Do you ever say things like:

I’m too OLD for that, or I’m too YOUNG for that?

Are you using it as an excuse not do something that you’re
actually afraid of?

Whose opinion on age most affects you?

What do you know about yourself now that was probably true
at 18 too, but you just didn’t know it?

What do you make age mean?

Are you flattered when someone enthuses they’d never have
guessed you’re the age you are?

I’m 45.  And I must tell you, I feel 45.  I really wouldn’t want to feel anything other.  In those 45 years, I have loved and been loved, had my heart broken, witnessed and felt
cruelty – and dished out a portion myself, though I didn’t recognize it as such
at the time.  I haven’t worn sunscreen or flossed as much as I should have – but have retained my teeth and have hope that the cosmetics industry will find something to redeem my creamy neglect.  I’ve thrown fabulous parties and one that no one came to.  I’ve felt ecstasy and terror.  I’ve lived for years at a time in other cultures and been able to see my own culture from a few lenses away.  I’ve gained weight, lost weight, run in races and meditated to bliss.  I’ve plunged my hand into pond silt and emerged with a frog, found a baby octopus in a tide pool, ridden a runaway elephant.  Felt like a crummy mother, felt like a good mother. Learned the hard way not to give bank details to telemarketers.   Once, with two friends, I accidentally stood stark naked in the snow in front of floor to ceiling windows to a Japanese hotel bar (long story involving a hot spring and poor sense of spatial awareness…)

In summary – I am a very rich woman.  Much richer and textured than I have ever
been before in my life.  Something tells me you are as well.  To wish to strip this away… unfathomable.

I really believe you need to marinate in life awhile before your flavours make themselves known.

I know, I know…. you want to retain the wisdom, but lose the gravitational effects on our epidermal layers.

Study after study shows that women grow more confident and less worried about what other people think of them as they get older.  We have a delightful duty to show the younger generations how vibrant, alive and powerful the movement into the deeper years is.  To live lives that are vibrant, relevant, powerful.   Beat a path of freedom and acceptance.   If we merely try to clutch on to ‘youth’ we send the message that there is nothing richer from here.

Our disservice extends not only to those above 25 – but to those below as well.  A few months ago I was speaking to a 23-year-old who suffers from acute anxiety at a party.  She truly believes that the best years of her life are already behind her.   Egads!

There is much more to write on this subject, and I encourage you to comment below.

For now, I’d like to leave you with a few people to keep in mind if you’re feeling you’re already too old to _______ :

Julia Child was 49 when her first cookbook, the runaway bestseller, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, swept America.  And 51 when she got her own tv show.

Juliette Gordon Low was 51 when she founded the Girl Scouts of America, the world’s largest educational organization for girls.

Toni Morrison, at age 62 became the first African-American woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.  Her first novel was published when she was 39.

Mary Wesley‘s first adult novel was published in 1983, when she was 71.  She became one of Britain’s most successful novelists, selling three million copies of her books, including 10 best-sellers in the last 20 years of her life.

Paula Deen started a catering company at 42, opened a hugely popular restaurant at 48.  This was after spending years confined to her home as she suffered from agoraphobia.

Mary Kay Ash began her own cosmetics company at age 45 with just US$5,000 – the company is now one of the largest direct sellers of skin care products in the world.

BAFTA winning British actress Liz Smith did not become a professional actress
until the age of 50.

Laura Ingalls Wilder became a columnist in her forties, but did not publish
her first novel in the Little House series of children’s books until her sixties.

Kenneth Grahame was born in 1859, joined the Bank of England in 1879
and rose through the ranks to become its Secretary. Although he had written
various short stories while working at the bank, it was only after his
retirement in 1908 that he published his masterpiece and final work The Wind in the Willows.

Richard Adams’ first novel, the bestseller Watership Down, was published when he was in his fifties.

Anthony Burgess, the novelist best known for A Clockwork Orange, published his first novel at age 39.

William S. Burroughs was also 39 when he published his first novel, Junky.

The Marquis de Sade published his first novel, Justine, after turning 51.

Henry Miller published his novel Tropic of Cancer at 44.

Raymond Chandler published his first short story at 45, and his first novel, The Big Sleep at 51.

Joseph Conrad was arguably one of the greatest authors in the English language. He could not speak a word of English until he was about 21. He only started writing in English at about age 32, and his first published works came out when he was 37.

Al Jarreau released his first album at age 35.

Leonard Cohen did not release his first album until he was 32 years old.

Grandma Moses’ painting career began in her seventies after abandoning a career in embroidery because of arthritis.

In business Irene Wells Pennington became best known in her nineties when she helped straighten out irregularities in her husband’s oil business after he went senile in his own 90s.

Colonel Sanders began his franchise in his sixties and can also be deemed
a late in life financial success.

In his mid-50s Taikichiro Mori founded the business that made him, for a year or two, the richest man in the world. He came from a merchant family, but had been a business professor before his 50s.

Samantha has just started a new job as a project manager.  She’s thrilled to have this job as several months between this and her last job depleted her savings account and credit card limits.  Her new boss is great, but it turns out he has just handed in his notice.  He is so absorbed with tying up loose ends, Samantha isn’t being trained properly, will soon be without a mentor and feels too insecure to show how badly she needs guidance.

Two very different people.  Two very different situations.  Both highly successful recipes for heart-throbbing stress.

Their flavours of coping differ greatly as well.  Marvin is fond of taking the long way home – never has a husband been so intent on tracking down just the right bottle of wine from a specialty shop 20 miles out of the way, or been so eager to run errands.  Once home, it’s a quick whiskey or three.  All behaviours that seems to dance around avoiding the actual problem.

Samantha gets snappy.  It’s not a great way to build connections or encourage collaboration – but when she’s feeling overwhelmed, that certain tone of voice makes people back off.  In that fleeting moment between figuring out the new computer system and reaching for her power bar lunch at the desk again – the self-recriminations and flagellations begin.

How does stress show up for you?  Think of the last time you were angry.  How much was it down to the actions of the other person, and how much was down to the piqued emotional state you were in already?  What does it look like when you feel stressed?   What do you do, how do you eat?  How would I know you were stressed?  Do you tend to meet stress with avoidance?  Do you numb it down?  Do you exercise it out?  Breathe?  Meditate?   Yell?  Call a friend?  Drive too fast? 

How does your body react?  For many, stress causes tight muscles, fluttering stomach, raised shoulders, sweat, heart palpitations, difficulty breathing and inability to focus. 

We all have personal styles of reaction – but what happens inside the body is very similar.  The adrenal glands on top of the kidneys release the chemical cortisol which gets the body ready to fight or flee.  When the threat has passed a different cocktail of biochemicals are released to calm your body and restore balance.  Home sweet homeostasis.

However, if the stress remains for too long or is continually awakened the cortisol levels in your bloodstream become destructive.  As if the discomfort and frustration weren’t enough, clarity and creativity nosedive along with productivity.  Chronic stress results in impaired cognitive performance, suppressed thyroid function, blood sugar imbalances, decreased bone density, decrease in muscle tissue, high blood pressure, lowered immunity, increased abdominal fat, lowered sexual response, higher likelihood of stroke, heart attack… the list goes on.

 Marvin tended to compound these physical effects of stress by adding a fair amount of alcohol to the mix, and worsened the emotional effects by cutting off and ignoring the source of the stress.  Rather than engaging and thus evolving the problem, in this case his relationships with wife and son, it became a catch-22.  The angrier his wife became, the more he stayed away from home and drank.  Eventually his wife filed for divorce. 

In working with Marvin, several things became clear.  While he rocked the surgery, his skills at negotiating the murky depths of intimate relationships were lacking.  He tended to alternate between agreeing with everything his wife said (afterwards feeling resentful and unheard) or becoming defensive and nasty. 

It took very little time for Marvin to learn and integrate better communication skills which allowed him to both hear and be heard at home.  These skills afforded him a bit of wiggle room for rewriting their future together, but it was slow going and left a big, unruly, and frankly frightening glut of uncertainty.  Would his wife carry through with the divorce despite the effort he was making to change?  What was going to happen with his son who seemed increasingly belligerent and sullen rather than repentant and grateful after his brush with the law?  What would starting all over look like if his marriage was over?    There were plenty of horror stories playing in his mind based on various colleagues’ marital breakdowns.

Uncertainty is a huge form of stress for just about everyone these days.  Jobs, marriages, investments – they all seem more precarious than in years past.  Health concerns loom heavy too.  Helping Marvin to ground his fears and stories about the future became top priority so he could build his future from a place of strength rather than the rubble of anxiety and chaos.

For Samantha, absenting herself was not the problem as it was with Marvin.  Prying her away from her desk was.  Somewhere along the line, Samantha shelved all sense of herself as a human being and went into ‘I Will Now Be a Machine’ mode.  If this tactic ever resulted in an efficient or productive solution, we might halve the human population overnight.

Inevitably despite because she was relentlessly embroiled in the minutiae as well as the overview of the project, nothing was getting resolved.  Deadlines were repeatedly missed.  The people Samantha was managing were bickering and as she was beginning to believe – plotting.  She hadn’t been able to make strong alliances within the team and fractures were becoming huge falling chunks. 

The first thing that helped Samantha to get this under control was scheduling a self summit each morning and evening.  This was completely on her own in quiet to allow her to see the big picture and plan accordingly.  In this oasis of calm she could decide whether to bag, barter (delegate in her case) or better each item on her enormous to do list.  Also to prioritise so she knew what needed to be done first and could clearly see who would be best to assist.  There were compulsory break times as well.  If she worked through lunch she needed to take two 10-minute breaks to walk around the block or have a coffee sitting at a cafe around the corner.  Something OUTSIDE the office. 

These breaks in action managed to create more productivity.  Bringing her human side back into the picture brought the woman who had been hired back into the project and the workplace.  Not only did getting back in touch with her strengths make for a better job, but an easier job.  She entered a flow that began strengthening ties amongst her co-workers, employers and herself.

The bottom line – there are a myriad of ways stress shows up, and a myriad of categories of mayhem it causes.  One thing is sure though – there is always a way to handle it, tame it and even grow from it.

Pleasure is an essential element – vital to our existence – to build in daily. I tend to agree with the Kama Sutra which affirms that ‘pleasures are as necessary for the well-being of the body as food.’

Nature appreciates the power of pleasure. Think about it – pleasure has ensured the survival of the human species by making food and sex activities we want to repeat. Survival has also relied on the adrenalin rush of fight or flight reflexes – but as a long term strategy fear is never your friend. Fear will move you just out of harm’s way and leave you there.

It’s what you find pleasurable that really moves you along.

Pleasure

*is a reward in and of itself

*makes both physical and intellectual exploration more likely (When is your best problem solving most likely to happen? When clenched and reliving earlier irritating conversation, plotting downfall of rude colleague, despairing of dodgy lawnmower or relaxed with a cup of tea and clear mind?)

*activates

*motivates (If there was a floating cherub who massaged my shoulders while I carried out administrative tasks, there would never be a pile of neglected receipts by my computer.)

*expands imaginative thought

*gets you out of your head (Pleasure is not a mind thing. It cannot lie. It just is.)

*brings you into the moment

*dispels tension

*reduces stress

*relaxes muscles

*gives strength and fortitude

*is good for concentration

*makes you attractive (Imagine a face filled with pleasure and then one filled with just about any other emotion and choose who you’d rather spend a starry twilight evening with.)

*makes anything it graces emotionally sustainable

Deprivation of pleasure

*tends to ravenously backfire (Think of the aftermath of restrictive diets.)

*curtails creativity, confidence and passion

*cultivates resentment and a judgemental mindset

If there were a poster boy for pleasure it would surely be Theodore Roosevelt. One of his friends famously said that life for Roosevelt was the ‘unpacking of endless Christmas stockings.’ This is not a man who was a stranger to difficulties – he was bedridden with illness for much of his childhood, lost his cherished father as a young man, and then his beloved wife and mother on the same day not very long afterwards. Pleasure did not lull him into inertia. He graduated from law school, wrote nearly 40 books, served as the 26th president of the United States and won the Nobel Peace Prize. He lived a passionate and meaningful life that frequently found him laughing and chasing his children around the White House and ensuring wildlife conservation.

Pleasure offers so many gifts, but funnily enough, many clients I see experience reluctance to and suspicion of pleasure. There is a cloud of guilt that can coalesce. Pleasure seems to get lumped together with selfishness and self-indulgence. There’s also a pernicious and weedy belief that one must suffer in order to deserve pleasure. Sometimes I hear that pleasure is a luxury to be savoured ONLY after all else is accomplished for boss, family, school, house, pet, car…. (You know the endless list.) What would Teddy say?

Cultural/familial/religious factors may have helped along these beliefs. There are psychological explanations too. Freud asserted that the suppression of a woman’s sexuality leads to further inhibition of desire and curiosity, creating a restriction on wanting and knowing that spreads throughout her life. I believe we could replace ‘woman’s sexuality’ with the more general term pleasure and have this still ring true – for both women and men. Harvard psychologist Carol Gilligan in her book, The Birth of Pleasure, points out that staying in pleasure equals staying open – which feels vulnerable. Perfectionism gets in the way. So does depression.

I’d like to take up the call of pleasure here and urge you to recognize daily doses of pleasure as the INVESTMENTS they are. Weaving mindful and guilt-free episodes of pleasure into each day not only ratchets up immediate happiness and comfort, but accrues into deep well-being and future resilience to depression, withered heartedness and cultivates an open, calm, creative mind.

Most importantly – honouring pleasure sets us on the path to our own, specific right life. Each person’s pleasure compass is unique and calibrated to their own precise self. I LOVE getting massages and kayaking, but I know many people who (how is it possible??!) don’t. Pleasure is what your native ground is made of. Pleasure is what you experience when you’re on the road to passion and fulfilment (think Teddy.) The signposts are often subtle, so I encourage you to become a connoisseur of your own pleasure. If you like cooking – what about cooking do you like best? The satisfying shomp shomp sound of the chopping, the smells, textures and colours of the food, the sharp shiny knives, sharing your food with others, the memories certain recipes bring up? The more you know yourself and recognize your own patterns and sensations of pleasure the better you’re able to draw out a map to find the source your natural creativity, strengths, talents and affinities spring from.

Feeling lost? Stuck? Angry? Sad? Begin to plot your own pleasure map. Make a love list. As the Sufi poet Rumi so eloquently spoke, ‘Let yourself be silently drawn by the strong pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.’

Think in terms of all your senses. Just as a start, here are some proven ways to bring pleasure into your daily life:

*funny films and books – anything that makes you laugh. Laughter is the best way to break up stodgy headspace. Pay attention to what it is exactly that makes you laugh. It’s fantastic info for your pleasure map.

*hot bath – preferably with scented bubbles, candles and quiet.

*fresh flowers on your desk or in your entryway greet you with colour, scent and connection to nature.

*sex – beyond the immediate and obvious physical benefits of touch and release, it strengthens connection with your partner which promises further pleasure in all sorts of directions. Scads of new research is also showing that it boosts immunity, reduces pain, reduces prostate cancer risk, helps you sleep better, enhances self-esteem and improves cardiovascular health. Make time for it!

*time with friends. Friends are the people in your life who you feel better for having spent time with. People who enjoy your company, listen to and respect who you are. They tend to reflect back the best version of yourself, and will lovingly call you out if you’ve crossed the line into an unhealthy place. If your drive home is peppered with feelings of inadequacy or other stings – revert to hot bath and start looking around for new friends.

*time in nature. 15 minutes in a park at lunchtime will do. Long hike where you might run into a fox or see hawks is even better.

*keep beautiful artwork within view

*wear soft clothing

*spend time with a dog. They are masters of pleasure.

Once you’ve listed as many pleasurable activities and sensual delights that appeal to you – start to imagine how you might intertwine them to upgrade some not so pleasurable activities. If you like the sun and woods – pack a blanket and laptop and complete some of your research/writing from outdoors. Bring your favourite tea to work with you. Play great music while you’re cleaning. If you know there’s a tough day of back to back meetings coming up – ask your child to draw a few surprise pictures to be placed in envelopes which you’ll open at different points throughout the day. Anything to please and delight you. It’s an investment.