Is Grey Really the New Blonde?

Whew! I feel so much better. Actor Antonio Banderas says it's okay for women to get old. And's it unfair older actresses are pushed aside by young beauties.

Combine that with the news that grey is the new blonde - or is it the new black? - and things are looking up. Even young women are dying their hair grey. (Gray for my American friends.) Because grey hair is now cool. Actresses like Jamie Lee Curtis, Judi Dench and Helen Mirren are becoming role models for beauty. Even Lady Gaga, never one to miss a trend, has played with grey.

"Gray hair becoming a hot look for 2015," claims The Province Journal. They open the article talking about Joan Didion's appearance with her "chalk-white hair" in a spring advertising campaign for Celine. I never thought I'd live to see the name, Joan Didion, and the phrase, hot look, in the same article. Of all the adjectives I can come up with to describe one of my favourite writers  - brilliant, haunting, meticulous, fragile - hot has never been one of them.

Then Joni Mitchell, with her long white hair, was chosen as the new face of Saint Laurent. She does look kind of hot. And she's always been cool.

It's not surprising two French companies are behind this. The French with their love of women "of a certain age," are far less restrictive when it comes to standards for female beauty.

On my pessimistic days, I see this whole "grey hair is cool thing," as a trend in the fleeting meaning of the word; on my good days, as as a trend in the developing, changing meaning of the word.

I do hope it's the latter. I remember seeing both my grandmother and my mother in the last days of their lives, their white roots spreading wider on top of their dyed hair. They were both highly intelligent women; accomplished for their eras. But neither could accept grey hair even after they were eighty. So I promised myself I'd never be that woman, worrying about her hair colour to the end.

But I have worried about my grey hair, which started in my 30s, and I've done my share of hair dyes and henna rinse.. Grey hair has always seemed just another sign that it's time to ignore a woman. I'd like to think my grey hair is a sign of achievement, not coolness, a sign that I am older and wiser and live with more equanimity. And I'd like to believe others are starting to see it that way too.

I guess in the words of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, I want to see it as a sign I'm "pro-aging,"and so is it the world. D

Addendum: A reader pointed out the Julia Louis-Dreyfus advertises for Clairol so maybe she's not the best person to go around taking about accepting her age. And by the way, I'm still ambivalent about going grey and understand why other women are too. Just hope one day any woman who wants to go grey can do so without all the baggage. Oh, and I was being sarcastic about Antonio - don't believe him for a moment. D

These Things Take Time

Every morning I make a list of things I need to do that day and most times I don't get everything on the list done. When I had a full time job the lists were longer and the number of things I didn't get done each day was longer as well. My good friend, Bernie, once told me the secret was to make the list manageable, 'do-able', and have it consist of a mix of the urgent and the long term. Without doubt, he is right, I just haven't got there yet.

I ran into a friend the other day who is on a self-financed sabbatical, and I asked her how it was going and she was ecstatic, enthused and over the moon excited with how her life was unfolding during the time she was away from the office. Someone asked her how she was going to manage the re-entry to the workplace and she paused and said, "I don't know how I am going to cram work in on top of all these other things I am doing," I think I understand exactly what she means

A few years ago, before I had given any thought to changing the focus of my life, a colleague was telling me about a mutual acquaintance who had some bad health problems."She tells me she spends a good part of her life, managing being well...exercise, diet, relaxation, meditation." At first blush it seems crazy, but the reality is that being sane, being healthy, simply being requires time, focus, energy and perspective.

Every day, my list includes some writing (both paid and unpaid), some planning, some exercise, some household maintenance, some effort towards personal growth, some thought to eating and being, some reading and just being with Debi. And at the end of that list, maybe just maybe there is room and time for the spontaneous and the unexpected. All of these things are essential to life, living and being and yet for so many years all of that was crammed around and into the niches and interstices of work.

Work is not unimportant but, for too many years in our lives, work is overwhelming and intolerant of everything else. There is a reason for the phrase`work-life`balance, a reason why work and life are separate entities in the accounts book.

Ironically, since shifting into the Third Phase I have been thinking about work more and more. I have been reading about and delving into how toxic work has become, how precarious and hard to find. Our children are finding the joys, opportunities and benefits of solid well-paying careers so much harder to obtain than most of us did and that both worries and perplexes me.

I know that work is important. I know that life outside of work is vital. I know that at different phases the issues around work change and morph. Trying to put all this together is yet another project I am adding to my list.

These Comfortable Shoes Are Made For Walking

I always liked Nancy Sinatra's song, These Boots Are Made for Walking. It was the "girl power" song of its day, a great break-up revenge song. But more than that it was about walking, about how movement and walking onward, away from something, toward something, around something was powerful on its own.

I have always liked to walk. I used to have to walk to school and I loved the transition period between the classroom where the teachers often found fault with me and my home where I believed I had to be a certain way.

On my walks home I could imagine myself as someone else, rid myself of what was bothering me and feel like my own self.

Flash forward to the third phase and walking is still important, perhaps more so. I haven't lost that ability to contemplate while walking, and I feel a greater freedom than my younger self did, particularly my twenty-something self trying to walk alone in European cities without being hassled. No one bothers me much anymore.

Walking has become over the years the best way I know to discover a place. Peter knows a lot more about the mechanics of walking. In fact, he wrote the book. I've been lucky. Except for blisters and some low back pain after overdoing it, I don't have to think about the physical side of walking which leaves me free to observe people, buildings, street art and more.

And it leaves my mind free to plan new projects, get ideas from everything that is around me, look for unusual camera shots. Whenever we travel, after Peter's had enough walking for the day, I continue on, sometimes for hours. Since the latest surgery on his leg two years ago I've explored the canyons of Death Valley, the parks of Valencia, Spain, the commercials streets of Buenos Aires and the back streets of Salta, Argentina solo.

So I want to keep walking as long as I can. My daughter gave me a Fitbit for Christmas, the small device that counts your steps. I've become obsessed with reaching the 10,000 step target each day - I do that about half of my days  - even adding exercise at the end of the evening until I reach the goal. Just yesterday, I thought I forgot my Fitbit when I went to the gym and joked that there was no point in taking steps if I didn't count them.

I'll get over that, but reaching my goal is really about something else - working hard to ensure my mobility lasts a long time.

I have never been a runner but I'm trying to build up my jogging. And for the first time in my life, I approached a personal trainer to reach a point where I could run for half an hour with ease. Jacyln did a long questionnaire with me on my fitness goals. I didn't care about weight loss or sculpted arms (although they would be nice) So she gave me not particularly glamourous exercises to strengthen my gluts, upper back and core to improve my walking efficiency and my posture. She was right; they probably are the best exercises for me. Jaclyn summed up my ultimate goal this way: "You want to live independently when you're ninety."

And I guess that is what it's all about now. I don't want to stop walking, stop seeing new places with my own two feet. I want to let my mind wander freely, not have to concentrate on each step. I'll move as much as it takes now to make sure I can keep on trucking, as they said in the day, until I stop completely. D

The Happiness Problem Paradox Perspective

The Happy Face was the appetizer served to us at a vegetarian restaurant in Salta, Argentina. We had gone there searching for a meal that wasn't rooted in, centred on or consisting solely of butchered animal. As cutesy as the appetizer was the whole experience made me happy in ways that wouldn't have been possible 20, 15 or even ten years ago.

A recent issue of Maclean's Magazine, a blog on the Zoomer website and more studies than I can count all suggest that the pursuit of happiness is perhaps the most enduring of puzzles, problems and paradoxes that human beings ever invented. The key may be in the use of the word "pursuit.' Happiness can seem so personal, so difficult to quantify, that even the founding fathers of America thought safeguarding the 'pursuit of happiness' was the most any one could actually wish for. Being happy was going to be up to the individual in question. Maybe, but, then again, maybe not.

I have a confession to make. I am happy. Not crazy, smiley happy in a creepy, bizarre way, but happy. Life's good, my health is ok, my finances are not a disaster and I have a family that makes me feel all warm and fuzzy inside and I am in the third phase of my life. Strangely all of this makes me fit a statistical model in a way that both challenges and pleases me.

Having money, health and a decent relationship are all life long markers of happiness. Being poor, ill and alone are not a guarantee of misery and sadness but are often connected to unhappiness. It is the growing older and its link to happiness that most surprises. As with all scientific research, there are wrinkles and quirks but the bottom line seems to be: if you make it through the middle years intact, odds are that as you age you will be increasingly more happy. In fact, some of the research indicates that people in their 80s can often be nigh on ecstatic, or at least much happier than they were in their 30s and 40s.

But why?

Part of the answer seems to be that we grow up. Petty quarrels and arguments that enraged us in our twenties and thirties don't seem to matter as much. Arguments and scrambling over status, position and rewards lose their lustre and their weight. We seem to age into a sense of equanimity and acceptance that make life a marvel and source of wonder. We seem to become literally more mature.

I am challenged by this simply because I want to claim some responsibility for my emerging happiness, and the idea that it is simply the passage of time seems to deny the importance and need for growth and the cultivation of perspective. At the same time, I am pleased because it means that all things being equal over the years as society ages, we will become a happier country, a happier world.

I may be happy but I haven't become a pollyanna. I do understand and deeply appreciate that the qualifiers on health, finances and relationships are key and critical and that the absence of these vitally important elements of the 'good life' can render the most mature pleasant individual  a psychological basket-case. I am also cognizant of the fact that some researchers believe happiness is a con, a self-help delusion that distracts us from real social and personal problems.

But here is the key tricky part of this self awareness: I am comfortable with wrestling with these dilemmas largely because I am happy. The happiness I have discovered, developed, encountered or stumbled upon gives me the psychological and spiritual space to wrestle even deeper with the crazy-making answer to that most ubiquitous of questions...How are you doing?  I am happy even while wrestling with what that even means. P