“Do something every day that scares you.” That advice from Eleanor Roosevelt is particularly useful as we get older.  When we’re young, we don’t even think about what might go wrong with what we decide to do.  We just rush headlong into what looks like fun or seems like the right direction.  If you end up with a broken arm, you heal.  If you lose money, you get on with making more.

But in maturity, we become more tentative.  Maybe the break won’t heal and there’s no way to make more money if we lose what we have and are past the age of being paid to work.  Or so we think.  In truth, being too timid can cost a lot more than a wise risk.  We can second guess ourselves right out of a satisfying life.

It’s easy–and almost expected–to become afraid of pretty much everything as we age.  You might waffle about going on vacation to a new place and shy away from a meeting where you won’t know anyone.  You may keep wearing the same hairstyle or sports shirt because you know it works.  You rely on the same friends and do the same things for fun again and again so that you don’t have to step into that scary unknown beyond the familiar.  You read the same kinds of books and watch the same kind of TV shows.  With every act of same-and-familiar you build a smaller and smaller world for yourself.  Eventually, you will bore yourself to death.  Literally.

The truth is, we need to do scary stuff–no matter how old we eventually become.  We need to step beyond what’s easy and do something that’s got a challenge.  Quite often the challenge–especially after we’ve mastered a significant number of life skills–is in getting past the fear that the new thing engenders.

It’s good for us to do that. It’s the only way to build up the emotional muscle needed to get through the tough spots that come into every life.  It’s the door to the new experiences that make life interesting and keep your soul growing and your brain working.  It’s also the best way out there for affirming your self worth.  When you do what scares you, you’re a conqueror.  You’ve faced something that could have stopped you and overcome it.

Notice I’m not saying watch something scary.  Going to horror movies isn’t the same as facing a personal fear and getting on with what you’d planned to do anyway.  This is a do mandate, an action that you must take on your own behalf.  Getting the experience through someone else’s scary situation–be it in a movie, on TV, or in a book, is a really cheap counterfeit to the real thing.  It’s not going to give you anything to work with when life gets tough.

Some of us fear speaking in public.  Some of us fear going to a different city or part of town.  Some of us fear heights or water.  (I personally fear heights and water.  I get a dose of do-something-that-scares-you every time I have to cross a skinny bridge over a roaring mountain creek on a hike.)  We all fear something.  Find what you’re afraid of and use it.

A few days ago, there was a TV show about an unusual group of lions who had learned to swim.  Those lions are, supposedly (I doubt anyone came by and had them get on a scale), 15% bigger than their more timid land-sworn African counterparts because of the pectoral muscles they’ve developed swimming and hunting in the water.  They can access food that most lions can only watch from the shore.  They have evolved because they started going in the water–an act that initially had to be scary for them.

The more you do to help yourself keep going in spite of fear, the stronger you’re going to be for whatever comes into your life.

Another of good old Eleanor’s great quotes applies:  “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”  Usually the thing that makes us think we can’t do something is fear.  Get past that natural inclination to shy away from what makes you afraid and use it as a springboard instead.

*****

Mary Lloyd is a speaker and writer and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, see her website.

Nope. I’m not talking about re-sparking old romances. It is rather heady to reconnect with your high school sweetheart or your first crush.  But there are other loves that pack as hefty a punch at this stage that have nothing to do with “boy meets girl” or “girl meets boy.” The magic I’m looking at here is the delight of coming back to things you used to love to do but lost track of.

Yes, we evolve; some of what we spent the bulk of our time on no produces a glimmer of excitement.  Listening to Beatles songs and swooning over that George Harrison poster don’t ring your chime like they did when you were thirteen.  Likewise, pitching green apples at passing cars is probably not up for renewal.  I’ve gotten three great lessons in things that you do want to resurrect in the last few days though.

I met two new friends today, in two different contexts.  Each had a story to tell about something they’d recently reconnected with that was making a big difference in their lives.

The first was a woman with a strong pedigree in finance who owns her own business and is venturing beyond the safe and familiar in what she’d doing with her career.  Simultaneously, things have been very challenging personally, particularly with her mother’s increasing dementia and her dad’s denial of that reality. The poor woman probably doesn’t have time to turn around given all her current responsibilities.  But six months ago, she decided to go back to something that had always brought her joy—ice skating—in a new way. She joined a synchronized ice skating team.

She’s not the youngest member of the team, but she’s not the oldest either.  She was like everyone else in one very important way.  She loves to figure skate.  Being part of the team is an ideal version of this joy for this time in her life.  A team effort means she has to focus on the team’s workout instead of whatever is crashing down around her ears beyond the rink.  She has teammates—wonderful people who support her.  Even better, they’re good—a great way to confirm your own worth when the personal pieces seem to be in tatters.

My second new friend is returning to an earlier version of work that he loved.  He’s not shifting his career back that way though.  He’s chosen instead to “dabble” as a strategy to move in that direction as he prepares for his version of retirement.  His passion?  Publishing.  Only now as he starts to play in that arena again, he has years of experience with business plans and management as well a deep love of books and writing to help him make things work.

You can hear the excitement in his voice when he speaks of the project where he’s currently testing his combined old and new skills.  His vision of retirement in uniquely his, and it’s already adding energy to his life.

The third example is me.  For the last seven years, I’ve focused on creating resources to help our culture create a wiser blueprint for what we do after 50.  I’m still passionate that we need a smarter approach for everyone’s sake.  But that message is now coming from more and more voices so my role can start to diminish.  My treat is to myself is to write fiction.

After a self-imposed hiatus, I’m back to the delight of “playing God” in the stories I come up with.  I, too, have had some difficult challenges of late.  Knowing I’m going spend time with my stories every day makes those challenges less difficult.

It’s hard to describe the joy of coming back to the favorite pursuits of younger years.  It’s a bit like meeting a dear but long-lost friend, learning all over again how much you enjoyed having him/her in your life, and then discovering that very special person is moving in next door to you.

We are so lucky when the things we love circle back and catch our attention and devotion again.  Usually, it’s not exact same effort as when we were so enthralled the first time.  Most often, it’s even more magical—both because of all the things learned in the meantime that make you more effective and because you cherish it more because it was lost.

You’re not living in the past if you pick up old pastimes.  You’ve had the chance to reconnect with an old friend.  Enjoy!

This article originally appeared in the May 2013 issue of Barbara Morris’s online newsletter Put Old on Hold.

***********

Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, see her website .

Someone has stepped up to tackle the wrongness of Off Their Rockers,  and I applaud that someone–Barbara Morris, who’s been advocating for smarter aging even longer than I have.   Below is her press release about the situation.  I’ve added my own comment after hers.

By Barbara Morris:

I admire Betty White. Her energy and creative ability are inspiring. Long ago she could have joined those retirees who imagine they are living the good life, drinking, playing shuffleboard or endless rounds of golf, and reminiscing about what used to be. Instead, she continues to use her time and talent to give meaning to her life. Her vitality and competence assure every healthy midlife woman that chronological age is meaningless; that a joyful productive life, not just a passive dependent existence is possible regardless of age.

Unfortunately, she is not doing old people a favor with her TV show “Off Their Rockers” with its premise “A troupe of senior citizens pulls pranks on unsuspecting folks.” The “unsuspecting folks” are usually embarrassed young people. The whole idea is embarrassing to a lot of us older folks, too.

One must wonder why Betty can’t see how damaging it is to the image and psyche of her peers. It’s tragic that dementia strikes so many older people, rendering them incapable of rational behavior. It’s even more tragic when old people of sound mind deliberately engage in behavior that gives the impression advanced age is synonymous with ditzy lunacy. It’s disturbing to watch the cast of her show behave like irresponsible teenagers. Watching their often-obnoxious antics is akin to hearing a dirty joke that makes you giggle but at the same time you know it’s inappropriate and you feel demeaned by the experience.

Why did Betty decide to do this show? Is it because she is so confident and so vibrant that she can’t understand that most of her audience doesn’t grasp that she is trying to spoof the pathetic stereotype of “old” and see it as confirming it instead? Or maybe she saw it as a way for older people to get more exposure on TV, or a way to get a few dollars in their pockets. Maybe she is so focused on getting a laugh that she doesn’t see the damage she’s doing.

Regardless of her reason to create this misguided show and no matter how good her reason, it’s still damaging to all of us who ever get old enough to fall prey to the “old people eventually lose it” stereotype. She is undoing the very thing that we love her for–being vibrant and funny and “with it” in her 90′s.   We appreciate and applaud Betty White. But she needs to give us respect in return. Participating in a show that’s demeaning to older people is simply not the right thing to do. In so many ways Betty could use her talent, energy, and experience to choose projects that more accurately reflect the caliber, talent and continued competence of old people.

A positive change in Betty’s choice of entertainment projects may already be happening with her new show, “Hot in Cleveland” that has more to its premise than the horrid, longstanding stereotype of “old.” In the meantime, it’s time to retire “Off Their Rockers”. It never belonged on the air in the first place.

Barbara Morris, R.Ph., Editor, Publisher Put Old on Hold Journal Barbara@PutOldonHold.com

Comment by Mary Lloyd:

Thank you for bringing this up, Barbara.  That show has been bothering me since the first (and only) episode I watched.  It is a huge disappointment to have Betty White—someone the whole country loves for doing what she’s doing for as long as she’s been doing it—playing to ageist, stupid pranks to get a laugh. 

No one would dream of making a series based on racist jokes or even “dumb blonde” or other sexist jokes.  Why is this ageist garbage deemed acceptable?

But it goes a step farther.  She—and the show’s writers—have missed an important piece of advice I got from Jonathan Winters in a writers workshop years ago.  “Good comedy laughs with people not at them.”  Off Their Rockers is makes fun of young people and presents old people as self-centered, outrageous dingbats.  It’s wrong on many levels.  How tragic that it’s still on the air. 

Mary Lloyd, author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  www.mining-silver.com.

Some folks may be feeling sorry for themselves because the Great Recession trashed their Golden Years retirement plans.  That’s as silly as being upset because the caterpillar turned into a butterfly.

We spend our working years looking forward to not working—to long lazy stretches of lying on the warm sand at a sunny beach or relaxing in a favorite recliner.  Reality is different though—100% leisure isn’t satisfying in the long haul.   Yep.  It’s a bad idea even if you can fund it.

Leisure is like salt–when you sprinkle a little on what you have cooking it brings out the flavor.  But if you try to exist on a steady diet of just salt, your meals are not only going to be very unpleasant but dangerous.

Too much salt can kill you.  That’s true of leisure as well. Leisure steals a lot of important emotional nutrients from your diet if you resort to it too often.  You don’t feel competent because you haven’t done anything to prove your mettle.  You lose confidence in yourself because you aren’t doing anything significant.  You start to ask yourself scary questions like “Why am I even here?” You lose your enthusiasm for life.  There’s no zing in doing nothing.

Leisure means you expend little, if any, effort in what you’re doing.  It is not the same as play.  Play is far more active and personal—and much more essential.  According to researcher Dr. Stuart Brown, play helps our brains develop, makes our empathy bloom, helps us navigate complex social situations, and is essential to creativity and innovation. Play is for everyone, too—not just kids.

Most of us do need more play when we retire.  Careers are built on the mantra of productivity and play is, by definition (at least by Dr. Brown), not productive.  So we don’t value play.  Stuart notes that the opposite of play isn’t work.  It’s depression.  So yes, we do need to play when we retire.  But play is active.  When you play, you are doing something.

Play is fun and we like to do it—at least once we can get past that productivity thing.  But we don’t need an exclusive diet of that either.  Play is like sugar—it sweetens up your life and makes things a lot nicer.  You need more of it than leisure—just like you use more sugar than salt in your cooking (unless you’re making dill pickles or sauerkraut).

But the real deal is flour.  (In a gluten-free environment, it’s just not wheat flour.)  You use flour—lots of it–in bread and pasta.  You use it for gravy and coating the chicken you are going to bake or—gasp!—fry. And, of course, there’s flour in cookies, cakes, and pastries.  In my kitchen analogy, the piece we need the most of, the “flour”, is work.

We need work, just like we need starch in our diets.  But just like whole grain flour is good for you and bleached white flour is not, meaningful unpaid work trumps anything you do for money that you don’t have your heart in.  The work you need when you retire should be more wholesome and more enriching—but it should be there.

Having to let go of the old Golden Years idea of retirement is probably the nicest “downside” of the economic mess we seem to finally be coming out of.  If you can’t do the leisure-centered version of retirement, rejoice.  You didn’t need all that leisure.  You need a chance to play and a chance to do meaningful work along with that leisure.  With some effort and reflection, you might be able get both of those things in work you continue to do for pay.  If that’s not possible, you can still fit them into your day with a bit of ingenuity and effort because none of the three is a 24/7 requirement.  (Only basics like breathing truly fall in that category.)

Human beings are not made to sit around the swimming pool sipping mojitos day after day.  That kind of experience is only fun as an interlude–a break between more emotionally, mentally, and physically engaging activities. A little is pleasant.  A lot is a maddening prison.

Learn to play.  Find good work.  You’ll be miles ahead of the folks who packed the car and moved to Easy Street the day they stopped working.

This article originally appeared in the April 2013 edition of Barbara Morris’s online newsletter Put Old on Hold.
*********************************
Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love. For more, please see her website.

Old has so many definitions, but what I’m looking at here is how we advance in years. And I have become a bit of a snob about it. This surprises me since a few years ago I was rather put off with a local newspaper columnist when she pronounced “I’m not interested in interviewing anyone unless they are over 70.”

Now I’m limiting my own admiration for amazing things done in advanced age, to people not over 70…or even 80. I save my awe for what folks in their 90′s are doing.

My first dose of this was a newspaper article about a local retired teacher that came out a couple months ago. This nonagenarian is just doing what she likes to do but she’s still going strong and making a huge difference to young readers with her effort.

After she retired, she decided to volunteer as a reading tutor with kids who were having problems. But as she worked with these kids, she realized the materials available weren’t what the kids really needed. So she created her own materials.

Cool, huh? That was just the start. The materials worked so well that teachers in the schools noticed and wanted the resource themselves.  So with the help of her daughter–who did the illustrations–she made them into a formal set of materials. GoPhonics was born.

When I read the article, she was just embarking on even another step–to create a program for teaching teachers how to use those materials–because that’s what is needed now. Sylvia Davison is in her 90′s. You would never know it by how she is living her life.

Just this last weekend, I read of another amazingly active person who’s less that a decade from the century mark. Fred Oldfield is has been a commercially successful artist for over three quarters of a century, specializing in Western art,but also doing a lot of murals. He still paints, but even more amazing, he’s active in teaching kids painting and in raising money to help fund art education for kids.

Don’t picture this as doddering old guy who shuffles between his easel and his bed for a few hours every day. Don’t think this guy is just the facade for other, younger volunteers.  He still rides his horse regularly and makes his way around the Heritage Center where he teaches with the ease of someone much younger. Fred Oldfield is 95.

A recent AARP interview with Dustin Hoffman reveals I’m not the only one intrigued with these outliers of continued vibrance. Hoffman mentioned two whom he’s noticed. Manoel de Oliveira is still directing at 104. And then there’s the 94-year old guy who, after finishing a triathalon, was asked if he was going to run anymore. His reply, “Oh, yeah. I got to keep going until I get old.”

That’s a funny line, but it’s also the gyst of what’s going on with these folks. They do not see themselves as “old.” And that is the best way for all of us to advance in years. How many birthdays you’ve had is completely irrelevant to what you will be happiest doing with your time, effort, and resources.

These people are all deeply interested in something and spend a lot of time and effort on it. Age is a totally useless concept for them–at least in terms of themselves. (The ones who are working with kids may have age parameters for the kids they work with, but that’s a whole different thing.)

I preach a lot about having a sense of purpose–something to do that goes beyond your personal comfort and pleasure. That is definitely an essential piece of becoming a centenarian superstar. But there’s another piece to this that we all need as well.

We need to stop thinking the “old” thoughts. When I can’t get the yogurt tab off the cup, I need to try harder not find a different snack. When something aches or I don’t have the energy, I can often make it go way if I’m not excited enough about what I am planning to do.

I want to be more like Grandma Moses–who took up painting when she could no longer do needlework. And less like my maternal grandfather who stopped doing everything when he learned he a “a heart condition.”

The more energy you use, the more you have. No matter how many candles were on your last birthday cake.  Hoffman quoting Bill Connelly about the point of the movie Quartet in which they were both involved had it right: ”Don’t die until you’re dead.”

*******************

Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, see her website.

“Aging in place” home modifications are gaining traction as a way to “get ready” for retirement.  We do need to put some thought into what it would take to be able to live our later years in the surroundings we have come to love in the decades before. But “aging in place” changes can be way too much like “getting ready to die.”  That is a terrible waste of a lot of good years.

Have you ever ended up in the “handicapped” motel room because it was all they had left when you needed a room? When this happens to me, I fret a bit about taking it when someone else might really need it.  But that slight bit of empathy is really a disguise for something much deeper.  The message that rumbles from the depths is This is not me!  I feel like I am staying in a hospital when I end up in one of those rooms.  It’s not a place I belong and I usually don’t relax very well.

Doing a bunch of “aging in place” upgrades to your home in case you might eventually need them can creat the same dissonance.

So if someone is advocating that sort of remodel before you retire so that you are “ready” if you end up infirm, please think long and hard about what’s being recommended.  How likely is it that you will end up needing those specific things?  What is your family history?  What is your health like now?  Will you enjoy your home as much with those changes as before they were made?

One of the biggest drawbacks of this approach is that it can actually drain away things that would have kept you from getting infirm in the first place.  Gardens can be extremely soothing and gardening gets you out where you can soak up vitamin D.  Running up and down the stairs every day gets your heart rate up.  Don’t stop doing stuff you like to do until you have to–whether it’s gardening or having your bedroom on an upper floor or taking three dogs for a walk–separately– every day.  Deciding that you should  have it easier now, even though you can still do all that easily means you don’t get that exercise from here on–and the exercise may have kept you healthy enough to never need any of the modifications you made.

And if you are thinking that you need to move someplace where someone else is responsible for the lawn, run the numbers before you get in line for the newest model.  Homeowners Association dues that include lawn service also include maintaining and insuring common areas and gates.  You might be able to get all the lawn service you need for less than that if you just stay where you are and pay to get it done when you need to.

Doing a bunch of modifications to “get ready” before we actually reach the point of age-related decline can be way off base with what we end up needing, too.  It might be your sight not your back that fails.  Instead of that wheelchair, you might end up having to work standing because of back problems.  So much for those lower counters!

Let’s find the right balance on this.  If you are buying or doing a major remodel, assuring there’s flexiblity in what you select so you can make changes later if you need them is probably enough. Put money aside for that possibility if you can–for a the new place you are considering or the home you’ve loved for 50 years.  That makes a lot more sense than doing a bunch of stuff you might not ever need now.

When you reach the point of decline (if you ever do), you may decide there’s a better way than continuing to live where you love now, too.  You’re not going to know what you need then until you get that far.  Trying to get it all set up before you reach that point is silly–particularly since you might never need anything at all modified!

Think about this stuff, yes.  But don’t make  a lot of changes until you know what you need to accommodate.  Instead, focus on staying vibrant as long as you can.  That’s not running away from advanced age–it’s redefining it.

*********

Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, see her website.

Mom was right. But sometimes it takes a good physical therapist to get you to heed what you were taught when you were six.  Case in point”  SIT UP STRAIGHT.  And for that matter, stand up straight, too.

For the last three weeks, I’ve been working with an amazing physical therapist to get rid of pain I’ve had in my hip for years.  I thought it was arthritis.  I thought it was hip degeneration.  I thought is was a total hip replacement in my not-too-distant future.  All I actually needed was a refresher course in what I got from mom before I went off to first grade: Slouching is not acceptable.

For Mom, it may have been the need to raise a kid who looked half way interested in what was going on.  For my physical therapist, it’s a simple solution to avoid surgery, cortisone shots, and other expensive medical procedures.

I’m living in a 66-year old body.  Things are going to hurt every once in a while.  I’m going to do dumb stuff like clobbering myself with a shovel handle or treating my finger like part of the shish kabob.  You just assume it will get better after you do that kind of thing–and it does.  Except that’s not how it works with my back.  That is not just a “wait and it will be fine” situation.  It happens a little at a time and when it starts to hurt, it’s usually not in my back.  Confusing, right?

Not if you are paying attention to what’s really going on.

The truth of the matter is that most back problems come from poor posture.  I assume that I am standing straight when I’m not, believe I’m sitting up square when I’m twisted into the curve of a too cushy chair, and that I do my work looking straight at it when at least half the time, I’m torqued around so I can do two things–or more–at once.

Believe me, being good to yourself by maintaining good posture sounds simple but is not.  It takes ongoing effort and commitment.  It doesn’t even feel natural for me to stand with my feet equally weighted because I have a very long-standing habit of weighting my left leg more.  (Thus, the pain in my right hip….)

You might not be blessed with the same luck as I had in terms of ending up with a great physical therapist.  But you might not have to if you remember this one thing:  If you are having pain on a recurring basis, check your posture.

This is one of those “easy fixes” that we don’t hear about often enough.  Back surgery is invasive and not always successful.  It’s a whole lot harder to deal with than reteaching yourself how to sit on the couch when you watch TV, how to sit at your computer, how to stand correctly.

I am living proof of how much of a difference this can make.  The first time this physical therapist coached me, my life had degenerated into long days of laying on the bed the most of the time because my leg hurt so much.  I could not walk a block.  (Yes, this is the hiker who considers anything under five miles “just a walk.”)  I was firmly convinced that it was my leg that was the problem–and I do have a genetic peculiarity that I could blame it on.  It was severe enough that I fully expected that surgery or cortisone were the only options.

But this physcial therapist would have none of that and just went to work seeing how to make the hurt move around.  Once she did that, we knew what exercise I needed to do to get the pain to go away entirely.  And it did–in a matter of a few weeks.

This second round I did the same wrong thing again–assumed the pain was not in my back.  This time, we moved a lot faster because I didn’t wait so long to get help and was ready to get to work when she said we could fix it.  Hopefully, there will be no next time since as part of this most recent work, she taught me how to localize and then centralize the pain myself.  This stuff works so well it seems like magic to me.

It is way too easy to buy in on the invasive, expensive solutions to common healthcare problems.  Before you do that for leg, back, or hip pain, see what improving your posture will do. (Others have found this also to be true for shoulders and neck.) You might be as pleasantly amazed as I am.

*************************

Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, see her website.

The “no more Mondays” version of retirement easy. Or you can “rewire,” starting a whole new ”build a success” effort with all the funthat comes from charging off in a new direction. But there’s a third option out that might suit you better.  It’s way different than just dropping out, but on the surface looks distressingly like it.  That third option:  Surrender.

The primary religions of the world all teach the idea of surrender-to stop trying to make what you want happen and accept whatever does happen with serenity instead. Of course, you don’t have to be retirement age to embrace this approach to life.  Neither Jesus or Buddha or Mohamed was wizened when the tenet of surrender became part of what they preached.  But when you retire, there’s almost a natural bridge to stepping into surrender if you have not already.  At least if you know what you are looking for.

We all can step into surrender.  For most of us, it’s not obvious or simple.  I’ve been struggling to figure out how that should work for over ten years.

Most of us got involved in climbing the career ladder instead, propelled forward by the goals and objectives we hammered out for ourselves.  That’s the ”
build your own future” version of life:  know what you want and have a plan for getting it.  You call the shots.  Work harder.  Work smarter.  Work longer.  Success is earned and it takes a lot of work and sacrifice. It’s the highly touted, socially acceptable way to succeed in our culture–to live life well.

When we retire, the career ladder disappears though.  At first, the delight of not having to worry about time is a huge plus.  But if you are still buying in on the “make your own future” version of life, eventually you start to feel like you got pushed off the merry-go-round.   The nagging thought persists:  “I need to be doing something more.”

All this is perfectly normal and the answer I’ve been giving for years is “Find a new purpose.”  That’s still what I would recommend, but in not exactly the same way.

The “career path” way to find a new purpose is akin to your previous career path efforts. List the things you believe in strongly, assess what you’re good at, and then find a way to apply the latter to the former.  That still works.  If you aren’t ready to move on from what has already worked for you, this is the approach you really do need to take.

But if you want to move beyond what you already know you can do with this question of “what’s next?”, there’s another way to go about it.  And that is to surrender to the now.  With that strategy, you don’t have a plan.  You don’t have goals.  You don’t have responsibility for making things happen.  You just live everyday awake and engaged.

Instead of your self-prescribed marching orders, you have a process: Open to what’s happening around you, watch, and wait.  As this life unfolds, you will begin to act on what comes into your life instead of trying to force certain things to be in it.  You are in the flow instead of trying to swim upstream to get to that goal.

Paying attention to what comes into your life and doing what you can with that is the sum total of what you have to “worry” about when you function at this level.  You don’t have to prove yet again that you can apply the discipline and drive to “get the job done.”  You surrender to being part of life as it is now and just live it.

This isn’t the same as the ”Golden Years” do-whatever-I-want-all-the-time version of life.  That’s a form of cheking out and it is, essentially, backwards.  When you do the Golden Years thing, you only allow in what you are already comfortable with.  That strategy means your world will get progressively smaller.

Surrendering to whatever life brings each day and living with complete awareness of it keeps your world expanding.  You don’t know what is going to come next.  You just accept your place as part of it.

This concept both intrigues and terrifies me.  I’m reassured by who I’ve become with all the effort I’ve put into making things happen.  But if I want to continue to grow, it’s time to let that go.  To just accept whatever comes into my life rather than trying to call the shots.

That is a brave–scary–new world.

************

Mary Lloyd is (at least for now) a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, see her website.

What words do you want to define your life in 2013? The right ones might make a difference in how things unfold for the next 12 months.

In the last 24 hours, I’ve come upon two different sets of “words to live by.” Both were offered as a way to improve the quality of our time here on earth.

The first set belongs to spiritual author Eckhart Tolle.  His three words are ACCEPTANCE, ENJOYMENT, ENTHUSIASM.  I like those words, even though there’s no catchy acronym for using them.  (“AEE”  sounds like a mouse is loose in the house.)

“Acceptance” is the first step in making life sizzle.  You won’t have a dime’s worth of success–or fun–if what you think you are doing doesn’t mesh with reality.

“Enjoyment” belongs on everyone’s plate, but too often, we assume someone else is supposed to dish it up for us.  What am I going to do to be sure I ENJOY my life?

And “enthusiasm”?  Well, it’s one of my favorite words, trumped only by it’s first cousin, EXUBERANCE.  Let’s hear it for being–and staying–exited!

Accept, enjoy and stay excited.  Sounds like a pretty compact recipe for a good life.  I gotta try that one.  (Again.  This set came from notes I took several years ago. How can I forget such important things so easily!)

The second set of words is from book marketing guru Brian Jud in his December newsletter.  His set has four words.  He offered them in the context of writing and selling books, but they are actually as generic as Tolle’s.  Jud’s set:  DISCOVER, ADAPT, RESPECT, EMPOWER.  (The first letters from his turn cleverly into the word:  DARE.)

He offered the words, but I’m adding my take as I present them here.  (So if you hate what I’m writing here, don’t blame Brian.)  For me, ”discover” means you need to explore what excites you and use that to keep yourself motivated.  Doing what you love is the fastest way to success no matter what you are trying to do.

“Adapt” adds the fact that you need to work within reality  Life is a lot easier if you’re working at coming up with effective ways of dealing with what’s actually going on around you instead of trying to solve what you thought was going on last year–or the year before that.

Third is “respect.”  You need to respect yourself first–and that’s Jud’s point.  But take in farther than that–do what you can to respect everyone and everything.   Respect requires equal parts  of tolerance,  humility and wisdom.  Much as it looks weak, it has great power.  Respecting others builds bridges, spans chasms, and links worlds.

With his last word, “empower”, Jud also points inward, as in “empower yourself.” That is good advice, for sure, but you can gain even more from it by taking this one farther, too.  When you empower others, your effort comes back to create even more energy for yourself.

It really doesn’t make a lot of difference if you use the nouns (ACCEPTANCE, ENJOYMENT, ENTHUSIASM) or the verbs (DISCOVER, ADAPT, RESPECT, EMPOWER).  The real key is in using something.

Much of the time, we rush around just trying to get everything done.  But when you put the daily manic effort in the context of prioritizing that comes from word maps like the two I’ve just described, life can take a calming turn.  They don’t have to be these sets of words.  Maybe those you need are ones you mine on your own.

What are you trying to do with 2013?  Bubble?  Meander?  Forge?  What words energize you when they come to mind?   Giving?  Rest?  Forgiveness?

Instead of New Years Resolutions, maybe it’s time to try a word map.

*************

Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement: Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, see her website.

Living in a gated community is supposed to be a big plus. I am currently trying to adjust to that lifestyle and I can’t find it.  When I leave in the car, I have to wait for the gate.  When I come back, I better have the remote with me or I will have to pull around to the keypad at the main entrance (which is not the most direct route to my house) and enter the “secret code”–and then wait for the gate.  If I want to go for a real walk without doing laps (which has all the allure of watching paint dry) I have to have a key.  If I don’t, I am locked in. This gate has way too much control of my life, and I dislike it intensely.

I suspected this would be the case when I agreed to live here for a year, but it’s still good to check it out.  Okay.  I’ve checked it out.  This gate sucks.  Lucky for me, it’s a temporary problem.

My simmering resentment of this gate has brought some interesting insights.  Gates have two purposes–to control what gets out or to control what gets in.  In the developer’s zeal to keep “the bad things” out around here, we are all essentially kept in–or at least required to wait while access to the rest of the world is granted.  How many of these “gate” situations am adding to my life without really thinking about them?

When I first started living here, I would just walk inside the gate because that was the obvious solution to the gate’s existence.  When I did that, I let my everyday world shrink big time. That was a very scary realization.  There I was, giving up access to things that should be in my life because of some artificial and arbitrary restricted access.

I also started seeing the world just outside the gate–which has similar houses, the same police protection, etc.–as “dangerous” simply because they were outside the gate.  Did the crime stats support that.  Not really.

The gate also severely limits who can come into my life while I am on the premises.   My friends and family have to fiddle with the keypad or call from the phone at the gate to have us let them in.  One brother used to stop at my house when he was in the neighborhood and leave his business cards in funny places if I wasn’t home.  Now, he’d have to leave it at the gate.  Delievery drivers who miss the few hours when the gate is open on  business days either have to come back or make me come get what they were supposed to deliver.  I am not seeing this as a big advantage.

Why do we have this gate?  It’s supposed to make us more secure.  The “bad people” can’t get in so we are supposedly safer.  There may be a few residents who love the ”exclusivity of it.”  I am not in that camp.  We’ve created our own little ghetto.  What is the point?

There are good places to use gates.  You need to keep the cows in.  You need to keep the baby out of the stairwell.  You need to be sure your inventory is not at the mercy of anyone who decides they need that size lumber or stone or motorcycle or bonzai tree.

But this idea that we can be kept safe from Life by a couple of gates is just plain wrong.  It’s easy to start believing that you need that protection, that going out into the world is too dangerous to attempt.  This kind of thinking–more than the real physical aging of our bodies–makes us “old.”  We worry about safety and seek the predictability of the status quo instead of searching for new adventures and fresh things to experience and learn.

It’s true, the world can be dangerous.  But it can also be wonderous and full of excitement.   Besides, that gate isn’t all that effective.

An article on the International Foundation of Protective Officers website looked at whether gated communities deter crime.  Studies they cited found only a small benefit, mostly related to car thefts.  The article noted that Neighorhood Watch programs are far more effective.

But Neighborhood Watch efforts can’t be packaged in slick real estate advertising.  We buy into that new development with the gate and stop worrying about getting to know our neighbors and staying aware of what’s going on around us when we are home.  And think we are safer because some real estate guy said so.

Gated communities are just one more way to complicate our lives while reducing their richness.  Knowing your neighbor is a whole lot more fun than waiting for a gate. Think twice before you go for the gated community–whether you’re 55, 85, or 35.

***** Mary Lloyd is a speaker and consultant and author of Supercharged Retirement:  Ditch the Rocking Chair, Trash the Remote, and Do What You Love.  For more, see her website.