life than reducing heart disease and winning The War on Cancer. Wow.

This is according to a wonky big data study by a team of health economists at UCLA, Harvard, Columbia, University of Illinois and elsewhere. They used the “Future Elderly Model”—a microsimulation of the future health and spending of older Americans—to compare optimistic “disease specific” scenarios with a hypothetical “delayed aging” scenario. I like reading this stuff but sure am glad I don’t have to do it. Imagine spending your days running disease specific scenarios.

What they found was the delayed aging could increase life expectancy by an additional 2.2 years, most of which would be spent in good health. In contrast, projected gains in life expectancy from further reducing the incidence of cancer or heart disease were only about half of that. They also ran the numbers in terms of economics – looking at the greater outlay for Social Security, etc. as people lived longer contrasted with the reduced outlay for medical costs as people became disabled or fell prey to the “diseases of aging” later in life. Also, if people were healthier and more vibrant longer, the normal retirement age could be older so more money would be going into funding Social Security and what our country continues to call “entitlement programs.” The economic benefit to society would be about $7 trillion over 50 years, say the researchers.

“The health gains [of delaying aging] are so overwhelming that they make this worth pursuing,” says lead researcher, Dana Goldman of UCLA.

And this, my friends, could spell revolution with a capital R:

Revolution in the lives of older people as they enjoy additional healthy, vibrant years, years during which they can contribute their talents and energies to doing good in the world.

Revolution in our culture as the meaning of “old” is detached from frail, fragile, dependant and takes on a new, powerful meanings, like knowledgeable, engaged, contributory.

Revolution in our attitude toward health care reflected in the approach of doctors, hospitals and insurance companies (and even, yes, Obamacare) as we switch to focusing on and funding prevention.

You say you want a revolution?

Ageism: Alive and well? Hell yeah. It is, in fact, more vibrantly alive and a whole lot healthier than our culture believes older people themselves are. Which I guess wouldn’t be difficult, as our culture equates “old” with any or all of the following: weak, frail, ill, forgetful, slow, cranky, crabby, creaky, stodgy, stuffy, sexless. Am I leaving anything out? Oh yeah: Useless. In the way.

Here’s Annie Lennox, who just turned 60: “There’s this youth culture that is really, really powerful and really, really strong, but what it does is it discards people once they reach a certain age. I actually think that people are so powerful and interesting – women, especially – when they reach my age. We’ve got so much to say, but popular culture is so reductive…”

You’ve got that right, Annie.

But: Do you realize that there are societies where our concept of “old” never took root? In these cultures, aging is not associated with a diminution of vigor or, more important, of usefulness. Activity, involvement and engagement continue unabated throughout life. Older people are as integral to the health and welfare of these societies as younger people — and it may be that this belief (even more than healthy behaviors) keep those older people demonstrably, verifiably biologically young.

Could this attitude about aging and older people ever be part of our culture? It would mean an extraordinary, dare I say mind-blowing, change: politically, culturally, economically, and every other way imaginable. Because I am trying hard to make “optimism about the future” a part of my constellation of youthful habits, and because this applies not only to my personal future but to The Future, I am going to say that such change is possible. And I am going to say that right now, at this moment in time, this change may be the most possible it will ever be.

Why? Because between the (frequently ridiculed and more-often-than-not dismissed) Baby Boomers and the (all-but-forgotten) Gen Xers, the oldest of whom turn 50 this year, there are considerably more than 100 million Americans alive and kicking (creative, active, involved, interesting) in their 40s, 50s, 60s right now. (Not to mention the pre-Boomers now in their 70s, 80s and beyond). And we are hardly “old and in the way.” We are, in fact, in the thick of it.  We can dismantle this damaging “old” stereotype by example, by continuing to actively contribute to and engage with the culture, by choosing not to live in isolated, gated, same-age communities, by embracing change, by staying both physically and intellectually resilient. By using our added years of youthful good health to be useful and do good. There are a lot of us, and we can do this.

If this sounds like a call to arms, it is.

And btw, Jerry Garcia was 33 when he put together and started recording with the group “Old and in the Way.”

Setting aside the politics, I want to say a few things about Clint Eastwood’s “American Sniper.” I promise this has something important to do with aging. Just stay with me for a moment.

The movie knows what it’s about and goes for it. Where it could be arty and dramatic, it is blunt and unsentimental. We know what we need to know just when we need to know it. The acting does not feel like acting. The skirmish/ battle scenes, which need to communicate confusion and randomness without themselves being confusing or random, do just that. The movie, with very few glitches, is a sharp, clear, sure-handed, finely crafted piece of work, professional and powerful from beginning to end. It is the directorial work of a master.

That master happens to be 84.

What I have been hearing (from friends who’ve seen the movie, from media commentary) is how amazing it is that an 84-year-old could do something like this. Wow. He is an old guy and, gee, he is in top form. Isn’t that astonishing! As if being old is an obstacle to excellence as opposed to a contributor.

Clint Eastwood could make this kind of movie because he is 84 not despite the fact that he is 84. (And, anyway, who knows how old he really is…as in biologically. His chronological years make far less difference to his energy, vitality and creativity than his biological age. That’s the counterclockwise message I’ve been preaching in these columns. That’s the counterclockwise message the science of aging communicates unequivocally.)

I want to repeat: Eastwood is capable of such work because – not despite of – his age. Can we please please stop playing the age card, stop assuming that people past a certain chronological age are diminished? Can we please please stop viewing those who continue to contribute as “exceptions to the rule”? It may be that they ARE the rule.

Here’s what Pablo Casals had to say about age and excellence: “The first twenty years you learn. The second twenty years you practice. The third twenty years you perform. And the fourth twenty years you play.”

Play on, Clint.

And consider the lives of these “elderly” folks.

How could you not want to start the day with something called “Happy Baby”? I mean, really. Happy Baby (Ananda Balasana) is a yoga pose. You lie on your back, draw your knees into your chest, fan open your legs and reach down to grab the outsides (or insides) of your feet, making sure your feet (alas not the cute chubby little feet of a real happy baby) are parallel to the ceiling. And then you rock, gently, from side to side. And you breath.

Yoga teachers and instructional websites will tell you that Happy Baby has the following benefits: It opens and stretches the hips, stretches and releases the lower back, lengthens and helps to realign the spine, and strengthens the arms and shoulders. I don’t doubt it. I will tell you that it scours the mind and makes you feel both happy… and like a baby.

Lately, I’ve been starting my days with Happy Baby followed by cat/cows and pigeon, various spinal twists, and three lengthy sun salutations. I love the irony of doing the sun salutations in the pre-dawn (no sun) in the Oregon winter (with no hope of sun once the day begins). I love the flow from posture to posture. I love that the postures have names like cobra and down dog and warrior one, two and three. And I love how I can lose myself in the flow – even though, every morning, I have to persuade myself anew to spend these 30 minutes.

That’s because for decades I’ve thought (even as I’ve taken my share of yoga classes and gone through asanas in the living room while following yoga DVDs), that yoga isn’t real exercise. That my time would be better spent sweating or grunting or, preferably, both. Yes, I know it’s wrong-headed to think of yoga as “exercise.” It is a philosophy, a way of being, a connection to self. Still, I’ve not given it its due because I have been unable to appreciate the physical benefits.

So, if you need convincing about the importance of yoga to a counterclockwise life, breath deep and read on:

Balance  “Help I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” The American Academy of Orthopedic Surgeons estimates 1 out of every 2 women and 1 out of every 4 men over 50 will suffer a fracture related to a fall. Balancing poses in yoga can keep us aligned and steady on our feet

Flexibility  That happy baby doesn’t just grab her feet in the crib, she nibbles on her own toes. You try that now. A certain amount of inflexibility does come with age, but most of it comes from inactivity. Every yoga posture helps with flexibility, especially hips and spine. And posture! Oh yeah.

Strength  Yoga builds strength slowly and safely (unlike, say, CrossFit) through weight-bearing postures like downward dog, cobra and plank. It’s okay – and for some folks preferable – to avoid high impact, high intensity strength-building exercises. Yoga does the trick.

Body awareness  Through the postures and the poses and the movements and the breathing, we notice where we hold tension – and release it. We feel – and can correct — the slouch. We deepen the shallow breathing. The stronger the connection we build between body and mind the less likely we are to, essentially, punish our bodies with destructive habits like all-day sitting, mindless eating.

So, tomorrow morning, join me in saluting the sun. I know it’s up there somewhere.

I awoke this morning feeling…good. Deep-down, to-the-core, easy-breathing, clear-headed, for-no-particular-reason good. And, instead of rushing out of bed as I usually do, I lay quietly for maybe as long as five minutes. Which is a very long time when you are motionless in an inky black room at 5:45 in the morning, and you know you’ll have to hoof it to make it on time to the pre-dawn Barre3 class to which you are (happily) addicted.

But I stayed put. I was, for some reason, struck by how good I felt. It wasn‘t the endorphin-high good of an intense work-out or the I-just-accomplished-something good of a self-esteem high or the warm body rush of a great-hug high. It was a quiet, solid, embodied good. Emphasis on the embodied. As in: in the body.

I stretched out long, pointing my toes, reaching my arms above my head. I flexed and pointed. I rotated my arms in wide circles, careful not to whack my sleeping husband. I shrugged and released my shoulders. I took big, deep breaths. The air in the room was chilly, just like I liked it. It tickled and cooled my nostrils but, when I released through my mouth, it was soft and warm.

I hadn’t just awoken from a lovely dream, or even had a great night’s sleep. I wasn’t anticipating a particularly wonderful day. I merely awoke into my body, into the good health and banked energy of my body.

When people ask me what I do or what I eat or what supplements I take, and then ask (of course) “Does it make a difference?” I can’t answer in the way they want me to answer. I can’t say “Why, yes, since I starting taking CoQ10 I have more energy.” Or, “Sure. My daily work-outs have increased my bone density by 2 percent.” Or, “Absolutely. Eating kale has made a new woman of me.” Because everything I do, everything we all do (or don’t do) is part of a much bigger, still pretty mysterious mix. Everything we do (don’t do) is more than a sum of its parts in ways we don’t understand and cumulative in ways we won’t discover for years. Or until one morning when we awake into our own wellness.

“The unexamined life is not worth living,” said Socrates (according to Plato). But what about the over-examined life?

Socrates meant examining your beliefs, ethics and morals, your behavior towards others, your actions in the world. At least that’s what I think he meant. Unlike Plato, I did not sit at his feet and listen. Why I’m writing about this now is to comment on our current-day fascination/fixation – mania? — with over-examining our lives, particularly the many many ways we have of tracking and quantifying the health-conscious (counterclockwise) lives we would like to be living. I am the last person to argue against making every effort to live a healthy, mindful, body- and soul-enriching life. But I’m concerning about the obsessive tracking of such a life.

For Christmas this year Santa presented me with a Garmin Forerunner 620, a sophisticated wrist and chest-band tracking device that measures my heart rate, miles run, split times, calories expended. The usual. But also offers such information as my cadence (steps per minute), vertical oscillation (my bounce while running), my ground contact time (amount of time in each step spent on the ground measured in milliseconds). Not to mention my VO2 max, predicted race times for 5K, 10K, half-marathon and marathon, recovery check (real-time indication of my state of recovery within the first several minutes after a run), recovery time (optimal time until next hard work-out). It also tracks me on GPS and sends all this info to my phone. I can share it with you!

Don’t worry, I won’t.

You can buy devices, download apps and join online groups that will help you track your food intake, water consumption, alcohol intake, volume of oxygen consumed (and air quality thereof) metabolism, blood pressure, skin temperature, sleep time/ quality/ phases, moods, time spent waiting, time spent doing whatever it is you spend your time doing that isn’t waiting. If this interests you, you might want to check out The Quantified Self.

For me, there’s a line – and not really the proverbial “thin line” — between mindfulness and obsessive self-tracking. It’s important to eat clean and healthy, but is it important (or healthy) to quantify every phytochemical you ingest? Yes, we should move our bodies every day, but do I really need to know my vertical oscillation while running on the beach? I care about sleeping well, but I know when I do (or don’t) without tracking how many minutes I spend in various sleep phases. Etcetera, etcetera.

All this self-tracking, all this technology may just rob us of enjoying and experiencing life in the moment – which, really, is the core on counterclockwise living. Or so it seems to me this morning as I resist the temptation to strap on the Garmin before my foggy run.

You could make any number of counterclockwise-y New Years resolutions. You know what they are, and you know from past experience which ones will stay with you past, say, January 7.  So you could resolve to:

Get to the gym three times a week or
Eat six servings of vegetables

Or you could vow to:
Get another hour of sleep or
Give up _______ (fill in with favorite bad-for-you indulgence)

Some people disdain the whole resolutions thing. I personally think January first lists are phony and set us up for failure or guilt (probably both). But I do love the idea of intention that powers action. And I love the idea of self-direction. So I am, in fact, thinking of starting the new year with a plan.

But more and more I am convinced that “staying young” (as in vibrant and active and engaged, curious and challenge-seeking) is about attitude and affect as much – or more – than it is about kale and kettlebells. I don’t mean that good health isn’t important. Certainly it is. And I don’t mean that we should shirk our personal responsibility to promote, enhance and maintain good health. Of course not. So yay for those six servings of vegetables or that pledge to work out more.

But that’s not all there is to counterclockwise living, and resolutions (if you are the resolution-making type) that focus only on the physical are not as life-enhancing as maybe we think (or hope ) they are.

So what is? Waking with energy and purpose, eagerness and curiosity into each morning. That is my “resolution,” and, yes, I know there’s a disturbing whiff of bumpersticker-ese about this. Allow me to replace that unpleasant scent with this quote from John Updike:

Each day we wake slightly altered and the person we were yesterday is dead.

Which means we are reborn. New to the experience of that day. And that, my friends, is counterclockwise living.

It’s a good thing.

I am too busy living counterclockwise to write about it. At least this week.I just returned from 5 days on the road with the Eugene Ballet Company. We — yes, I am (temporarily) part of the company — are touring The Nutcracker for the holiday season. We just did 5 shows in 5 days in Washington and Idaho. Tonight and tomorrow we are in Salem. Friday, Saturday (matinee and evening) and Sunday we are at the Hult Center in Eugene, Oregon.

Those of you who follow me on facebook know I’ve been preparing for this for a while, going back to my childhood passion for ballet, going first to community classes and then company classes, rehearsing with this company of talented professionals — and now performing and touring. I’ll be writing about this in a new book, Raising the Barre, about shaking it up mid-life, going back to the beginning of the learning curve, challenging myself while ecapturing old dreams. Right now, though, I have to put on my stage make-up, gather my tights and leo, my character shoes and headpiece, my protein bars — and leave for the studio to catch the bus up to Salem.

Thanks for stopping by the blog today. I promise a nice, meaty post next week.

(photo by Cliff Coles)

The thing about joy – the best thing about joy – is that it comes unbidden.

You can (if you are very very lucky) find yourself sipping a glass of Brunello and nibbling a chunk of local pecorino as the Tuscan sun glints off a field of sunflowers. And it is lovely. And it is wonderful. And you are happy to be there. But the moment doesn’t grab unexpectedly at your soul. It doesn’t shoot a bolt of electricity from the soles of your feet to the top of your head. Maybe it’s because you worked hard for that moment. You planned it, set it up, made it perfect.

Alternately, you could pull yourself out of a warm bed at 5:20 on the chilliest morning of the year after a not-great night’s sleep. You could be thinking (not-entirely-positive thoughts) about the 6:15 Barre3 class you have to get to and the semi-grueling ballet class that follows and the long day of writing after that. And you could walk out the back door of the house into the cold, black morning and, with that first inhale, you could be — you are! — almost knocked silly by an overwhelming blast of joy. I mean full-body, electric-charged, all-encompassing bliss. Unasked for. Unplanned. Boom.

Here’s why I decided to share that moment in today’s post rather than write about what dogs can teach us about anti-aging (which is what I thought I’d be writing about when I woke up this morning): I want to acknowledge the power of the unexpected. I want to embrace the idea that you don’t always have to work so very hard to get to a good place. It may be that, occasionally, when we least expect it, without the gritting of teeth and the straining of muscles and the writing and checking off of lengthy to-do lists (yes, I am referring to myself here), good stuff happens. It may be that cultivating a life-long openness to that possibility, to the unexpected glory of surprise is as viable a path to a counterclockwise life as, say, kale salad and cross-fit.