Aging

Why Age When You Can Sage?

Posted on by Dr. Toni

This expert offers what she calls the three keys to ‘sage-ing’

Sage-ing

Credit: JDS Malacky | Flickr

When I worked as a professor of business management, my mentor, Elmer Burack, once told me, “The world is full of baby boomers who will be leaving their careers. Once boomers leave the workplace, they won’t know what to do with themselves. You can help them figure it out.”

Elmer sent me the book From Age-ing to Sage-ing:  A Revolutionary Approach to Growing Older by Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Ronald S. Miller. Reading it changed my life. Now I blog about “sage-ing” © (becoming an elder) and have a monthly podcast titled Becoming a Sage where I interview thought leaders in the field of positive aging. Because of my involvement in Sage-ing International, I read and watch everything with my “sage-ing lens.” I’ve concluded: Why age when you can sage?

In my workshops, I ask participants to picture someone who is aging and to describe the characteristics. They will shout: bitter, regret, denial, withdrawn, not interested in doing much. Then I ask them to envision someone who is sage-ing and to identify the differences. For a sage, people will say: wise, kind, generous, relevant, engaged.

Everyone says they would prefer to spend time with a Sage.

First Key to Become a Sage: Live Life With Meaning and Purpose

To become a Sage, one of the key components is living life with meaning and purpose. Research shows that people who have a reason for getting up in the morning live longer and healthier lives than those who don’t. (In the Blue Zone of Okinawa, Japan, this is called ikigai.)

As Gregg Levoy, author of Vital Signs: The Nature and Nurture of Passion and Callings: Finding and Following An Authentic Life told me: “Passion and purpose is not a place you get to, but it is a place you come from. It is a skill and a mindset you have or don’t have toward life. In fact, I call it a survival mechanism.”

Second Key to Become a Sage: Embrace Your Mortality

Another way to become a Sage, rather than just age, is by embracing your mortality.

Dr. Timothy Ihrig, who practices palliative medicine (caring for the most vulnerable people) around the world and helps other health care providers improve the care they offer this population told me: “Most people do not fear death as is commonly believed. People fear getting dead. They fear the journey of dying.”

As the late professor Morrie Schwartz, who had ALS, told author Mitch Albom in Tuesdays With Morrie: “When we learn how to die, we learn how to live.”

Embracing death reminds us that our time can end any day, which frees us to live more fully. Sages want to make the most of their time learning, building community and in service to others and to the environment.

Third Key to Become a Sage: Leave a Legacy

Another key aspect of sage-ing is leaving a legacy. Most people want to know their life mattered.

Margaret (Meg) Newhouse, author of Legacies of the Heart: Living a Life that Matters, told me she defines legacy as “the footprint of our lives that lives on after our death and into another generation … But the heart is the key to a more positive legacy rather than ego focused contributions such as look at all that I have done with my life.”

In my workshops, I usually ask: “So when do we leave a legacy?” People will say: When we retire. When we die. When we leave. I ask, “When we leave what?”

We actually leave a legacy all the time every day. I call this “bread crumb legacy,” because we are continually leaving bread crumbs along the way.

We leave part of our legacy when we leave a meeting. When we leave a conversation. When we leave every interaction.

When we think about the legacy we are leaving — positive or negative — we are conscious of what we say, how we behave and how we treat others.

The Path to Sage-ing

If you want to be on the path to sage-ing, rather than aging, my advice is to:

  • Discover your meaning and purpose. What do you want to do with your time, money and energy? What will get you up and keep you going?
  • Learn to embrace death. What is your perception about death? How might you embrace it?
  • Think about the legacy you want to leave. What difference are you making? How do you want to be remembered?

Why age when you can sage?  Simple: Everyone wants to be in the company of a Sage.

Jann E. Freed

 By Jann E. FreedJann E. Freed is the author of Leading With Wisdom: Sage Advice From 100 Experts. She has over 30 years of experience teaching organizational leadership and development and is a consultant with The Genysys Group.

Conscious Aging poem

Posted on by Dr. Toni

she said
I am rare.
I am the standing ovation
At the end of the play.
I am the retrospective
Of my life as art
I am the hours
Connected like dots
Into good sense
I am the fullness
Of existing.
You think I am waiting to die…
But I am waiting to be found
I am a treasure.
I am a map.
And these wrinkles are
Imprints of my journey
Ask me anything.
by Samantha Reynolds

Older Adulthood

Posted on by Dr. Toni

  by Joyce Ann Mercer, CALLING ALL YEARS GOOD: CHRISTIAN VOCATION THROUGHOUT LIFE’S SEASONS, Kathleen A. Cahalan and Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore, editors, pgs. 190-191

     Those in the initial phases of older adulthood often note the way that gradually the deaths of friends and loved ones become less of an exceptional occurrence and more the norm. A central characteristic of this stage of life is the inevitability and constancy of loss. The regularity of loss accelerates across subsequent years, such that people in their seventies and beyond begin to speak of “outliving all my friends” or being the only one left in their families so that “it all ends with me.”
     With the death of age-mates comes an increasing sense that there is no one who can listen to and validate the stories of one’s experiences of growing old. There is a loneliness inherent in losing the people who hold our stories with us.
     …One of the most common experiences named by older adults is loneliness. As loss becomes cumulative and social supports diminish, there is the general loneliness of having too few companions. Sometimes retirement and its aftermath awakens the relational emptiness that can characterize this life period, a state particularly common among men in late adulthood who were socialized to form relationships in and around work roles.
     …If loneliness is common, one of the most evident forms of loneliness in older adulthood is that which overtakes a person after the death of a spouse or partner. In John Bowlby’s studies on attachment, he identified a phenomenon he termed “pining away,” the intense yearning after the loss of an intimate relationship…The specificity of spousal loss cannot be ameliorated by adding other relationships such as friends or additional companions, as if the loneliness were generic That does not mean that a person suffering such a loss is not aided by support and friendship Older adults who have extensive social support suffer less from depression. Loneliness thus becomes one of the challenging staples of older adult life.
     How might the loneliness of old age relate to vocation in this life phase? If we understand vocation not as a possession, something an individual “has,” but rather as an interaction with God’s purposes that takes place within a relational ecology in which one participates with others, then it seems possible to imagine loneliness in older adulthood evoking the community’s capacities to provide a web of relationships in which older adults can grieve well. In turn, older adults suffering losses in the midst of the community “teach us how to grow through losses instead of being defeated by them,” writes Paul J. Wadell in “The Call Goes On: Discipleship and Aging.”

Accepting Change in Aging

Posted on by Dr. Toni

“One of the first things an individual must do as they get older is to accept the changes they will have to make to their lifestyle and looks and embrace these changes for the better. Accepting these life changes is a significant key to psychological health, as aging changes everyone and is inevitable…. Seniors who think rigidly do not do this, as they experience the natural changes and their health status associated with aging, they view these changes as negative, which adds a tremendous amount of stress and strain to their life.” –from Secrets To Aging Gracefully by Danielle L’Ecuyer