How to Love Your Life
After a couple of decades of helping people lead more satisfying lives, through my private psychoanalysis practice and overseeing mental health outreach programs for the institute where I’m president and CEO, I’ve developed strong impressions about what makes the later years of life invigorating and gratifying. The key, I believe, is to link the past with the present and future in three important and enriching ways—to look back, reach back and give back.
LOOK BACK
The senior years are prime time for reflection. Reconnecting with the past reminds us of who we are and where we came from, grounding us more securely in the present while preparing us for the future. Accepting or rethinking negative aspects of the past clears old cobwebs out of your brain like airing out a closet.
I’m not talking about obsessing over the past, but recognizing that our prior experiences will always be a part of what comes after them. To pull it all together…
• Collect old memories. Ask family members for stories about previous generations—early lives can be fascinating.
• Spend time with your elders. Their past is your deeper past. Ask them about it.
Rejuvenating: My husband, my sister and I take a bus trip every year with my 87-year-old aunt’s Oregon-based group of former hikers and mountain climbers. Currently ages 65 to 92, they remain active and interested in everything and reinforce our admiration for people older than those of us in our late 50s. We see our future—we hope!—in their indefatigable present.
• Plan a reunion of people who remain strong in your memory. Expect to hear new or forgotten anecdotes about your life.
REACH BACK
Reclaim aspects of yourself that you’ve left behind and reintegrate them into your life. Identify passions—not just hobbies, but real avocations—that you abandoned or never pursued. Example: You might have been a competitive swimmer when you were younger but gave it up due to lack of time.
It’s working for me: My husband was a Metropolitan Opera contest finalist who sang professionally. I played Grace Farrell, Daddy Warbucks’s secretary in Annie on Broadway, for five years. We relinquished those careers early on to seek more dependable livelihoods. Recently, we began to perform again. We believe that we’re singing better than ever without the pressure to compete or make a living at it.
The past is gone, but the future can hold whatever you put in it, including beloved activities that you’ve never stopped wanting to do.
GIVE BACK
It’s a plain truth—we love our lives more when we give to others. Everyone can be a philanthropist by sharing time, knowledge and energy. Examples…
• Get involved locally. It can be with a local committee or institution such as a school, library or hospital. Teach someone to read. Be a mentor or adviser to those who need help in your areas of expertise, such as law or small-business ownership.
• Meet your neighbors. Our weekend house is 60 miles north of our New York City apartment—in a rural area with mountains, fields and wildlife. We’ve loved its bucolic isolation but regretted that we didn’t know our neighbors.
To rectify this, I took simple gift baskets last December to four neighbors I had never met. They were surprised and delighted.
Unexpected: How much I received in return. They shared riveting stories and information about the area and gave me little presents germane to my personal interests, including a book on myth-ology that I had not read. Upshot: I feel more comfortable now in my surroundings, especially knowing that I can call on my new friends in an emergency and would be glad to be called upon by them.
• Preserve new memories for others. The present has a way of becoming the past very quickly. My family’s new Web site displays digital photos and news, enhancing our feelings of being a real family.
What to do: Use a Web site, such as Snapfish (www.snapfish.com), that helps you put together family photo albums or ancestry journals for free and is accessible to family members anywhere in the world.
• Write your story, perhaps including a video or taped history, for yourself and your family, including those not yet born. Revisiting the high points may help you to appreciate how far you’ve come and to see today as part of a long continuum.
• Dispense with stuff. Give keepsakes to family members, attaching written stories about the items’ backgrounds and why they’ve been important to you. While decluttering your home, you’ll find appreciative new owners for treasured objects and pass along a precious piece of yourself and your family.
WHAT AND HOW TO GIVE
To recognize what to give back, find a clue in the place where you hurt the most—your greatest wound or sorrow.
Example: If you suffer from chronic pain, start a group, in person or on-line, to share stories, information and support. Those who have had cancer or another disease or lost a family member or friend to illness might work with others coping with the same challenge, such as in a hospice program.
My English friend John Makepeace, a bobby (policeman), volunteered in a cancer ward after losing his wife to the disease. Later, when he, too, was dying, I visited and was astonished at the number of friends and neighbors who stopped in daily. He had created a caring community for himself by giving to others.
The home where I recently met my neighbors is in the Hudson River valley. Despite its name, the Hudson is not a river, but an estuary, affected by tides for 153 miles, all the way to Troy, New York. Long before Europeans named this body of water for explorer Henry Hudson, the Algonquin peoples called it Muhheakunnuk, meaning “the river that flows both ways.”
Giving back is the river that flows both ways. Energy from your heart is returned many times over. Volunteers often say they get more out of their donated hours than they give. But you don’t have to volunteer to earn that feeling. Give back in whatever ways make sense for you.
Bottom Line/Retirement interviewed Kathryn Madden, PhD, a psychoanalyst in private practice and president and CEO of the Blanton-Peale Institute, New York City, an educational and service organization founded in 1937 by psychiatrist Smiley Blanton and the Reverend Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, www.blantonpeale.org. She is executive editor of the Journal of Religion & Health, editor of Quadrant (the Jung Foundation journal) and coeditor of The Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion (Springer).
(Article originally published September 1, 2007)
Reprinted with the permission of:
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