Becoming 60 - Part IV

Through the end of the year - I’m writing one post a month about my thoughts on becoming 60. The theme for this month is my perception of conflict and happiness at this point in my life.

Conflict

I’ve read that many of us become less confrontational as we get older; there is a tendency to avoid conflict as much as possible. When I was in elementary school, I remember going on a family vacation and my grandparents agreeing with everything, always saying ‘whatever you want’ in response to a question about their preference. It was so different than my parents or my sisters or my own response to such questions that I noticed it and the episode stands out with clarity in my mind now. My grandparents would have been around 60 at the time. Why did they let everyone else decide what they wanted to do?

• Maybe they had decided that being on vacation with family was all that mattered - that what we actually did was of much lesser importance and it was really true that any of the choices would be equally enjoyable to them.
• Maybe they did have a preference but did not feel strongly enough about it to articulate it. All the choices were acceptable to them so they opted to let others choose.
• Maybe they felt overwhelmed by the choices - the place was new to them and they simply could not be comfortable choosing.

I never asked my grandparents about it later and they may not have even remembered the time as significant as it was in perception. I know that now that I am becoming 60 that I still make a lot of choices as I interact with other people but I also find myself being equally satisfied with several alternatives so it makes it easier for close relationships to move along with no conflict.

I am less tolerant of people that are very confrontational or are passive aggressive confrontational (seemingly agree, avoiding confrontation, and then do something completely different). During my career I was adept at diffusing conflicts of this type but I never enjoyed it. Not having to tolerate certain types of conflict may be the aspect of being post-career that I savor the most!

Happiness

A lot has been said about happiness - about how to measure it, about how people strive for happiness. At 60, what I want is not just ‘happiness’ - I want

• Meaning to living
• Comfort
• Good health
• Satisfaction
• New things to learn and experience
• Close family relationships
• Ability to contribute toward a better world
• Multiple paths into the future

There is probably more I will add to the list over time. I notice now that the things I put on the list are of longer duration than ‘happiness.’ Perhaps any emotion is too fleeting to be a goal. What if the only way we could achieve it 100% of the time was through modifying ourselves in some way….and would we still be human if we did?

Earlier posts:

Part I theme: The future looks bright

Part II theme: An interlude to choose the best for the rest of my life

Part III: Pleasures 

Becoming 60 - Part III

Through the end of the year - I’m writing one post a month about my thoughts on becoming 60. The theme for this month is about pleasure. Articulating the aspects of my life that I find pleasurable gives me added opportunity to savor how plentiful they are - which is also a way of being thankful (Isn’t that the overall theme for November with the Thanksgiving holiday coming up?).

As I started thinking about the pleasures of my days I realized that most of them are not complicated or expensive. Some of them must be sought or require effort on my part…some just happen and all I need to do is notice. Here are 5 pleasures I’m acknowledging today - November 1, 2013.

Seeing beautiful images of nature - in photographs, through a window, in paintings. Being able to capture the moment with a photograph of my own, reinforces the image in my memory. I have become a much more visual person in the past few years. I think it is caused by spending time collecting historical botanical prints (electronically) and then taking 1000s of photographs.

Sharing life experiences via conversation. I am an introvert so initial meeting of someone new is never easy for me….but I forge ahead because I enjoy the conversations that come afterwards and the possibility of new friends.

Accepting family. Everyone in my family assumes we are together for the long haul and, to make that assumption possible, accepts family members as they are. There are family members that have known me my whole life. I’ll probably outlive them. There are the ones born after me that I have known their whole life and expect that they may very well outlive me. It is the cycle of family. We don’t choose each other…but we accept. What a pleasure it is to know that there is always at least one group of the world where I will always belong!

Shopping for groceries. I usually do not like shopping; shopping for the sake of shopping is not something I do; grocery shopping is the only ‘shopping therapy’ I can imagine as a pleasure. I make sure I get to the store when it is not crowded so I can move at my own pace - which is usually brisk unless I am researching something new and taking time to read labels. I’ve added quite a few new items over the past few years: quinoa, kale, hummus, almond milk, and frozen blueberries. It takes creativity to buy the right amount of food to last a week and not buy the same things all the time.

Reading a good book. Once I admitted to being an introvert - most people should have guessed that this one would be on my list of pleasures. It is easier now that it used to be to keep good books near at hand. There are so many free books online (Internet Archive or my library) and paperbackswap  has filled up my ‘to read’ space (and I’m still working down my wish list).

Earlier posts:

Part I theme: The future looks bright

Part II theme: an interlude to choose the best for the rest of my life

Becoming 60 - Part II

Part I of this series on becoming 60 was posted almost a month ago. I was prompted to write about what I was thinking as I approached by 60th birthday this year after reading May Sarton’s book about the same time period in her life. In this second post on the topic - I am focusing on how I see this time as the staging for the rest of my life in a similar way that my early 20s were the staging time for my career. The new staging was initiated by leaving a 40 year career behind and beginning to make choices about the future I wanted rather than simply proceeding the same way my career decisions of 40 years ago directed. There are similarities between now and when I was in my early 20s: 

• Lots of decisions in a short period of time
• Perceiving an abundance of opportunities
• Good health 

There are some differences too: 

• Decisions made early in my life (like college major, when/who to marry, when/if to have children) tended to be narrowing while now the decisions tend to be broadening.
• Financial considerations were high on the list for most decisions in my 20s; now they are still a consideration but they are not major and often not limiting.
• Now I am more aware that the elders that have known me my whole life will not be there for my whole lifetime and that awareness influences my decisions about spending time with them. 

I’m not nearly at the end of the bevy of decisions but there are themes that are emerging.

Getting rid of excess baggage. The initial aspects have been in terms of my weight and the years of accumulated stuff filling up the house. But I see this theme continuing - moving to a house that is better suited to our needs (and not as large), thinking about the number and kind of vehicles we need, etc.

Building in variety. Change and life are so mingled; finding a comfortable amount of variety is probably one of the keys to happiness and, for me, I am happiest when I make choices about at least some of the changes coming my way. Continuing to taking Coursera courses - and looking for other similar learning opportunities - is one way to build in variety. Volunteering is a wonderful way to meet new people and ‘do good’ for the community at the same time. Taking classes and volunteering are probably going to be the pillars of change I choose over the next few years but  I also hope there are some happy surprises too. What if I become a grandmother?

Reducing waste. Over the past few years, I have become more conscious of waste related to lots of things - but food is the one I have done the most about. Being very aware of getting the most from the food I buy: 

• Eating food before it spoils and has to be thrown away. This requires that food is purchased in a way that it can be easily consumed within the time is fresh.
• Paying attention to food preparation so that there are few that are ‘failed’ (i.e. no burned toast, no muffins where a key ingredient was left out, etc.).
• Learning to freeze portions to eat much later if I won’t be eating it quickly enough otherwise. I’ve even learned to freeze sliced bananas if I buy too many to eat fresh (they make excellent additions to smoothies).
• Not buying non-foods (like soft drinks and other foods that have calories but no nutritional value otherwise). In my mind, these have become ‘waste’ because they have no value to my body but leave behind plastic (or aluminum). Yes - recycling is better than trash but it is still waste. Why should we even have items to recycle for non-foods? 

In the first post in the series I ended by saying that I perceived the future as bright. I’ll add to it this month: I am enthusiastic about becoming 60. It is a great age to be in 2013!

Becoming 60 - Part I

I read May Sarton’s Journal of a Solitude recently - her journal from the years leading up to her 60th birthday. Published in 1973, it was full of angst caused by the recognition of the delta between what she wanted in life and reality. She wanted to be a poet but had become more successful as a writer of journals and memoirs - and not as well-known as a writer in either genre as she had envisioned.  Her personal life had not turned out well either; she found herself living alone and realizing that her relationships with people were best in short bursts rather than full-time living in close proximity….but also feeling profoundly lonely when there was no one to share something very good (or very bad) just as it happened to her. The version of the book I read was a paperback from the 70s and the glue cracked, releasing the pages as I read. It felt symbolic of the different way I feel as I approach 60.

Letting go of old angst left from career or personal relationships is very easy for me. It flutters away like the pages falling out of the book - not forgotten but simply a part of my history. There is less of it in my life than Sarton’s although it may be that my outlook on life has always been more positive than hers. The future has always looked full of fabulous opportunities and most of the time the present does too. It helps that I have a lot of family living --- and 40+ years of marriage and a child. Sharing joy somehow increases the highs; and maybe the lows never get quite as low in the environment I’ve helped created for myself and for them.

Sarton’s descriptions of the outdoors around her house in Nelson, NH were the parts of the book where I feel the most affinity with her: the beauty seen through a window, the cycles, the fight against animals eating the garden (she had wood chucks, I have deer), and enjoying cutting flowers to bring indoors.

Sarton would live more than 20 years after writing this book but there is a foreboding in this book that implies that she views the best of her life as ‘over.’ In contrast, I see 30 or 40 years of life ahead and the tenor of my life now most resembles that time in my 20s when I was making a lot of decisions about what I wanted to be. The interlocking components of life are shifting and, in some ways, the decisions are more my own than back when I needed to choose a career that I could enjoy and support my family. What a boon the advent of Coursera and the Internet Archive has been as I indulge interests that I’ve not had time in the past 40 years to pursue as often as I wanted.

I chose a September sunrise picture to illustrate this post because I perceive the future as bright as the morning’s east horizon.