Category — Taking on challenges

Exercise is not the answer.

Did I just write that? Yes, I did.

Of course, physical activity is one of the keys to health and vitality. But exercise is not THE answer to “How do I live a meaningful, engaged, counterclockwise life?” Sweat is good (and necessary). But just as good (and even more necessary) is attitude or – if you want to get high-minded about it, philosophy.

After decades of honing a sweat-and-grunt gym rat life – not to mention the year I spent subjecting myself to every form of exercise from aerobics to Zumba (get it? A to Z?), I discovered a place where, for me, fitness and philosophy come together. Imagine being in a studio, in a fitness class, where as the instructor cues your movements, she is simultaneously making insightful, potentially life-changing statements. And no, not cheesy. Or self-conscious. Or woo-woo. Simple and natural.

A challenging workout packed with insights and ah-ha moments? Yep, you bet.

Here are a few of the cues given by my Barre3 instructors that mean so much more to me than just advice about how to move.

Find the ease in the effort. The instructor says this just when the effort is beginning to feel overwhelming, when I can’t imagine holding that plank a second more or squeezing the ball any tighter. And, as I search my body for a place of ease (Yes! Unbelievably I can find it), I also de-code the message as a broader directive. Life is about effort – and so often about chaos. But rather than letting the effort be all there is, rather than letting the chaos fill my head, what a gift if, in the thick of things, I can find that place of ease and calm.

Release the tension that does not serve you. The instructor says this when I have a death-grip on the barre or my shoulders are hunched or she can see the tendons pop in my neck. I am oblivious until she says it. And then I feel it. And then I release it. And I think about the life lesson here: Putting down that unnecessary baggage we carry. Letting go of those grudges. Releasing what does not serve you.
It is all about the core. The instructor says as I balance on a ball in boat pose. Yes, all movement comes from the core. But I de-code the statement this way: All movement in life – creativity, curiosity, productivity, meaningful engagement, relationships – everything should come from the core, the core of one’s being, the core of who you are. Your authentic self. It IS all about the core.

Create your own resistance. The instructor says, cueing us to purposeful eccentric and concentric muscle contractions, to feeling the air we move through, to using our own body weight. I internalize this as an important life strategy: Look for challenges. Up the ante. Decide to raise the bar on your own life not because you have to, not because you’re forced to, but because that’s where learning and growth take place. Because that’s where you strengthen resilience and feed curiosity and live with intention and engagement. (This, by the way, is the subject of my new book, Raising the Barre, due out in late November.)

There are always modifications. The instructor says to help those of us with tight hip flexors or wonky lower backs. And I think: What an
empowering and self-determining way to look at one’s life. Whatever you want to do, wherever you are, whatever your circumstances, there are always ways to make it work, to make the endeavor successful. To modify means to make it your own.

I am so very tired.

No, I am not tired because my metabolism is slowing down or I’m not sleeping well, because my arteries are clogged or my joints are inflamed or my mind is foggy. (In fact, none of this is true.) I am not tired because, gee, isn’t this what “naturally” happens when you age?

No, I am not tired because I am getting older. I am tired because I carry the weight of our culture’s expectations about what “getting older” means. And that weight is heavy. And that weight is making me weary.

I am betting you carry this burden too. That you were once sort of pleased with comments like, “wow, it’s so impressive that you’re doing that” (the unspoken subtext being: at your age). But now you hear that subtext. You hear it loud and clear. And you’re tired of being “the exception that proves the rule,” the over 50, over 60, over 70 year old who…wait for it…is active and productive and sparky, who takes on new challenges and seeks out adventures, who is curious and engaged and full of energy and vitality.

I am not the exception. You are not the exception. We are the rule.

And the bloom is not off the fucking rose.

I wrote about adventure last week – and then promptly went on one. It was no Wild, but it was, for me, both demanding and empowering: I embarked on my first-ever solo biking and camping trip.

The uncomfort zone I inhabited – an adventure is not an adventure if you don’t make yourself at least a little uncomfortable in the process – was not what you might expect. It was not so much about the physical challenge. I’m not saying that riding 70 miles over the coast range on a loaded bike was easy (especially on the lady parts), but I was in shape to do this. Getting my body to perform was a challenge, yes, but I knew I could do it.

The uncomfort zone was the woman-alone thing. Anxieties about the bike: flat tires and broken chains and assorted road mishaps far from bike shops and towns – and often out of cellphone range. Anxieties about camping alone: animals and people who act like animals and things that go bump in the night.

It took maybe 40 miles to stop feeling that particular all-body zing that, for me, signals being on high alert. This embodied anxiety feels almost like a low-level electrical current — not actually unpleasant, but insistent and distracting. But as I cycled through wetlands and pasture lands and forests, as I crossed creeks and skirted farms and edged around a lake, I began to forget all the bad things that could happen – because so many good things were happening: the greener-than-green landscape, the cloudless sky, the smell of mown hay, the solid power of my legs. I didn’t make a decision — Now I am going to cease being a scaredy cat start enjoying myself – but it happened. It’s weird to say that my body, busy pumping out the sweaty miles, actually relaxed. But that’s what happened.

And, after I successfully established my camp site and pitched my tent and started a fire in the fire ring and ate my dinner with my feet dangling in the Siuslaw River, I felt deep-down good. And ready for the next adventure.

I am not yet ready to stop having adventures.

Why do I make this proclamation?

It is because having adventures, whole-heartedly pursuing adventures – physical, creative, intellectual, spiritual – is the mark of one who is a curious and engaged.

It is because maintaining (no, not just maintaining, actively fueling) a sense of curiosity and wonder is the cornerstone of a counterclockwise lifestyle. A curious, engaged, adventurous person is, regardless of chronological age, youthful.

And so I say again: I am not yet ready to stop having adventures. And I hope I never will be.

An adventure is an experience that involves risk. It nudges you back to the beginning of a learning curve, which is an exciting, humbling and scary place to be. But it is the place where learning happens, where growth happens. Adventure is about inviting the unexpected and staying flexible and resilient enough to enjoy (or cope creatively with) what happens.

Adventures are individual, idiosyncratic things: a six-day silent meditation retreat is one person’s adventure; three weeks of backcountry hiking is another. A third adventurous soul might sign up for a pudding wrestling contest at a bar (a benefit for a really good cause. Really). These aren’t, as you might have guessed, random adventures. They are, in fact, adventures each of my three children have recently undertaken.

Which brings me to a conversation I overhead yesterday that compelled me to write this post today. I heard a woman at my favorite coffee hang-out say to her friend (after regaling her with what her children were up to), “After all, it’s our kids’ chance to have adventures now. Our time has past.” To which I say: bullshit. No, I didn’t say this out loud at the time. (I am not that kind of adventurous.) But I say it now. I am yelling it now. B U L L S H I T. Listen. This isn’t a zero-sum game. We don’t have to stop having adventures when our kids start having their own. In fact, this is THE time to reinvigorate our own sense of adventure.

Tomorrow I leave for my first-ever overnight solo bike trek.

Life is either a daring adventure or nothing.” — Helen Keller

Counterclockwise living is not just about kale salads and Crossfit. And thank goodness for that, as neither is – or is likely to be — a part of my life. (I hate kale, but not as much as I hate the whole Anointed Superfood of the Year thing. As for CrossFit: Did it, escaped without serious injury – unlike many people – and moved on.)

What I mean, more broadly, is that living a healthy, engaged life that actively promotes vitality and youthful energy involves far more than eating well and moving one’s body. It is, as I’ve written about here and in my book, about nurturing a kind of bring-it-on attitude. It’s about purposely (bravely) stepping out of one’s comfort zone to take on challenges, to try new things. Being inquisitive and adventuresome is a hallmark of youthful energy. It is in the Uncomfort Zone that interesting things can happen.

You know how trainers will tell you to vary your exercise routine to create “muscle confusion”? If you do the same exercise routine every day, your muscles adapt and soon are not working as hard. You’re on the treadmill for the same 50 minutes, but you’re really getting 25 minutes of a decent work-out. If you switch it up and engage different muscle groups, you give your body a new challenge, and it is forced to answer the call. You begin to make progress rather than merely holding steady.

It’s the same with other routines in your life. You’ve spent a lot of years, decades probably, getting good at whatever it is you do. It’s likely that, at mid-life, you have adapted to that work. It is easier, less challenging. Admit it: You are on auto-pilot. (I am speaking about — and to — myself here too.) How about pushing yourself into the Uncomfort Zone? How about doing something you are NOT already good at? How about going back to the BEGINNING of some learning curve…just for the heady, scary thrill of it?

That’s what these folks did. (You really, really want to click on this link!)

And it’s what I’m doing right now as I take on the (self-inflicted) challenge of re-learning ballet (I stopped taking lessons at 12) and dancing The Nutcracker this season with the Eugene Ballet Company.

What can you do to shake it up?

Binge. Purge.

No, this is not a treatise on eating disorders. This is about how our lives, our exciting, creative, counterclockwise lives are often all about bingeing and purging. And it’s not a bad thing.

I go on a novel-reading binge, gobbling up And the Dark Sacred Night, Painted Girls, Astonish Me and Arcadia in less than three weeks (the last three weeks, in fact). The purge is coming up. I’ll probably not read another novel for four or five months, as I purge myself of fabricated worlds and immerse myself in nonfiction. I binge-watch Orange is the New Black, and then I don’t watch television for weeks. I drink three or four cappuccinos a day (remember the fika I wrote about?) in Stockholm. And then go coffee-less for the next month.

I go through a binge cycle on exercise, too. Last week I ran every day. This week I’m not running at all. I go through intense periods of certain activities – circuit training, boxing, Barre3 – and then purge by moving on to something else, something entirely new.

If you think of “bingeing” as giving yourself up entirely to something, immersing yourself, saturating yourself in it, losing yourself in it, then bingeing becomes a vibrant whole-hearted act. A powerful, exhilarating act. But not sustainable. Not meant to be sustainable.

If you think of “purging” as cleansing, sluicing out the brain, the body, the spirit to make way for new “binges,” then the purge is also a powerful and necessary act.

Several years ago I stayed at an agritourismo near Montepulciano run by Fiori, Marzia and their teenage daughter. They had re-built the place, themselves, from a few ancient stone buildings. The gardens, vegetable and flower, were breathtaking. They had a small vineyard, a big field lush with girasole (sunflowers), hand-laid stone patios, honeysuckle-covered verandas and a number of beautifully crafted little outbuildings. How had they accomplished all this, I asked Fiori. Where did all these ideas and all this energy come from? “Ah,” he said, with a big smile, “Marzia…she is a woman of much imaginations.”

I want to be a woman of much imaginations. I think this is a major component of youthfulness as I’ve tried to define it for myself, a cornerstone of living the counterclockwise life. And I think that means bingeing and purging, throwing myself into the great wide open and then, sated, pulling back to recoup, to cleanse, to ready myself for the next adventure.

Many of us travel when we’re young, bumming around Europe in our 20s.  Some of us travel, later, and generally joylessly, for work. Others, like my in-laws, wait until they’re old to travel, booking passage on cruise ships and seeing selected port cities in a single afternoon.

We travel for many reasons: employment, enjoyment, enrichment, adventure. But traveling as an anti-aging strategy? Really?

Yes, really.

Like sipping a cappuccino or two (or three) a day or nibbling on dark chocolate, an anti-aging/ counterclockwise lifestyle means more than gym time, treadmill desks and Krunchy Kale. Actually, I love the gym. I love my new standing desk. About kale, krunchy or otherwise, the less said the better.

But the point is, it’s wrong to think of an anti-aging/ counterclockwise lifestyle as a series of must-dos, chores to tick off – from taking supplements to drinking 8 cups of water a day to getting in your 10,000 steps. A physically, intellectually and creatively youthful lifestyle is, well, fun.

I am writing this on a bus traveling from Parnu, a little town in Estonia, to Riga, the capital of Latvia that calls itself the “Paris of the Baltic.” On this trip, part business, part pleasure, I’ve spent time in Vienna, London, Stockholm, Tallinn and Parnu. After Riga I’ll have a week in Copenhagen before heading home.

Can traveling be physically tiring? Sure. It’s a chore to heft bags around. It’s sometimes hard to get a good night’s sleep in a strange bed in a strange town. Walking everywhere the way I do to explore a new place (sometimes up to 20 miles a day) is physically challenging.

So I get a work-out, which is great. But I can do that at home. The true anti-aging benefits of traveling are cognitive (both psychological and creative). Scientific research has demonstrated that travel can open up neurological pathways in our physical brains, benefitting – and, I would argue, counterclockwise-ing — our overall mental health in many ways.

We spend every day of our lives not only in a particular physical climate but also in a particular mental climate determined by our familiarity with our surroundings. Break the mental shackles caused by familiarity, and we open up a world of wider mental associations. We can’t operate on auto-pilot. We are suddenly, voraciously curious. We are a bit more daring. Our imagination takes flight as we attempt to make sense of, say, the Estonian language which seems to have more diacritical markings than it has vowels. Mental acuity, boldness, curiosity, hunger for experience, intellectual vitality, imagination — these are the markings of an energetic and youthful brain. These are the keys to an anti-aging attitude toward life. It’s not all about CoQ-10, Krunchy Kale and ab crunches. Not hardly.

Time is the strangest of measurements. We act as if it were precise: My flight is scheduled to arrive at 11:11. I run a mile in 9:19:32 (Yes, that slowly). I am instructed to steep my tea for 4.5 minutes.

But time is also utterly malleable. Consider the obvious. (Well, obvious if you’ve read Counterclockwise and/ or a number of posts on this site. Hint. Hint.) The measurement of your time on earth – your chronological age – is a precise number. It is the exact moment of your birth, noted diligently in hospital records. But that number does not measure your true age, the age of your body. That age – your biological age – as I have been arguing (and as the evolving science of aging clearly states) – can be considerably older or younger than your birth date age.

You can manipulate (biological) time. You can fast-forward it by –choose your poison — smoking, sitting on your butt, isolating yourself socially, handling stress poorly, eating Doritos. Or you can turn it back by being physically and intellectually active, nurturing relationships, eating healthy and staying engaged in the stuff of life.

That’s malleable time. Then there is the deep subjectivity of the experience of time. We often say – I say this, and feel this, all too frequently – that time has “speeded up” as I’ve gotten older. I don’t know where the day went, the week. Is it really almost summer…what happened to spring, to winter? How can my daughter have a driver’s license already? Where does the time go?

And it’s not like I live life in the fast lane, for goodness sakes. I’m a writer not a Wall Street trader. I live in the country not in the heart of Tokyo. But still, life speeds by.

…But not recently. Recently, time slowed for me in a wondrous way that is teaching me a good – and very different — counterclockwise lesson. Last week I accompanied one of my sons on the first three days of what for him will be a 3-month cross-country solo bicycle trip. Each of those three days was packed with experience: The crazy rain of day one, the sweet smell of wet hay, the flat tire, the hot chocolate. The 22 miles of switchbacks on day two, the rebel yell when we saw the 5000-foot elevation sign, the peanut butter and banana sandwich that was so good I almost cried. The warm central Oregon sun of day three, the straight-aways and unexpected steep hills, the long good-bye, the ride back to Sisters, solo.

Those days did not zip by. They played out slowly, with – and I know this doesn’t make much sense – languorous intensity. I went on this trip to spend special time with my son. I thought the challenge, and the lesson I would learn about myself, would be physical. I did learn about my strength and resilience. (And just how saturated water-proof clothing could get.) But I learned something more important. I learned that packing your life with challenges and seeking new experiences slows time. Those three days made me feel like a kid again. I remembered that time in my life when a week was a long, long time, when summer was forever. And so, during these three very special days, I moved the clock backward both by challenging my body and my psyche.

Staying young is all about giving yourself challenges — physical, creative, intellectual, whatever.

It is about taking on something new, something you don’t know if you can do.  And doing it. It’s about pushing yourself out of your comfort zone.  You know, that place you’re at right now that you had to work hard to get to but no longer makes you sweat (literally or otherwise)?  That place that — admit it — feels a bit like coasting?  A little bit like being on auto pilot? Time to move on out.

It’s not about bucket lists.  It’s about nurturing — actively feeding — a curiosity about the world and about yourself.

Could I do this?

What would happen if I tried?