Embracing My Wrinkles

So I read about this woman who hasn't laughed or smiled in forty years, even at the birth of her child. Not because she's depressed. Not because they told her to wipe the smile off her face at the Catholic school she attended as a girl. No. She made a conscious decision in her youth to keep emotions from her face because they caused wrinkles, trained herself to show no reactions. And at fifty her face, the story goes, does look surprisingly young.

But, really, are we as women that worried about wrinkles?

Yes, we are. So worried the New York Times did "an in-depth report" on the subject. So worried we inject ourselves, lift our skin and slather our faces with products touted to smooth out those creases, plump up that aging, drying skin. And globally we spend a trillion dollars or so on treatments and anti-aging products even though over and over we're told the cost isn't worth it and the sales pitches are often lies.

And it's not just our faces. There's even a bra women can wear to bed that combats cleavage wrinkles in their sleep.

On the face of it, women look like dupes. But can we be blamed? While men with wrinkles still seem vital and even attractive, wrinkled women seem plain old and used-up. I remember a friend saying that after menopause women just dry up. That horrifying image stayed with me.

Is it any wonder that the sickly-sweet saying, "wrinkles should merely indicate were smiles have been," came from a man, Mark Twain?

Is it any less of a wonder that women try to diminish, eradicate and cover up our wrinkles.We may be the generation that breaks stereotypes of aging but the marketers will be able to play on women's insecurities about wrinkles for some time yet. I'm smart enough to know there really isn't much I can do to slow time but my bathroom drawer is full of creams and serums nonetheless. I buy into those exaggerated sales pitches all the time, hoping someone, this time, has found the magic elixir.

Grey hair I am learning to accept. But wrinkles. I still can't get there.

There are, of course a limited number of practical steps we can take to keep our faces smooth - stop smoking (easy for me: I never really smoked), drink lots of water (I like water) and stay out of the sun (harder: I like the feel of sun on my skin and sometimes find sunscreens irritating.)

But where my love of life trumps my vanity is at the idea I would stop laughing and smiling. Good God. What would be the point? So I say thanks to the woman who never smiled or laughed. Maybe by laughing out loud at her I'm taking my first step to acceptance.

While I learn to love me wrinkles, to see them as Mark Twain saw his I'm not above taking joy at the story that scientists have developed a chocolate that will make my skin look younger. Eating chocolate sounds just about right: if it doesn't make me look younger at least it will improve my mood. D

Paying Attention: Vital and Hard to do

A while back I wrote about how things that matter take time, take energy. It goes without saying, or does it, that things that matter demand attention as well. And paying attention is more difficult than we realize, more complicated than expected and more connected to a meaningful life then we ever could have imagined.

The reality is that we don't really multi-task, we do one thing at a time and we switch from one thing to another. Each switch requires real physical energy in the brain and that is tiring and draining. As with any activity, the more energy you have the more you can do and unfortunately energy levels often correlate with age. So maybe in your thirties you could juggle more things than you can in your fifties. The key here, as with many things, is to calm down and keep perspective. Luckily perspective is out there.

Daniel Levitin, neuroscientist and musician at McGill University, knows a lot about how the mind works and first hit the big time as an 'Academic Superstar' with his popular science books and articles on the brain and music. His latest work on making sense of thinking in a world of information overload is smart, clear and a good overview of how our lives have changed with the explosion of information and stimuli that we now all experience daily.

But Levitin is interested in doing more than just explain. Ever since the book was published he's been on the road and on the net trying to explain to people how to take control of their attention. He likes to talk about experiments done 50 years ago and more recently about how many things we can 'keep in mind at once' and the reality is maybe 4, maybe 5. He uses a fantastic example. You are coming through the door, with mail, groceries, a coat to hang up and the keys in your hand. That's already five things and your phone rings. Something will go astray and if you are like me you will be cursing yourself about forgetting something as important as where you put your keys. You are not 'having a senior moment;' you are coping with reality.

I find the guy truly stimulating and comforting. His explanation of how the brain works is very accessible. His understanding of how to parse out the process of decision-making is simple to follow. His approach and perspective is something we could all use at every moment of our day.

He is worth checking out: as a great talk, as a good interview, as is a nice top ten tips. But check out his book as well. If we are going to be awash in information, it is good to make sure some of it is totally useful. P

Putting an End to This Winter

It is Easter Weekend and the weather is right on the edge of being truly spring and I am so anxious, so eager to be able to wander to my porch, my deck, a patio and simply enjoy a coffee with the sun beaming down and a light breeze messaging that winter is truly done.

When I was young I never understood the annual migration of 'snow-birds'. The idea that one would travel simply to escape weather, as opposed to exploring, discovering  or experiencing the unknown seemed strange and indulgent. Well, as they say, times change and opinions evolve. Over the past 15 years I have learned that knocking the heart out of winter somewhere warm is good for me, and not just because walking in snow and ice is a struggle. My body feels better, my mind relaxes, my mood soars at the feel of warmth in icy January or freezing February.

About a decade ago, Debi and I travelled to Death Valley from Toronto in March. It was bitterly cold at home but about 80 degrees Fahrenheit in Las Vegas. We picked up our rental car and headed to a Traders' Joe for supplies before heading out to the desert. We saw a Starbucks and stopped for a coffee. We sat outside with no coats and sighed heavily as we drank our tall bolds. I was hooked. And it is an addiction I never want to escape. Ever since that coffee epiphany, we have tried to ensure that some of the winter is simply escaped, and it has been worth every penny to do so.

Last weekend, we were at a winery and one of the wine makers was talking about how brutal February had been on the vines. The temperature at one point at reached minus 29 and some vineyards lost nearly 60 % of their vines. He looked at us and said grape vines were never intended to experience minus 29...we looked at each other and we both knew that humans were never meant to either and these two humans would do everything in their power not to.

The Niagara Escarpment is starting to look fuzzy from a distance, a sure sign that the trees are starting to bud, most of the snow is gone, grass is greening and there is a sense of nature stirring. We are heavily into talk about trees to plant and plants to dig up. We try to live in the moment. We do. Revelling in the unfolding of spring and summer is the priority but I am no fool. The year is cyclical, winter will return and so, a few minutes at the end of each day are spent contemplating and planning where we will be next February.

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