Building Your Ageless Mind
Experiment by Experiment
This is an invitation to join me on a journey of discovery this year.
Although I’m in my late 80’s, I’m still experimenting with tools that can help me experience old age as a time of growth, which is the essential meaning of an “ageless mind.”
When I say “tools,” I’m talking about theories and activities that anyone can explore through trial and error – that is, by learning what happens when you try them out on yourself. If you’re willing to do this along with me, I believe we will make an important contribution to the study of healthful aging.
Research is the foundation on which we will build these experiments. Real-time practice will teach us what actually helps us live in healthy ways that are authentic, natural, and can be sustained because they are a good fit with our core values, strengths, and personalities.
My own goals are simple: I want to learn to be more open to new challenges, more flexible in my thinking, more focused yet playful, more able to draw on the past wisely to guide me through present uncertainties. In short, I want to cultivate a dynamic approach to life.
Your goals may be quite different. The common place where we can start is in our willingness to explore, experiment, and implement what we learn about ourselves through this process. By sharing our discoveries we’ll provide others with vivid, honest examples of the diverse ways humans can age well. Even more crucially, we will showcase the processes through which this happens, as we model our own “learning by doing.”
Because I’m a lover of the written word, I am using a notebook to document my process. Josh uses music. The music programs he creates are essential parts of our Ageless Mind Project, consciously designed to nourish mind, body, and spirit. (You can find out more about his February course, Waltzing Through Time, here.)
My contribution to our mission this year is to document my personal experiments for you and encourage you to share your own. I’ve decided to begin by exploring whether Character Strengths can be effective tools for moving closer to my goals.
What are Character Strengths? Behaviors that express some of the most universally held values in human societies, specifically Wisdom, Love, Courage, Justice, Temperance, and Transcendence. I began studying this concept back in the early 2000’s, when the field of Positive Psychology was new. I’ll be drawing on the massive research in Character Strengths and Virtues by two founders of the field, Martin Seligman and Christopher Peterson, for my inquiry. That manual has been central to my thinking as a psychotherapist and coach. Now I’d like to find out what I can learn from applying the same tool to my aging self. Stay tuned to find out what happens.
Why not get your own notebook (mine is red) — or use your phone or iPad or computer to document your own discoveries? This is a messy process, so don’t be shy about sharing half-formed thoughts in the comments. If enough of you respond, maybe we’ll want to create an easy way to talk together in real time too.
Watch for my first foray into strengths: I’ve decided to begin with Hope in my next post.
Note: For anyone who is reading about the Ageless Mind Project for the first time: my husband, Josh, and I co-founded this nonprofit over 10 years ago. Starting in the mid-1990’s. when we were in our late 50’s, we took on the care of close family members who developed various forms of dementia. As a result of those difficult experiences, we committed ourselves to learning what we could do to protect our own quality of life and brain health as we aged. We hoped to prevent -- or at least delay -- the onset of the kinds of brain diseases that had stripped our loved ones of their memories and control over their lives. Since those days, when there was little information to guide us, the research on healthy longevity has grown exponentially and is easily accessible on the internet. But a basic question still persists: what can help us consistently apply all this knowledge to our daily lives? That is the key question we try to answer through this project.
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Looking forward to the series!