Mom's Advice: The Ten-Year Trick (OT)

[Ed. note: This is just a comment and reply from yesterday, but it's an idea I thought deserved "promoting." Good advice and easy (and free) to carry out. P.S. I'm feeling better now—much more energy—I don't think I realized how run-down I've been, literally for months—and will get us back on our usual track soon! —Mike]

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Jeffrey Hartge wrote (partial comment): "I trail you by about a decade in age. In many ways I see you as a mentor. Your discussions about 'mid-life crises' were invaluable for me. I was able to recognize, acknowledge and deal appropriately with the onset in my own life because of your discussions. Thank you!"

Mike replies: Glad to hear that!

My mother was a career counselor. One (of several) of her foundational pieces of advice for clients had two aspects. One was to visualize yourself and your life ten years in the future. She suggested writing down a list of objectives ("objectives" meaning intermediate or transitional goals) that might help you get to what you envisioned; and the other was to find one or more role models who are ten years further along than you are, to help you better understand what your own life might be like a decade down the line.

The idea is that we humans tend to cling to "the way we are right now" too much when it comes to our self-conception (and we tend to lack objectivity the most when it comes to ourselves). We identify too strongly with the age we are now, as if we're going to stay that way, and fail to prepare consciously and forthrightly for the inevitable next phase of our lives.

Sometimes we don't even acknowledge that we will soon be older. My mother and stepfather remodeled their "getaway" Maine farmhouse when they were 75, and constructed an office for my stepfather at the top of a custom-made, hardwood circular staircase that even I, age 53 at the time, thought was a bit perilous. A few years later he was having trouble with the stairs in their year-'round home, and by the time he was 86 or so, I was present when a physical therapist came by to give him a lesson in how to negotiate those stairs, both hands on the railing. I don't know exactly when he stopped using the treacherous circular stairs, but I'm sure it was years before they sold the farm.

I found a picture of the stairs in the real estate listing.
Beautiful, but not the sort of thing you commission
if you're looking forward to being 85.

Another example: my father, in his mid-eighties, took a brutal fall. He tripped on a seam in the sidewalk and fell off the curb, breaking his fall with...his head. It left him with a black eye the size of a hardball and alarming blood-filled bruises on half of his face. The pictures were dreadful. I sent him a "care package" with six or seven items in it, one of which was a cane. He promptly returned the cane, because he had a decades-long contempt for "feeble old guys" who have to use canes! My thought was, even if you think you're too young and virile for it now, couldn't you at least stick it in the corner? Maybe you think you don't need it now, but you're not going to be 84 forever. Fell on deaf ears.

With luck, in ten years we're going to be ten years older. And that will be a different age. So we might as well drag that fact out into the open and face it down squarely.

According to Mom's insight, I should be visualizing what I want my life to be like, where I want to be and what I want to have done, as well as preparing for whatever challenges I might face, as a 75-year-old, and I should be finding 75-year-old role models to learn from. So, Jeffrey, what you say is true of you and me might be something that all of us should do, regardless of age. At least according to Mom!

Mike
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Featured Comments from:

Ken Bennett: "Bravo to all this advice, Mike. We are lucky enough to have numerous friends who are 10–20 years older than we are, and we've been paying close attention to how they are navigating their lives. They really are role models for us as we retire and try to figure out the next chapter. The downside to having so many close friends in their 70s and 80s is, of course, that they don't stick around forever."

ugo bessi: "This reminds me of a letter of Petrarch to one of his doctors, Giovanni Dondi dell'orologio; he got this surname because he built a clock with the movements of the planets; Petrarch knew a lot of swell guys. Giovanni said: 'Now you are older; that's a big change and you should change your habits too: you should begin to believe in medicine.' Petrarch answered: 'But doctors order me to drink wine (you say water has no use in medicine), stop fasting a day a week and, horror, stop eating veggies and fruits. And meanwhile my friend Lombardo has planted in my garden the choicest cultivars. No way!'"

Hélcio J. Tagliolatto: "It's unbelievable how the situations you reported about your parents are repeated among the most diverse people. In my family it is happening now. And, yes, how hard it is for me to make that ten-year projection your mother advised, and face the fact of the inescapable limitations to come."

Omar: "My 60-year-old thoughts about the stairs and the cane:

"You effectively tried to tell your father to act his age. He instinctively knew if he did that, he would become older faster. I'm out doing things well beyond what I ever considered possible for my age (five to 10 km runs, 30 km plus trail walks on some rugged terrain, 140 km per day bike rides). I do things like put my socks on standing up to keep my balance fine tuned. It's fun now and keeps me feeling better today. But I also know pushing myself now will pay benefits years from now.

"I live in a two story house. I have thought I would want to switch to a bungalow before my agility dropped. Reflecting on your father makes me wonder about that. Climbing the stairs to go to bed will keep my ability to climb stairs much longer. Yes, at some point, no amount of determination will get me down the steps, but I suspect I will age better if I can maintain it as long as possible."

Yoshi Carroll: "The example of your father is, sadly, extremely common. Two Harvard Graduate School of Education faculty members—Professor Robert Kegan and Lecturer Lisa Lahey—have named the phenomenon The Immunity to Change. Searching for the term brings up their book, which describes a process that can make the situation visible to the people suffering from it. It's become popular, so many resources are available. The key idea is that we have open commitments, like 'I want to live a long and healthy life,' which we don't act towards because of conflicting hidden commitments like 'I don't want to feel like a "feeble old guy."' And we're more committed to our hidden commitments, often because those hidden commitments have served us well as defense mechanisms against unexamined worries and assumptions."

J T K: "Re: 'and I should be finding 75-year-old role models to learn from.' OK Mike, I am about to be 75, so using me as a template you will be...

• At the gym 5:00 a.m. every weekday morning
• Walking at 4 mph for at least 40 minutes, and doing some weightlifting
• Driving an 18 year old Lexus

"Worse than that, you will be only 5'10" tall. (And weigh 175 lbs.)"

Nick Davis: "I agree with Kirk on this. Old age is a state of mind as much as anything. I'm not trying to be 21 again but equally I flatly refuse to be 'old.' I just carry on with my life as usual. Indeed there has been a big study in Scandinavia which suggests that people who ignore their actual age and simply get on with life (even with underlying health conditions) live 6.2 years longer than people who decide they are 'old.'"

Dan Khong: "Once a fall starts to occur, it is a milestone to remind us that we have turned the corner in life. My friend, an anesthetist, has this to share, 'The fall is a harbinger of death. I lost my father three years after his first fall.' In Atul Gawande's book, Being Mortal, he wrote that people on five or more chronic medications are three times more likely to suffer falls. People who live past 85 are in 'Falls Territory.'"

Mike replies: Plus, "Hip fractures are associated with significant morbidity, mortality, loss of independence, and financial burden. In usual care, the reported 1-year mortality after sustaining a hip fracture has been estimated to be 14% to 58%." (According to this paper.) In other words, lots of people over sixty die within a year of a hip fracture. So, you don't want to break your hip. I personally experienced a sudden increase of falls in my mid-50s, so I made two responses: I started working on my balance by "walking the tightrope" on a skinny floorboard every morning (the good news: working on balance markedly improves it, at least in my experience) and I started being more careful about my footing. I fall on average only once a year now—took this year's fall just the other day in fact, because I walked down a grassy slope that was sodden with rain and didn't realize how slippery it was until it was too late to turn back. Down I went. But at least the wet hillside was soft.

Comments

[Ben]

Love it! This is fantastic advice!

Working on that next 10 years right now... Roughly two decades behind you Mike and one behind Jeffrey.

Life is pretty amazing, isn't it? We're moving through past, present, and future all at once. Hopefully cultivating a little humility along the way.

My commentary on the anecdote about your father is: Try to avoid unnecessary prejudices... they're hard to get rid of and can trip us up along the way.

[Nick Reith]

Sage advice and valuable food for thought, Mike.
Thank you.

[Wolfgang Lonien]

"With luck, in ten years we're going to be ten years older."

Never heard more truth in a single sentence :)

[Timothy Auger]

Which suggests I should now visualise myself at 85. The thing is, as you get older, your contemporaries show an ever-widening range of degrees of fitness or decrepitude. So I don’t need to look very far to see what I might be like in 10 years. There are only three guidelines that are universally helpful: take a LOT of exercise; don’t get fat; take up some occupation or pastime that makes some demands of you. Sitting on your ever-broadening backside with no obligation to do anything much is not a prescription for a long and enjoyable later life.

[James Weekes]

Those stairs remind me of a rental we used for many years in our village in Provence. Three stories of circular stairs. By the second week my outside knee was killing me. A friend had a similar staircase turning the other way and, if we visited more than once a day, my other knee would flare up.

On a side note, I was told, over there, that besides saving space, a circular staircase was much easier to defend. Just stop the first guy coming up.

[Greg Heins]

On canes: I view them as fashion accessories as much as walking aids. Although I have no need yet for a cane, when I accompany my spouse into an antique or thrift store, I look for canes. So far I have four, all quite distinct from one another and none costing more than $30. I'm ready! And willing.
Some of your readers might want to know about the "Magnus MHA-01 Monopod Handle Adapter" which is a cane handle with a 1/4-20 receptacle for your monopod. You go into someplace that won't let you bring a monopod (I'm looking at you, museums) but when you're using yours as a cane... And the fact is, it helps your footing out in the landscapes also.

[Kirk]

Ten years more is never a given. Better to enjoy the heck out of life right now, in the moment, than to endlessly prep for an eventuality that may never arrive. And which role model do you choose? The one who as mastered complacency and just survived or the one who is still channeling his adolescent self with great success?

Someone older once told me: Think young to be young.

[Bassman]

My wife and I are 71. Two years ago, we embarked on designing and building our dream house, which we finally moved into this week. One of the first and most important requirements we gave the architect: everything we need must be on the main level. Garage, kitchen, bedroom, dining room, living room, office, study. The house has a large finished basement which will be used for storage and grandkids playing, and a second floor with two guest bedrooms and an exercise room. If I can’t walk the stairs, I won’t be using the weights or treadmill anyway. The guest rooms can be used for a live-in caretaker, if it comes to that.

We expect to live here as long as we’re able to live independently.

[Kirk]

What horrible advice. In 1923 the life expectancy for an American male was 56.1 years !!!! That one would emulate the lifestyle that led to this painfully early demise would be insane. And yet, the role models were, on average, 56.1 years old WHEN THEY DIED.

Your mother did not see the advances in the science and sociology of longevity we are experiencing and was, perhaps, looking at static measures of "success."

You can do better.

In the 1960s, when I was growing up, I rarely saw any adult over 40 exercise. I never saw 60 year old men doing much more than walk around the block. Now we're seeing 90+ year olds at the Master Swimming National meets and they are performing well. We routinely see normal people, 70 and older finishing 26.1 mile marathon races. My own father was moving on his own steam into his 90s.

Perhaps parts of the country have legacy "old people" thought patterns and ingrained conceptions about aging. But I can't stress enough that you don't have to slow down, curl up and die in your 60s and 70s.

[Are you saying my mother wears army boots? :-)

Who suggested that you have to emulate any particular type of role model? Not my mother and not me. The point is to envision YOUR OWN future and pick the sort of role models who embody YOUR OWN goals. Are you saying you don't do that? You even specify some of your own role models in your brief comment: "...90+ year olds at the Master Swimming National meets and they are performing well. We routinely see normal people, 70 and older finishing 26.1 mile marathon races. My own father was moving on his own steam into his 90s." You're doing exactly what she suggested: picking role models who embody what you aspire to do and be yourself. That's the advice. --Mike]

[Brian V.]

I was away from home and out of touch. Just catching up, but here is a quote from an earlier post of yours. I don't think you can get stuff like this on other "photo" blogs--just sayin'.

"This shortchanges the transcendental nature of the poem and its mystical allusions, though. For Yeats the "indomitable Irishry" casts back to before Christianity and the ancient pagan times when mountains were the remote homes of gods. Yeats said in his Autobiography, discussing mountains, "Have not all races had their first unity from a mythology, that marries them to rock and hill?" To look into it further than my simple take on it, I'd probably counsel reading some interpretations of "Under Ben Bulben,"

[C.R. Marshall]

In her advanced years, my mother refused to use a walker. She said that they were for old people. She hobbled around using two canes. Move a cane, move a foot, move the other cane, move the other foot. I think she could have doubled her speed with a walker.

[David]

Your post is incredibly timely for me! My stepfather is 90, and he has fairly recently fallen down the stairs (all the way) and just yesterday fell flat on his face on the sidewalk . Both with very few injuries considering the severity of the falls (though he was covered in blood from the face plant, looking somewhat like an old age zombie). I told him that he is incredibly luckily but that’s going to run out some day soon. He has gone from being an incredibly active man to sometimes having a hard time getting across the room. It’s very sad and stressful for all. So thanks for this post Mike. It has really struck home!

[Bill Tyler]

About Kirk's comment, "In 1923 the life expectancy for an American male was 56.1 years !!!!" That is life expectancy at birth. Infant and childhood mortality was much higher at that time, and brought the average life expectancy at birth way down. If you made it to, say, 20, your life expectancy was much higher (unless you were involved in one of the century's wars). In 1923, there were no effective treatments for tuberculosis or many other bacterial diseases, nor were there vaccines for anything beyond smallpox. Measuring lifestyle change effects on mortality is way more complicated than just comparing average lifespans from 100 years ago with today's figures.

[Gerard Geradts]

This thing called 'sudden deafness' happened to me 6 years ago at the age of 66. It was literally sudden. One moment I could hear, next moment I lost hearing in my left ear. Not only that, but als that constant sound in my good ear:tinnitus. As a bonus the loss of balance. 3 for the price of one.
I needed a cane. I was a big fan of New Orleans singer Dr. John. He walks with a cane. Now I had an excuse to walk like Dr. John, though nobody I know, knows the guy.
Anyway, bought a second cane, because bad knees, and a third one, you know just in case, a fourth one for in my car and a fifth for on my bicycle.