Conscious 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 They will shout: bitter, regret, denial, withdrawn, not interested in doing much.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

Dying Deliciously

Posted on by Dr. Toni

“The hills are alive with the sound of mommy!“ 

That is the opening sentence my sister wrote for our mother’s obituary. The day before Thanksgiving, 2014, our beloved friend and nurturer was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer and given 5 months to live. I was doing my own dance with ovarian cancer for the second time.  Visiting her in the hospital, I became aware of how vulnerable I was, still in chemotherapy treatment. I was already in remission so with the approval of my oncologist, I stopped three sort of the 18 weak protocol to walk mommy home.

My sister and I agreed that Mom would only die once so we vowed to make it a good death! Whatever that meant…  One of us was with her all the time.  We would take turns, one or two weeks at a time, never knowing of course how much time we have left with her.

Pancreatic cancer can be very nasty way to go. Life was filled with doctors appointments,  paracentesis and other procedures, a plethora of pills, and visits from friends.  The pills made her crazy at times and she would lash out. It was way too easy to get my feelings hurt but I had to remember over and over again that she was not herself.

Years ago an acquaintance asked her what the secret was to having such a good relationship with her daughters, because her daughters and her own relationship was in turmoil. My mom said something to her and forgot all about it. Two years later, this same friend found my mom and threw her arms around her! She thanked her profusely for changing her relationship with her kids! My mom asked “what did I say?”

“Let every thought I think, let every word I speak, let everything I do be out of love.“  That sums up Mommy all right! So when she was acting crazy and less than loving because of her illness and the drugs, that became my mantra. It wasn’t easy.    I know from being on both sides, it’s much easier being the patient than it is a caregiver!  I have never felt so helpless in my life.

One of the many lessons mom taught us was to embrace and honor our feelings. She believed that every emotion had value when harnessed and embraced. “It’s not the emotion itself that causes harm,” she’d say, “it’s what we do with our emotions that can cause harm.”  Mommy taught us how to cry! She believed that tears are a fabulous way to release grief and that anger was a normal response and could be channeled for great creativity!  So I guess it didn’t surprise me when my sister and I both came to the same conclusion after one side gripping, gut wrenching, grief releasing crying jag just weeks before she passed. This is DELICIOUS!

Wait a minute, how can death be delicious?  It wasn’t death itself, but the accompanying angst that is so much a part of who we are!  How could we ignore or push away this pain? Wasn’t it true that we felt so bad because we loved so good!?  Her friends got it. We invited them one or two at a time to come be with mom whenever they could. It was a nice time for me or my sister to get away for an hour or two. But it was a precious way of including her beloved friends that otherwise would’ve been left in the dark.

I had found and joined the Threshold Choir in 2012, as I was finishing the first dance of 18 weeks of chemo. I have been singing all my life, but singing at the bedside for people who are hovering between life and death, is by far the most sacred way I have ever used my voice.  Mommy was a singer. My sister and I sang together in harmony as often as we possibly could throughout our entire lives.  It was one of Mom’s biggest thrills… To hear us laugh and sing. So it was the most natural thing in the world to sit on either side of her, hold hands, and sing her home. On April 20, 2015, pretty close to five months from the initial diagnosis, mommy gave my sister and I her last breath as we sang her home.

Now I know what I want to do with my dying breath. To be sung to in lullaby tones is to be  cradled in the arms of song. There are about 300 songs available to this international organization. Song was written specifically for this precious purpose. I have written songs that are in the repertoire and that I want sung to me. Singing is such a personal gift, such a vulnerable act and so incredibly sacred, that it transcends tears and trauma. I want to give my last breath to those singing me to the other side!  I might have that opportunity sooner than later.

In August, my oncologist said I had 12 to 18 months to live, with treatment now that will only slow down the progress of the disease.  With the help of my friends, choir members, sister and other family members, I choose to live in harmony.  I choose to share widely, to sing softly, to love deeply, to die deliciously.

Come sing me home!

Lauren Lane Powell

www.LaurenLanePowell.com

Bio. Lauren Lane Powell is an expert vocal coach, recording artist composer, keynote speaker and author of the book “Holy Shift! Everything’s a Gift!”

She has been featured in Bloom magazine, New Horizons, and the Daily Word.  She is a codirector of threshold choir, here in Bloomington and is a regular contributor to the International Threshold choir Newsletter.

Lauren has been interviewed on radio shows with hosts like, Sandra Champlain, (Richard Brenden) Cathy Dewitt and George Whitten to name a few.

She has been the main keynoter speaker for the Unity Minister conference, several Great Lakes Unity Musician’s Conferences, and the Judith Coates Jeshua retreat,

She has a degree from Indiana University in voice and music education.

Lauren traveled extensively throughout the US and Puerto Rico facilitating her Sing For Your Soul and Harmonies of Healing workshops where her motto is “If you can laugh you can sing!”