Your Life Reimagined Winter 2014 by Don Morris

PREMIER ISSUE

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Nat Geo

Reimagined Real Possibilities

Simplify! Meet 6 families who have found balance—and bliss

Stay Sought After On the Job

Photo Assignment p.42

Live Longer Starting Now

By Dr. Sanjay Gupta

Ben Stiller’s Fantasy Life Amazing New Brain Science p.18

Reignite Your

Romance

PHOT0 CREDIT TEEKAY

LEARN TO THINK LIKE STEVE JOBS

5 Destinations to

Renew Your Spirit 1

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contents

Recreate: lifestyle 9 Iowa’s Healthy Makeover 10 How to Live the Simple Life By Gary Belsky and Deanna Cioppa

Recharge: health 16 Eat Less for Success By Brian Wansink

18 Turbo Charge Your Brain! By Allen St. John

23 Live Longer Starting Now By Dr. Sanjay Gupta

Rediscover: relationships 25 First Dog After 40 By Merrill Shindler

26 Restart Your Relationship By Pepper Schwartz

28 Older Families Find Joy Adopting Older Kids

On the Cover

The vintage car pictured is a 1974 Pontiac Grand Ville convertible. The last Grand Ville rolled off the production line the following year. Photograph by Dennis Welsh/Aurora Photos

4 Editor’s Letter

DOG DAYS The joys of owning a pooch can be even greater for a grownup.

5 Transformers Denzel Washington, Rachel Ray and other committed crusaders

41 Q&A with Ben Stiller It takes guts to try new roles, he says, but now’s the time to do it

42 Imagine If! Take a shot at your dream life for our Nat Geo Photo Assignment

By Brooke Foster

Reimagine: work 30 How to Stay in Demand on the Job By Douglas Quenqua

31 Think Like Steve Jobs By Carmine Gallo

32 Finally, Be Your Own Boss By Elizabeth MacBride and Elaine Pofeldt

33 No, I Regret Nothing By Joe Queenan

35 How Will You Measure Your Life? By Karen Dillon

Reembrace: play

CHARLES GULLUNG

36 Start Acting Like a Child! 37 Five Trips to Renew Your Spirit LifeReimagined is your gateway to what’s next. On our website you’ll find stories, videos, tips, tools and activities to help you make changes—both small and large—in your life. Visit us to discover the power of new possibilities. Go to LifeReimagined.org

By Samantha Brown

38 The Power of Play By Fred Cohn

40 Unleash Your Creativity By Dana White

LifeReimagined.org / Winter 2014 3

editor’s letter

Pioneering a New Life Phase

Editor-In-Chief Nancy Perry Graham Design Director Don Morris Editors Ken Budd, Nancie Clare Susan Crandell James Kaminsky Cate Lineberry Frank J. Yuvancic Managing Editor Matthew Goldenberg Art Directors Bob Newman, Linda Rubes Director of Photography Quentin Nardi Contributing Photo Editor Sabine Meyer Copy/Research Chief Michelle Harris Editorial Assistant Allison Beatty Contributing Editors Samantha Brown

AARP ambassador and Travel Channel host who’s visited 220 cities in 49 countries. Dan Buettner

New York Times bestselling author of The Blue Zones: Lessons for Living Longer from the People Who’ve Lived the Longest. Richard Leider

One of the world’s top-ranked executive coaches and an finding purpose. expert on ﬁ Brian Wansink

Author of the bestseller, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think.

Nancy Perry Graham Editor-In-Chief

4 2

LifeReimagined.org / Winter 2014

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COURTESY OF NANCY PERRY GRAHAM

I DON’T KNOW ABOUT YOU, but as I get older, I feel as if life is speeding up, not slowing down. My friends say the same thing. We all have lists of things we’d love to do—start our own busioff the Great ness, go snorkeling of B find a diet where Barrier Reef, fi w can eat chocolate lava cake we a still lose weight—but they and g shoved aside for all the stuf stuff get w need to do. Like answering we a those bleeping work emails, all m making sure Mom took her meds, su suffering with the kids through suf Py Pythagorean theorem, and, oh ye Facebook just sent out a yeah, re reminder that it’s your college ro roommate’s birthday. Plus, don’t for the dog food. forget Balancing Act: To spend more time different. What if we Now imagine if life could be dif with my teen, Jessica, reflect on what changes, could hit the pause button and refl I brought her on a fulfilling small or large, would make our lives more fulfi work retreat. reflections into actions? and fun? And then turn those refl When we were children, life was full of possibilities. It can be again. Thanks to longer lifespans, the old myths about aging are obsolete. We’re entering a transformational new life phase in which we choose how we live, work and play. That’s what Life Reimagined is all about. We hope you’ll enjoy the timely mix benefit of health, work and lifestyle stories, plus member benefi information, in this premier issue of Your Life Reimagined magazine. Let us know at feedback@lifereimagined.org. As an added bonus, to help start you on your journey to what’s next, we’ve teamed with National Geographic to send you on a 42. Then very special photo assignment. Read about it on page 40. come visit us at lifereimagined.org, full of rich content and tools, first step on the path toward new possibilities. I can’t to take the fi wait to hear where your dreams lead you.

Reimagined

Transformers People Who Are Reimagining Themselves & the World Around Them

These Celebs Want You

From helping vets to ﬁghting hunger—three great volunteer options from three committed stars

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: BARRY SLOAN; NBC NEWSWIRE VIA GETTY IMAGES; PRNEWSFOTO/SC JOHNSON/AP; DAVID MCHUGH/REX FEATURES/AP

A Cool Comeback At age 50, Jacki Munzel is training for the Olympic speed skating trials in December—and no, she isn’t worried about competing against younger athletes. The 20-somethings may be quick, but Munzel is tough, a grit built by passing constant tests. She overcame bulimia in her 20s—the eating disorder ended her career as a figure skater—then wrestled with regrets. “I had this gift,” she says, “and I kind of threw it in the garbage.” Munzel was known for her speed as a figure skater, so when she was 46, her daughter suggested speed skating. Smart idea: In 2012, Munzel won gold at the World Masters competition. But personal trials followed. Her New York home was pummeled by Hurricane Sandy, and in October, while training, she broke a rib and suffered a concussion in a bike accident. “It’s not going to stop me,” she says. “Most people my age have a toughness we don’t even know exists. So this is just another obstacle. You either give in, or you find the positive and work around it.” —Ken Budd

Denzel Washington The Oscar winner is a low-proﬁle donor and trustee for Fisher House (ﬁsherhouse.org), which offers housing so families can stay near hospitalized military personnel. Volunteer options: At 63 homes nationwide, jobs include delivering meals and babysitting (to give parents quiet time).

Roger Daltrey

Rachael Ray

The Who frontman supports k9connection, a group that teaches at-risk teens to train shelter dogs. Volunteer options: Everything from fostering dogs to mentoring students (k9connection.org).

Her nonproﬁt, Yum-o!, has provided meals to millions of Americans and supports the hunger-relief charity Feeding America. Volunteer options: You’ll ﬁnd a food bank locator at feedingamerica.org

LifeReimagined.org / Winter 2014 3 5 LifeReimagined.org / Winter 2014

Transformers WHO SAID IT?

My courage and my bravery at a young “ age was the thing I was bullied for, a kind of ‘Who do you think you are?’ ” ■ A. Oprah

■ B. Cher

■ C. Lady Gaga

■ D. Joan Jetson

The Power of Experience

The Master of Career Change Is…

Homer Simpson Reason: He’s worked roughly 200 jobs in 24 years (yet always returns to the nuclear plant). Résumé: Snow plow entrepreneur, beer baron, mob boss, FBI informant, founder of babyprooﬁng company (Wee Care), fortune cookie writer, Sprawl-Mart greeter, baseball mascot… Thoughts on reinvention: “All my life I’ve had one dream, to achieve my many goals.”

Unusual Way to Enjoy a Birthday Bob Blackley of North Carolina recently celebrated his 58th birthday by giving $5 bills to strangers on a street corner. His cardboard sign said: “I have a job. I have a home. Could YOU use an extra $5?”

4 LifeReimagined.org // Winter Winter 2014 6 LifeReimagined.org

MARIA BARTIROMO

SALMAN KHAN

host of CNBC’s On the Money and Wall Street Journal Report

founder of Khan Academy, an education website with 260 million viewers

HEALTH CARE IS HOT: “What’s exciting is the merger between health care and technology. We’re creating new ways to monitor our health, such as sensors that alert you before you have a heart attack. We will see an enormous buildup of companies in health care technology and explosive growth in jobs in that sector. We need to provide training for people in their 40s and 50s to learn these skills.”

KHAN’S BIG IDEA: Credentialing instead of degrees. How would it work? “Pick a sector—ﬁnancial, technology, energy—and then get ﬁve major employers to agree on what matters to them and how to test it. Administer the test four times a year and have the employers interview those who score well. It would be an ageless way of testing for skills—a more career-oriented standardized test.”

TONY HSIEH CEO of Zappos.com, an online shoes and clothing giant SIMPLEST ADVICE OF ALL to American workers over 40: “Become entrepreneurs.”

WHO SAID IT ANSWER: C

PHOTOS CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: ROB KIM/GETTY IMAGES; LARRY BUSACCA/WIREIMAGE; DAVID JOHNSON/CORBIS OUTLINE. ILLUSTRATIONS FROM TOP: FOX VIA GETTY IMAGES; STEVEN SALERNO. OPPOSITE PAGE/TRANSFORMATION EQUATION: COURTESY GEORGE RAJNA; THINKSTOCK; COURTESY AMY AND STUART PHOTOGRAPHY

These business innovators gave us their best idea for employing and empowering workers 40+

The Transformation Equation This is Lisa Niver Rajna: She lost 58 pounds while hiking and traveling through the Paciﬁc—from Australia to Asia—a journey she shares in a new e-book, Traveling in Sin.

Back on the Case When it comes to unsolved murders, Texas prosecutor Kelly Siegler and retired crime scene investigator Yolanda McClary are TV’s top reallife detectives. They obtained one guilty plea and ﬁve indictments in season one of TNT’s Cold Justice—and now they’re back for season two

Extreme NFL Makeovers

ALAN PAGE Then: Hall of Fame lineman with the Minnesota Vikings Now: Associate Justice, Minnesota Supreme Court

CLOCKWISE FROM FAR RIGHT: JOHN DOMAN/AP; CHRIS BARRETT; FOX31 DENVER, KDVR.COM; EDDY CHEN/TM & TURNER ENTERTAINMENT NETWORKS, INC.

DOUG SWIFT You are helping people heal. How has this show changed your lives? McCLARY: It’s very rewarding to help. We’re working on, ultimately, the worst cases in the world—murders that have gone unsolved. SIEGLER: Working on cold cases is an extra special challenge because they’re the ones everybody had given up on. We’re saying, “We want to look at your case again. We have the best team there is, the best lab in the whole world, but we can’t promise you anything.” So when we have to go back and say, “We didn’t get there,” it’s awful. When we did that the ﬁrst time in Arizona, we’re telling the mother and the brothers [that we didn’t solve the case], we were bawling. Everybody was crying.

We go outside and the camera guys are going, “Oh my God. That was horrible.” And I told them, “What did y’all think it was gonna be like?” What advice would you give people who want to restart their lives? SIEGLER: You have to focus on the important things, and you have to quit burning days. If you want to go back to college, if you want to leave that sorry SOB that you’re married to, if you want to [watch] your kid grow up and go to college, start. McCLARY: Truly, life is too short and you just don’t know when you leave that morning what’s really going to happen that day. Do what makes you happy. —Cate Lineberry

Then: Linebacker for the undefeated 1972 Miami Dolphins Now: Board-certiﬁed anesthesiologist

ROD SMITH Then: Record-setting Denver Broncos receiver Now: Entrepreneur who reports earnings of $30 million since 2008 from his coffee enterprise

LifeReimagined.org / Winter / Winter 2014 LifeReimagined.org 2014 5 7

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lifestyle

Recreate Recharge

DAWN J. SAGERT / THE WATERLOO COURIER

Immortal Iowa In an audacious play to become the healthiest state by 2016, Iowa is transforming itself into a giant “Blue Zone.” “People are clueless that it’s their environment making them fat, sick and unhappy,” says Dan Buettner, a National Geographic explorer who’s traveled the world identifying places— aka Blue Zones—where people live the longest. “But things can change for the better.” With Buettner’s help, Iowa Governor Terry Branstad has 15 cities incorporating Blue Zones ideas, including eating less, moving more and staying social. Nationwide, close to 20 locales have signed up for Blue Zones treatment—including Fort Worth, Texas. “Man, that’s a meat town, a big-car town,” marvels Buettner. “It just shows how fed up people are with unhealthy lifestyles.”

Member Benefits Only Beneﬁ ts Travel Discounts Savings at Outback

page 15 13

How Six Families Simplify page page10 8

Going for Zero Waste

Changing Altitude

Living Single

Subtracting Stuff

Learning to Unplug

Building a Tiny Home

page page 11 9

12 page 10

page page 13 11

14 page 12 14 page 12 page 15 13

LifeReimagined.org LifeReimagined.org // Winter Winter 2014 2014 9 7

recreate lifestyle

Live the

Simple Life! By GARY BELSKY and DEANNA CIOPPA

10 8 LifeReimagined.org LifeReimagined.org / Winter / Winter 2014

CHARLES GULLUNG

WE’VE ALL BEEN THERE. For various reasons—unrewarding job, piles of bills, towers of stuff—most of us have dreamed about starring in a self-produced reality TV show called Extreme Makeover: My Life. In it, you’ll change jobs, live simpler and spend more time with people you love doing things you really like. And then you snap out of it because, come on, who really gets to do that? The answer is: more people than you think. The “slow movement” blossomed in the wake of Carl Honoré’s 2005 book In Praise of Slowness, echoes of which turn up in 2013’s Dot Complicated, by Randi Zuckerberg, sister of Facebook’s Mark. But whatever the spark, Americans of all types are living simpler but richer lives. How did they get there? We talked to a diverse mix of these new American Dreamers to learn why and how they reimagined their lives. Here are their stories.

They headed west to live in nature PETER & DARLA LOOMIS TELLURIDE, COLORADO Peter and Darla Loomis, both 51, knew that if something sweeter than a sundae existed, it awaited them out west. For Peter, owning ﬁve ice cream franchises in the Midwest was a nice gig, but he and Darla always had one eye on a double scoop of a simpler life. They’d been thinking about it as their three kids (all from previous marriages) grew up. But after Darla sold her spa business and competitors entered Peter’s territory, the mountains beckoned brighter. “When we started dating, we realized we had the same dream,” says Darla, who married Peter 11 years ago. “This move has been on the radar for a long time.” One upside to the ice cream business is the winter hiatus. In 2007, the couple visited Telluride, Colorado, to “try on the hat.” Soon after, they sold their 4,000-squarefoot home, half of their belongings and the franchises, and moved into a small condo in Telluride. In July 2011, they bought a threebedroom house with a two-millionacre backyard owned by the U.S. Forest Service. When Darla isn’t working as spa director at a local resort, and Peter isn’t running his vacation rental business, they take full advantage of the wilderness: hiking and biking, skiing and ﬁshing. As for Telluride’s higher costs, “You don’t spend entertainment money here,” says Darla. “Everything you do for fun is in nature.” Do they miss their old lives? Sometimes. Are they happy with their decision? Always. Says Darla, “You have to let go of the old to create the new.”

recreate lifestyle

She used her divorce to start simplifying LINDA NG / BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

12 LifeReimagined.org 10 LifeReimagined.org / Winter / Winter 2014

whole life,” says Ng. “So it’s taking a while to adjust.” Ng didn’t bring many old possessions with her, instead buying foldable and multi-use furniture: a dining table with built-in drawers, a bed with storage, a sleeper sofa. Much of her wardrobe and her small electronics are gone too. And her huge CD collection, accumulated during years working in the music biz, is being transferred to an external hard drive, so the discs can be sold. The most difﬁcult downsizing decision was her car. But when the registration and insurance came due, Ng decided to let go. “I had an emotional attachment to the car

because I’d had it for 10 years,” she says, laughing. “But it would save me $3,000 or more, which I could use elsewhere—like on a nice vacation with the girls.” In fact, simpler living is a family affair for the Ng household. Sophia and Olivia use the library rather than buy new books to keep the clutter down. And when their doll collections began to get out of hand, they selected some to donate. “They weren’t reluctant at all,” says Ng. “They were happy to give them up.” Whether their generosity stems from altruism or doll overload, Ng isn’t quite sure. But with space at a premium, she says, “I’m not asking.”

THIS PAGE: JOHN DOLAN; OPPOSITE: STEPHANIE RAUSSER

By late 2012, Linda Ng, an executive assistant at ESPN in New York City, knew she needed to consolidate— and quickly. The 43-year-old, in the middle of a divorce, had to vacate the apartment in Manhattan’s Chinatown where she and her soonto-be ex-husband were raising their young daughters, Sophia and Olivia. And, like a lot of women in her position, Ng was suddenly on a tight budget. That meant ﬁnding new digs she could afford that were close enough to the girls’ schools so they wouldn’t have to transfer. This past June, mom and daughters moved into a small two-bedroom in Brooklyn. “I’d lived in Chinatown my

They want not because they waste not BÉA & SCOTT JOHNSON / SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA For Béa and Scott Johnson, the road to zero waste started with the problem of zero downtime. Béa, 39, and Scott, 50, were living in a large home outside San Francisco with their two young sons, Léo and Max. Problem is, they spent the better part of their days driving everywhere. So, while they looked for a house in a nearby ’burb close to public transportation where they could walk or ride most places, they rented, moving in with the essentials and storing the rest. It was a gamechanger. “Living with less gave us the time to live more,” says Béa.

The home they eventually bought was half the size of their old one, so they purged 80 percent of their belongings. As the Johnsons learned more about the environmental impact of material goods, “It really made us sad for our kids’ future,” says Béa. The family went to war against waste. Scott became a sustainability consultant (he now works in green IT for IBM) and Béa manages the house, stocking up on reusable totes and mugs and bringing containers to the market to shop from the bulk bins. Today the Johnsons are ruled by the 5 Rs: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”

plus “Refuse” (say “no” to new stuff) and “Rot” (composting). They have one car (a second-hand Prius), use only small appliances and clean with white vinegar and castile soap. Even Béa’s makeup is zero-waste: beet juice lipstick and cocoa powder blush. She ﬁgures eco-friendliness has cut costs by 40 percent. “The hardest thing is ignoring what society says you have to keep,” says Béa. Her advice? Don’t let stuff into your house in the ﬁrst place. “People keep things because we think, ‘What if we need it?’ The more important question is: ‘What if we don’t?’”

LifeReimagined.com / Month 2013 11

Tiny home sweet home JEFF & ARLENE HEMSLEY SEATTLE, WASHINGTON

14 12 LifeReimagined.org LifeReimagined.com// Winter LifeReimagined.org /Winter Month2014 2013

He downsized his digital life KONRAD RIBEIRO / LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA New Year’s Eve 2011 was a low point for Konrad Ribeiro. The 42-year-old Google sales rep was facing what was once a favorite holiday alone following a breakup. But Ribeiro was resolved: “I’m going to make 2012 the best year of my life,” he decided. Social media, he realized, was a big cause of his dissatisfaction. Like a lot of us, Ribeiro was spending more time than he wanted on Facebook, a fact driven home when Frankie, his 8-year old daughter whose custody he shares, asked him to play and he put her off. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m not on the monkey bars because I want to look at somebody’s Mexican food,’” he says. It sent Ribeiro back to his past as a brand manager. “I had to deﬁne my own brand,” he says. The mission: Focus on doing the things that matter with the people who matter. So Ribeiro cut the social media cord. It wasn’t smooth, but soon his real-life connections improved. And the convert began to spread the word, proselytizing at, of all places, Google. Recently, he hosted a “Slow Down Saturday”— where people could drop in for chats, games, food, maybe even a nap. No TV, phone or social media allowed. Says Ribeiro: “The top comment was: ‘That’s how we used to hang out!’”

THIS PAGE, TOP LEFT: COURTESY OF JEFF HEMSLEY (3); BOTTOM RIGHT: COURTESY OF KONRAD RIBEIRO; OPPOSITE: JEN JUDGE

Jeff and Arlene Hemsley don’t mind being called small-minded: For the past four years they’ve been living in just 160 square feet. In 2009, the Hemsleys reached a turning point. Jeff, now 47, wanted to go back to school. Arlene wanted to kick start her art career. “We wanted to make changes,” Arlene, 50, says. “We looked to see where we could cut so that we’d have the freedom to make those changes.” They settled on a “tiny home” on rented land near Jeff’s school in Seattle. The tiny home movement is growing among Americans looking to save, live simply and/or reduce their eco-footprint. According to thetinylife.com, the average tiny home—from 100 to 400 square feet—costs about $23,000, which explains why nearly 78 percent of owners don’t have a mortgage. During the six months it took to build their home, they had to purge possessions: keeping only 100 items from their 700-square-foot apartment. “We don’t want to have to do that again,” she says. To ensure they won’t, every item coming into their home must pass a philosophical threshold along with the real one. “Our rule,” says Arlene, “is that if we bring something in, something needs to leave.” The rewards of extreme downsizing have been worth it. “We’ve learned a lot about ourselves,” Arlene says, adding without irony, “We’ve become much closer.”

recreate lifestyle

The plus side of subtraction KIMBERLAND & MICHAEL HERNANDEZ / PHOENIX, ARIZONA When Kimberland and Michael Hernandez decided to rent out their 3,000-square-foot Phoenix house and move to a smaller space, Kimberland approached downsizing armed with notebook and pen. The 45-year-old public school teacher mapped out nearly 20 “zones.” Then, she and Michael catalogued every item: keep, sell or donate. “We’d think about whether we really needed it or if it was an emotional attachment,” says Kimberland. It was time consuming, but the Hernandezes kept their eyes on the prize: a two-bedroom place within walking distance of downtown Phoenix. Bonus: freedom to travel when they want. “What really started it was me thinking ‘I’m tired of cleaning this big house,’” says Kimberland, whose two sons are on their own. “Now that it’s just my

husband and me and the dogs, we’re ready to spend weekends away just because we can.” The more she thought about it, the more intense the desire to clear the decks became. She and Michael are down to living room furniture, one bedroom set, dinette table, armoire and guest bed. Kimberland has culled to a few suits, outﬁts for her social life and yoga duds.

Everything else? Out the door. The Hernandezes hope to be in their new home by the end of 2013. (For now, they’re renting in downtown Phoenix.) Until then, Kimberland will continue to scale back. In fact, her zeal might be getting the best of her. “I’m looking at my dogs like, ‘Hmm, if I didn’t have two I really could do some other things.’”

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health

( just a little )

Eat Less for Success BY BRIAN WANSINK How many pounds would you have to lose to feel happy about your weight? As Director of Cornell’s Food and Brand Lab, I’ve asked thousands of people of all shapes and sizes that very question. According to our recent survey, four out of five five folks would be thrilled to lose 16 pounds or less. That’s doable! And you won’t need to eat cork-flavored cork-flavored rice cakes—just eat 200 fewer calories a day. We recently discovered two helpful snack facts: Just a taste will satisfy. How much chocolate and potato chips are enough? Only a quarter as much as you think. We gave one group of 104 adults either regular-size portions of candy, apple pie or chips, or just a couple of small bites of the same snacks. Fifteen minutes later both groups were equally satisfied. satisfied. The secret: After just two bites, do something to distract yourself. Cheese and veggies are the new chips. Cheese sticks aren’t just for kids. When we gave 201 Chicago women all of the chips or cheese and raw cut veggies they could eat, those with cheese and veggies ate 61 percent fewer calories—but they were just as content. This healthy combo takes longer to eat, has more texture and is more fun to munch. Try it a couple of times a week.

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Brain Science: How to Shift Exploring Your Mind into New Frontiers High Gear!

LifeReimagined.org / Winter 2014

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You Can Live Longer— Starting Now page page23 21

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Experienced drivers like you deserve benefits designed especially for you. No wonder this is the only auto insurance program endorsed by AARP for the past 29 years! * Savings amounts are based on information from The Hartford’s AARP Auto Insurance Program customers who became new auto insurance policy holders between 7/1/12 and 6/30/13 and provided data regarding their savings and prior carrier. Your savings may vary. † If you are age 50 or older, once you’re insured through this program for at least 60 days, you cannot be refused renewal as long as applicable premiums are paid when due. Also, you and other customary drivers of your vehicles must retain valid licenses, remain physically and mentally capable of operating an automobile, have no convictions for driving while intoxicated and must not have obtained your policy through material misrepresentation. Benefit currently not available in HI, MI, NH and NC. § Availability of RecoverCare benefit and benefit levels vary by state. The AARP Automobile Insurance Program from The Hartford is underwritten by Hartford Fire Insurance Company and its affiliates; One Hartford Plaza, Hartford, CT 06155. CA License #5152. In Washington, the Program is underwritten by Hartford Casualty Insurance Company.In Michigan, the Program is underwritten by Trumbull Insurance Company. AARP and its affiliates are not insurers. Paid endorsement. The Hartford pays royalty fees to AARP for the use of its intellectual property. These fees are used for the general purposes of AARP. AARP membership is required for program eligibility in most states. Specific features, credits and discounts may vary and may not be available in all states in accordance with state filings and applicable law. Applicants are individually underwritten and some may not qualify. The Program is currently unavailable in Massachusetts, Canada and U.S. Territories or possessions. All first time responders receive the free gift. Please allow 4-6 weeks for delivery. The free gift is not available in GA, ND or NM, but residents may still request a quote. 1 In Texas, the Program is underwritten by Southern County Mutual Insurance Company through Hartford Fire General Agency. Hartford Fire Insurance Company and its affiliates are not financially responsible for insurance products underwritten and issued by Southern County Mutual Insurance Company.

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recharge health

Scientists are racing to unlock the mysteries of the midlife mind. Can they help us turn back our neurological clocks? By ALLEN ST. JOHN

NLY A DECADE OR SO AGO, scientists viewed the human brain as a closed-system supercomputer with many mysteries and one certainty: it works less well as you get older. After a person passes their mid-20s, the conventional wisdom went, brain cells begin sloughing off and neurological function goes into a downward spiral. In middle age, short-term memory becomes maddeningly elusive, cognitive abilities slowly become impaired and plasticity and “sponginess”–the abilities to take on new challenges and learn new things–start going the way of dial-up modems. Well guess what? It wasn’t quite true. Scientists now know that the midlife brain is infinitely more resilient then originally believed. But that doesn’t mean it couldn’t use a boost. As the number of boomers over 50 continues to swell, a frenzy of highstakes research is underway to not just maintain the aging mind, but to jumpstart it. It’s a race that pits maverick self-experimenters against the biggest names in science. To some it has become an obsessional quest. The prize? Nothing less than the ability to turn back the mental clock, to

ILLUSTRATION BY EDEL RODRIGUEZ

remember, think, learn, take on new tasks and create like you did when you were 20. Just this past year, medical papers from several different labs reported breakthrough discoveries that are revolutionizing our understanding of how middle-life brains work. Such findings, combined with advancements in delivery systems like cutting-edge drugs, electrical stimulation and possibly even surgical intervention, hold the promise of boosting our brains in ways that were once confined to science fiction. Some areas of research will likely lead to dead ends. But others may come to fundamentally change the way we age, and the way we think. LifeReimagined.org / Winter 2014 19

THE LAB BREAKTHROUGHS

Brains Grow Younger “i was speechless,” says Columbia University researcher Elias Pavlopoulos, recalling the moment he first saw data from his department’s clinical study on aging. “I didn’t believe the results.” What the spreadsheet revealed was a breakthrough so big that Pavlopoulos was reluctant to show it to his boss, neuroscientist Eric Kandel. But sure enough, the numbers showed that brains of 15 elderly mice had, in fact, aged in reverse. If there’s a Eureka moment in neuroscience, it would have to look a lot like this. “I think it’s very encouraging,” deadpans Kandel, who won the Nobel in 2000 for his work on memory. The work began in 2008, as Kandel’s team targeted a specific protein found in the hippocampus, a part of the brain responsible for memory. They discovered that “RbAp48” is abundant in a young person’s brain and scarce in older brains. In initial animal trials in 2010, Pavlopoulos suppressed this protein in young mice by neutralizing the dentate gyrus, a portion of the hippocampus afected by aging but not by Alzheimer’s. The result? Their brains aged instantly. Memory went straight to hell as in older rodents. This in itself was a monumental finding. Mice can’t become naturally aficted by Alzheimer’s, so the mere fact that scientists were able to in20 18 LifeReimagined.org LifeReimagined.org / Winter / Winter 2014

duce age-related memory loss told the team that such declines operated in a diferent part of the brain. “It told us for the first time that those two things have to be mechanistically distinct,” explains Scott Small, one of the neurologists working on the study. The near-miracle occurred when Kandel’s team did the opposite, boosting the protein in elderly mice. Amazingly, the once-doddering, memory-impaired mice—equivalent to 60+ year old humans—scampered again like youngsters. Usually when a new object is placed in a cage, young mice clamber over it with curiosity and then ignore it; older mice with memory loss forget they’ve seen it and check it over and over. But the turbo-charged older mice ignored the toys just like the young’uns. Can these benefits be transferred to humans? That’s what the Columbia team is now trying to figure out. Wonders Small: “Is there a behavioral or drug intervention that will boost the dentate gyrus and reverse memory loss?” Kandel is optimistic. “Our research shows that age-related memory loss is treatable,” he says. Meanwhile at MIT this past summer there was a second breakthrough: Researchers working with another Nobel winner, Susumu Tonegawa, were able to implant Matrix-like “false memories” in mice by manipulating cells in the hippocampus (they implanted a fear response to certain stimuli). In the process researchers were able to pinpoint a crucial spot in the brain—the engram—where a memory is formed. The study supplies another key puzzle piece in the understanding of how memory works. (It also suggests that false memories are chemically identical to real ones, which is scary.) It’s a long way from mouse research to some kind of treatment that could boost your brain to what it was like when you were in college. But

these top researchers are ﬁnding reasons for optimism. “We have the tools now,” says Columbia’s Pavlopoulos. “I’m 42, and I hope I’ll have something speciﬁc to reverse memory loss I can take or do by the time I’m 50.”

THE ELECTRICAL OPTION

The Sci-Fi Cerebrum peop)e(ave been str v ng to harness electricity to boost brainpower at least as long as they’ve been gulping down potions for the same purpose. Around A.D. 47, Scribonius Largus, court physician to Roman emperor Claudius, had headache-plagued patients stand on live torpedo fish to gain benefits from the creatures’ electrical shocks. Paralysis and death took their tolls on his outpatient roster, but they hardly deterred future scientists, who have been experimenting with live current on human brains ever since. To view the state of the art in Cranial Electrotherapy Stimulation (CES)–aka “electrostim”–one need only head to the Harvard lab of Alvaro Pascual-Leone, one of the field’s pioneers. The place looks like

PACO GOMEZ GARCIA/GETTY IMAGES

recharge health a 12-year-old’s sci-fi fantasy, packed with truck-sized scanners and mysterious electrode-laden machines. The dazzling tech display is fitting, since Pascual-Leone sees the brain as a piece of electronics— one whose performance can be dramatically improved by cranking up the voltage. At its core, what the 52-year-old neurologist does is tantalizingly simple, in a Clockwork Orange sort of way. He attaches a pair of electrodes directly to patients’ heads, targets the proper area through PET or MRI scans, turns on a tiny current —barely enough to keep your phone charged— and, for a time, modifies the mind’s motherboard. The big idea: the brain consists of trillions of electrical circuits made up of special cells called neurons, and once they’ve been fired up, it takes less energy to fire them again. This, at its most granular level, is how learning happens. “We know that by repeatedly inducing a change in the brain, you can make that change last,” says PascualLeone. “It’s like taking a sled down a snowy hill. The first run is slow and bumpy, but each subsequent run is smoother and faster. When you’ve gone down 50 times, you’ve created a deep groove.” Many people currently receiving treatments at labs like PascualLeone’s have severe impairments like depression or early-onset dementia. Although negative side efects have so far been rare, the technology is still considered too experimental for the masses looking for a quick bump. But that promises to change as electrostim continues its rapid-fire evolution. Better imaging techniques allow current to be targeted more precisely, and stim methods now range from transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), in which weak, constant currents are sent through your skull, to transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), with focused pulses.

Easy (and Kind of Fun) Ways to Boost Your Brain...Right Now!

Get Sweaty Hey pal, take a walk. Or a run. Recent research by University of Illinois neuroscientist Art Kramer conﬁrmed that aerobic exercise has an astounding effect on midlife brains. Kramer discovered that the hippocampus, a part of the brain that involves memory and learning, gets bigger during aerobic activity due to increased blood ﬂow. “It really is a magic bullet,” he says.

Tango Down There’s a natural tendency to ﬂock to the familiar; ﬁght it, says Harvard neurologist Alvaro Pascual-Leone. He says that the best noninvasive way to boost brain function is to learn new skills, the more unfamiliar the better. Taking on tango lessons or Estonian songwriting can carve new neural pathways, while doing familiar activities merely strengthens existing ones.

Cop ’Tude That’s the surprising takeaway from the most comprehensive behavioral study of the maturing brain ever undertaken. Brandeis University professor Margie Lachman found that subjects who strongly believed they could control—or stave off—the mental effects of aging actually retained signiﬁcantly more information than those who had laissez-faire attitudes. Lachman suggests these subjects are more likely to make lifestyle changes that promote brain health—like the ones you’re reading.

Play Hard A slew of research studies have indicated that neural growth in middle-aged brains can come from regularly playing tough logic and strategy games, whether in the real world (chess, anyone?) or virtual one (ﬁnd a variety of free, online brain-boosting games at aarp.org/2staysharp).

Sleep In University of Rochester research studies suggest that sleep has a big role in cleansing your brain of harmful, protein-based waste products that have been implicated in Alzheimer’s. Aim for seven hours a night. One specialist suggests making the bedroom a light-free zone by placing duct tape over LED light sources on everything from cable boxes to alarms.

Eat Smart Ditch trans fats (they decrease brain volume over time), cut back processed foods (which boost “bad” LDL cholesterol levels linked to impaired memory) and binge instead on brain-healthy foods like brightly colored fruits and dark-green veggies, nuts and legumes, olive oil and foods rich in “good fat” omega-3s like ﬁsh. Drink Up Researchers in Eric Kandel’s Columbia University lab are investigating ﬂavonoids as a possible way to boost key proteins that wane in the aging brain. They’re found in many foods including blueberries, dark chocolate, and thank God, red wine.

LifeReimagined.org / Winter LifeReimagined.com / Winter 2014 2014 21 19

recharge health One reason scientists believe electrostim holds so much eventual promise: Its efects seem to last. A 2010 study conducted at Oxford revealed that subjects who received 20 minutes of electrostim were able to recall complex numbers substantially better than a control group. When the subjects were retested six months later, the gap continued. Electrostim is proving to be sticky, like old-school learning, regardless of the brain’s age. For all of its power, an electrostim session only takes 20 minutes or so, and is less invasive than a dental cleaning. That’s why some adventurous if ill-advised brain hackers are taking matters into their own hands. For 300 bucks, they can buy an iPodsized self-stim device that runs on a 9-volt battery. “It kicks butt,” says Dave Siever, an entrepreneur who sells them on the Internet. Siever uses a unit to treat his depression and even help him learn to sing on key. “I am extremely wary of that stuf,” says Pascual-Leone. Placing the leads in the wrong place could impede brain function, he says, even triggering neurological conditions like ADHD. But if it can avoid being derailed by this DIY movement, Pascual-Leone holds to his vision of a future in which using electrostim to enhance the mind might be as common as taking a pill. Does he foresee a day soon when he’ll be using stim daily to boost his own aging brain? “Absolutely,” he says.

THE PHARMA APPROACH

Botox for the Brain in the 2011 flick Limitless, ordinary schlub writer Bradley Cooper takes a near-magical smart drug dubbed NZT-48 and finds himself instantly smarter and able to absorb complex ideas in a few blinks of his baby blues. “Did you see that movie?” Dave Asprey, 41, asks in the conspiratorial tone that has made him a star in the bio-hacking community—a growing group of people dedicated to upgrading their biology through medical and tech means, some frowned upon by the FDA. “The filmmakers must have tried it—they got so much right.” “It” is Provigil, today’s smart drug of choice, and Asprey’s first line of attack in his war against brain aging. After success as an entrepreneur, he’s spent 15 years using himself as a guinea pig for neuro-enhancement. He’s

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22 LifeReimagined.org 20 LifeReimagined.org / Winter / Winter 2014

become a poster child for Provigil, the real drug given ﬁctional treatment in Limitless. “I’m faster and better on Provigil,” contends Asprey. It’s the latest in an ongoing quest to ﬁnd chemicals delivering a true mental edge. Freud thought of cocaine as a “magical” brain enhancer making users “resistant to privation and fatigue.” (Spoiler: he was wrong.) Most recently, amphetamine-based ADHD medications like Adderall have been used “of label” as neuroenhancers despite major side efects. Provigil was originally prescribed to treat narcolepsy by afecting the brain’s uptake of dopamine, but of-label users claimed it made them sharper and better able to concentrate, with less of Adderall’s speediness. One advocate, a New York-based exec in his early 50s, says the drug “makes me feel way smarter and more alert. It’s a leg up that I feel I really need right now.” So why don’t we all just pop a Provigil and call it a day? “It’s ‘cosmetic neurology,’” says Anjan Chatterjee, a University of Pennsylvania neurologist, author of The Aesthetic Brain. Chatterjee notes that the efcacy of drugs like Provigil is limited, sort of like Botox for the brain. They work while you’re taking them. They stop when you don’t. Is it possible to create a compound that has a profound long-term impact on middle-aged brains? A few newer drugs show promise. Cholinesterase inhibitors, used to treat Alzheimer’s, have shown success boosting cognition in younger patients. And ampakines, a class of meds still in the pipeline that treat memory loss by targeting the brain’s glutamate receptors, raise short-term memory as well. For now, it remains the Holy Grail of Big Pharma: a pill that can make us smarter and better, and cut aging down in its tracks. The challenges are vast. So are the upsides.

Feel Better by Friday My patients frequently ask: “What can I do to live longer?” The answer can be found a day at a time. Here’s my weekly plan BY DR. SANJAY GUPTA

“Set your alarm a few minutes early and begin your day with meditation.”

SUNDAY: Meditate

Set your alarm a few minutes early and begin your day with meditation. I started a few years ago, and now you might ﬁnd me meditating on planes or even the locker room at the hospital. In my experience, it leads to more patience and clarity of thought. You’ll want to ramp up to an hour a day. Today, try six minutes. Start by laying down on the ﬂoor or bed in the yoga position beguilingly called the “corpse pose.” Spread your arms and legs so that your body is roughly the shape of the letter A. Breathe deeply and, as you exhale, repeat a single word or sound, like “peace” or “ahhhhh.” (Mine is “gentle.”) You should emerge from this exercise with lower levels of cortisol, a stress hormone that’s a known life-extender.

COURTESY JEFF HUTCHENS/CNN

MONDAY: Stand Up

Today your goal is to spend fewer hours sitting. Make your chair the enemy. A recent study in JAMA Internal Medicine found that the longer you sit during a day, the greater your chances of dying of any cause, regardless of how physically active you are. The human body wasn’t designed to sit still all day. If you usually look for a seat on the subway or bus, stand instead. And consider investing in a wireless headset for your phone at work; I pace during all long calls.

TUESDAY: Eat Nuts and Fish

Living longer doesn’t require a drastic diet overhaul. Instead, start with this simple step: Keep a journal of the times during the day when you’re most likely to reach for unhealthy snacks, and make sure you have some nuts close by. Almonds, pecans and pistachios are among the nuts full of mono-unsaturated fats, which are great for cardiovascular health. And walnuts are a fantastic source of omega-3 fatty acids. So are ﬁsh—so stock up on salmon. A recent study in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that people with the highest blood levels of omega-3 from seafood lived 2.2 years longer on average than those with lower levels.

work, take an invigorating bike ride, or take the stairs instead of elevators. Better yet, run up those stairs. The Copenhagen City Heart Study found that people who jogged regularly lived about six years longer. THURSDAY: ❤ Your Heart

In addition to nuts and ﬁsh, the cornerstones of the Mediterranean diet are fruits, vegetables, beans, olive oil and red wine. The New England Journal of Medicine found that following this diet lowers the risk for heart attack and stroke by 30 percent in high-risk people. Add a cup of lentils to a salad and then drizzle it with olive oil. Or replace skirt steak with salmon. The key is to avoid going Mediterranean for a meal, only to be gluttonous the rest of the day.

WEDNESDAY: Break A Sweat

Regardless of your age or physical condition, daily exercise will improve your cardiac endurance, your lung capacity and your life. I’m an advocate of resistance training for everyone: Even my 70-year-old mother lifts weights every other day. Exercise slows the loss of muscle mass and even helps stave of depression. Start small: Bring resistance bands to

FRIDAY: Party!

Being social is more then just fun: It adds years to your life. Call up an old friend and catch up over the phone— or maybe on a walking date. And if you’re going out tonight with friends, have a glass of red wine. Make a toast to your healthy week. Take Saturday of (within limits, of course). Then start over again on Sunday. LifeReimagined.org / Winter 23 LifeReimagined.org / Winter 2014 2014 21

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The AARP Mobile Home Insurance Program is unavailable in Florida’s Atlantic and Gulf Coasts. Both programs are unavailable in some areas of the country, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Foremost Express Insurance Agency, Inc. is a subsidiary of FCOA, LLC, and Foremost Express is a registered trademark of FCOA, LLC. Foremost Insurance Company Grand Rapids, Michigan, Foremost Property and Casualty Insurance Company, Foremost County Mutual Insurance Company, 5600 Beech Tree Lane, Caledonia, MI 49316. 9009585 12/13 Foremost Insurance Company pays royalty fees to AARP for the use of its intellectual property. These fees are used for the general purposes of AARP. AARP and its afﬁliates are not insurers.

Rediscover Recharge

relationships First Dog After 40 I did not grow up with dogs. My mother said animals carried disease. Decades passed. One day a friend said he had seen the most amazing dog, dog, that someone had found. found. My friend said, “The eyes, you won’t believe the eyes.” He had the most soulful eyes I’ve ever seen. It was time for a dog in my life. His name was Jed, and he was my first ﬁrst dog. He became my best friend. Jed slept at my feet. He slept on my feet. He only barked at bad people. He made me feel like less of a geek: I was a Guy with a Dog, like Tom Hanks in Turner & Hooch. When Jed passed, I was with him—the most painful passing of my life. He taught me how to experience Unconditional Love— something humans are not good at. I’ve had dogs ever since. Jed taught me. And I learned well. —Merrill Shindler

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28 page 26 PHOTOGRAPH PHOTOGRAGH BY CHARLES GULLUNG

Fire UpYour Relationship Tonight! page 26 24

Older Parents Adopting Older Kids 28 page 26

How You Can Give a Child a Home 28 page 26

LifeReimagined.org / Winter 2014 25 23

rediscover relationships

T NIGHT

Want to fire up your love life? Create your own rules of romance By PEPPER SCHWARTZ, Love and Relationship Ambassador for AARP

LOVE AFTER 40 CAN BE THRILLING—and terrifying. Married or divorced, single or dating—it doesn’t matter. This is the best time to find love or jumpstart a relationship. We’re no longer hostage to our hormones, so we can think about love in exciting new ways—and pursue romance and relationships however we please. Ready to reignite passion? Take a fresh look at three essential areas: your sex life, your lifestyle and how you define love. Changing your mindset about each can transform your future, liberate your libido and make you feel truly alive.

LifeReimagined.org / Winter 2014

or both partners if they view “true love” by its passionate, over-the-top beginning. It is easy to underestimate the importance, even preciousness of feeling and acting “loving.” If you happen to find and sustain a starryeyed romance, that’s awesome. But being grounded in a low-key, loving relationship can be just as fulfilling. Linda Young, a clinical psychologist in Houston, Texas, says that as men and women age they become more hormonally matched. “They may wind up being very surprised to learn how much they enjoy cuddling and kissing without intercourse,” Young says. “Kissing and stroking makes us feel more bonded, loving and content. This kinder, gentler love can be deep, heart-meltingly intimate and sweet.”

OJO IMAGES LTD / ALAMY

What’s the difference between being in love and loving someone? Being in love usually means passion, possessiveness—and a certain level of drama. We crave the other person. We miss them terribly when they are gone. Loving someone requires affection, compatibility, connectedness and respect—but not necessarily frequent passion or an intense need to be together. Helen Fisher, author of Why We Love, says the changes from lust to more companionable kinds of love can be emotionally difficult for one

If you want sex to be more exciting, do it a new way. I mean, seriously revise the program. There’s a reason 50 Shades of Grey became one of the biggest selling books of all time, even surpassing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, the final installment in the series. A lot of women clearly want an edgier fantasy life or to redecorate their sex life. Perhaps that is why some couples feel confident enough to use 50 Shades of Grey as an opening to discuss some new, edgier behaviors. Other books can also offer new ideas, including Judith Sills’ Getting Naked Again or Joan Price’s Naked at Our Age. Both books offer a smorgasbord of sexual choices for readers no longer in their 20s and 30s. Their key point: that increased confidence and wisdom can lead to more experimentation because you’re less worried about whether an act is “respectable.”

TONIGHT! Suggesting something new is difficult, but Serena McKenzie, director of a health and wellness center in Kirkland, Wash., firmly believes people ought to try. “Finding that balance between curiosity and discovery, allowing the humility of being open to the new can create an intimate, erotic and fulfilling relationship.” The ability to be vulnerable and intimate increases with age, says Barbara Risman, a senior scholar with the Council on Contemporary Families and chairperson of the Sociology Department at the University of Illinois in Chicago. “I’d always thought that sex would get less passionate, less playful, less experimental the older one got,” says Risman, who remarried in her early fifties a few years ago. “I was dead wrong. Our erotic relationship is better than any other we’ve experienced.” Jennifer Glass, a 55-year-old divorced teacher in Texas, started dating online in her late 40s but waited for men to contact her. “When a good friend told me to boldly risk rejection by searching for who I wanted, it changed my attitude about sex as well,” Glass says. “I quickly found my life partner, who is younger than me and eager ILLUSTRATIONS BY PAUL CORIO

to experiment with what makes me happy. I’m neither afraid of rejection nor embarrassed about anything.” Love doesn’t require a twocar garage and a mortgage. It doesn’t even need a permanent home. Love can flourish in a commune or a camper and lead to new adventures. Virginia Rutter, who just turned 50 and teaches at Framingham State University in Massachusetts, has been in a long-term relationship with John, an economist, also 50, who lives in D.C. In the 1980s they lived together. Then they moved on. But two decades later, they reconnected, and are, in her words “sweetly, madly and romantically in love.” They are not married, and they do not live in the same state. “People sometimes say to us, ‘That must be so hard,’ says Rutter. “But, really, it isn’t hard at all—especially since I was able to leave behind some girlhood image of what a life and a relationship are supposed to look like. We both love our work. I have flexibility—especially in the summer—so we

get to spend about six months of the year together.” Fifty-six-year-old Jim Witte, director of the Center for Social Research at George Mason University in northern Virginia, and his wife, Constance Allen Witte, 58, who lives in South Carolina, have made a similar lifestyle adjustment. When Jim accepted his position in Virginia, their whole relationship had to be recalibrated after 30 years of marriage. Constance had also switched jobs, going from a high school teacher to a speech therapist for children, so they tried getting together on weekends. “We are now completing our fifth year of a commuter marriage,” Jim says. “Face-to-face time is rarer but seems more special.” However you decide to fire up your love life, remember that old rules are simply rules that may or may not be followed. You can choose which options, beyond the models you grew up with, you want to embrace. It’s taken years to earn the freedom to live life your way. Enjoy it! LifeReimagined.org / Winter 2014 27

rediscover relationships

The Baumanns ﬁrst met sisters Jennifer and Lady through Kidsave’s annual Summer Miracles Program.

Full House RAISING KIDS isn’t just for the young anymore. Older folks are adopting older children, giving them the forever families they have always craved BY BROOKE FOSTER

“THERE WAS ONCE a velveteen

rabbit, and in the beginning he was really splendid.” Dava Baumann was in her living room reading aloud to two young girls, Jennifer and Lady, from Colombia. The sisters were a long way from La Virginia, the poverty-stricken town in South America where they’d been living in foster care. “The girls were so engaged and intrigued just to have someone read to them,” says Dava, 49. “All they wanted was a shot at what all kids

have: someone who takes interest in them, who listens to them, who loves them.” Now Jennifer, 13, and Lady, 7, have it all. Two years ago Dava (who has a 9-year-old daughter, Maya, from a previous relationship) and her husband Gregg, 50, adopted them and brought them home to Fairfax, Va. Providing love and stability for kids growing up without family care is something that many older adults are uniquely positioned to do. “In many cases, these are people who

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28 LifeReimagined.org 26 LifeReimagined.org / Winter / Winter 2014

have parented before; they’re more mature and have more wisdom,” says Terry Baugh, the co-founder of Kidsave International (kidsave.org), which has helped connect thousands of older orphans from the U.S. and abroad with families or mentors. Rewarding as the experience can be, though, it comes with challenges. Most of the children that Baugh works with come with painful pasts, including abandonment and sometimes abuse. “We tell people: ‘These kids come with baggage, and you have to be ready to work with it.’” The Baumanns, who spend their weekends shuttling the girls to soccer games and other events, can’t think of a better way to spend the next ten years. Says Dava, “It’s been the most fulﬁlling thing we’ve ever done.”

How to Adopt The average age of foster children waiting for permanent homes in the U.S. is 8 years old. AdoptUSKids (adoptuskids.org), a federally funded organization that helps match older children in U.S. foster care with adoptive families, allows prospective parents to search for children by age, geographic location and race. Spence-Chapin private adoption agency (spence-chapin.org) in New York City has a school-age adoption initiative. In addition, most states have sites that offer listings of foster kids looking for permanent homes.

PHOTOGRAPHS PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOLAN

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work

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Stay Sought After—Forever Five ways to act ageless and remain desirable BY DOUGLAS QUENQUA 1. FIND A TECH MENTOR Talk to a tech-savvy coworker. “Ask them where your gaps are,” says Roy Cohen, author of The Wall Street Professional’s Survival Guide.

2. BUDDY UP WITH THE MILLENNIALS “Get to know younger workers as people,” says career coach Caroline Ceniza-Levine, co-founder of SixFigureStart. “Take age out of the equation.” Today’s up-and-comer may be your manager down the road.

3. DON’T BE THE “ME” IN TEAM Workers these days truly collaborate—often on open-office comfy couches in open-ofﬁ ce plans. “Age can kind of disappear if you show that you’re always thinking about what you can do to help the group,” says Patti Johnson, founder of PeopleResults.

4. BECOME AN INFLUENCER “What people know you for has to be crystal clear,” says Ceniza-Levine. By writing and giving talks in your specialty, she says, you’ll “build a halo around yourself as a thought leader.”

5. STAY CURIOUS “Most employers are looking for someone who has new ideas,” Johnson says. So get smart. It’s never been easier or cheaper to continue your education with online courses.

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Finally, Be Your Own Boss page 30 32 page

Joe Queenan: No, I Regret Nothing page page33 31

How Will You Measure Your Life? 35 page 33

ILLUSTRATION BY BRIAN STAUFFER

Connect new dots.

Jobs constantly bombarded his brain with new experiences. Researchers have found that a key trait among innovators is the ability to make unusual associations between life events—and that’s Jobs in a nutshell. In the 1970s, for example, Jobs studied calligraphy because he thought it was beautiful; one of the most important elements in the ﬁrst Mac was the user’s ability to control fonts. Head to places you don’t normally go. Spend time with new and diferent people.

Learn to Think Like Steve Jobs Apple’s insanely great founder and master reinventor taught us how to live better by design BY CARMINE GALLO

BESIDES REIMAGINING his own life multiple times, including a triumphant return to Apple after a 12-year exile, Steve Jobs revolutionized the way billions of people interact with technology. My book, The Innovation Secrets of Steve Jobs, explores the core of his brilliance and resilience. His innovation principles are valuable because they apply to everybody, not just 20-something tech geniuses. ILLUSTRATION BY TAVIS COBURN

Follow your star.

Was Steve Jobs passionate about computers? Not so much. He told employees that Apple wasn’t “about making boxes that help people get their jobs done … it’s about changing the world for the better.” We can all locate our guiding star by asking simple questions: What is it that you absolutely cannot live without? What is the thing that won’t leave you alone?

Know your purpose.

By distilling Apple’s mission down to two words—enrich lives— Jobs was able to stay on track, making sure that all decisions held true to that clear, if ambitious, rule.

Say no to a 1,000 things. When Jobs

returned to Apple in the 1990s, he ﬁercely embraced the power of saying no. Designers had been working on 350 products, and he reduced that to 10. He knew what the company was good at, and he focused on that.

Go on, be obsessive.

If a carpenter is building a beautiful chest of drawers, Jobs once said, he could use a cheap backing on it, and no one would know. “But the carpenter would know.” That insistence on excellence isn’t just for design snobs. Details matter. All of us deserve to be a little more obsessive. LifeReimagined.org / Winter 2014 29 31 LifeReimagined.org / Winter 2014

reimagine work

Finally, Be Your Own Boss You can call the shots and have fun doing it, whether you’re starting a company or keeping your day job. Here’s how to start loving your work

THE COMPANY MAN

Accountant Richard Levychin recruits minorities to his ﬁeld.

By ELIZABETH MACBRIDE and ELAINE POFELDT

IT WAS 11 P.M. The neighborhood was dozing but the lights were blazing in Melinda and Eugene West’s basement, where the couple was surrounded by piles of curtains. That’s when Eugene—who’d already left his job as a regional sales manager selling marble and tile—said aloud what they both were thinking: Melinda should either quit her job at the Long Island Railroad and get serious about Swags Galore, the webbased curtain business the couple had started several years earlier as a hobby, or close up shop. The venture was never going to succeed if they kept trying to run it in stolen hours when she got home from her day job. 32 LifeReimagined.org 30 LifeReimagined.org // Winter Winter 2014

Melinda, 54, decided to go for it, forsaking the pension and medical beneﬁts she’d earn at age 62, but happy to leave a job where “I was bored out of my socks.” Once they both began working seven-day weeks at Swags Galore, it took of. Last year, sales topped $2 million. “We put our social life, our traveling and getting a dog on hold. The sacriﬁces are working, so that is motivating,” Melinda, the company’s CEO, says. By starting her own business, Melinda took a classic—and increasingly popular—escape route from midlife career doldrums. But other paths lead to freedom as well. If you’re not cut out for self-employ-

ment, or you can’t aford to ditch your day job, you can still reignite your passion for what you do. Becoming a consultant, starting a side business, or leveraging your personal brand within a larger organization can all restore your sense of being in control. But you must be willing to step out of your comfort zone. Whichever path feels right to you, step one is adopting a new mindset. As Reid Hofman, co-founder of LinkedIn, advised in The Start-Up of You: “You need to think and act like you’re running a start-up: your career.” So consider yourself a brand manager in charge of the most valuable commodity on earth—you. PHOTOGRAPHS BY SQUIRE FOX

WORKING FOR YOURSELF Over a lunch of spaghetti carbonara last spring, Chuck Presbury, an executive coach at McGraw-Hill, was worrying aloud to a former colleague about whether to stay or go. Opt for security or the freedom to execute his own out-of-the-box ideas. His friend looked him straight in the eye. “Chuck, it’s time,” she told him. Presbury, 60, went back to his ofce and made an appointment to resign. Now a Norwalk, Conn.-based organizational change consultant, Presbury says, “You can hold on to the things you know you can control—like I know I can get my train at 6:45 a.m.—or you can trust yourself, believe there’s something better, and you can have more.” There’s power in owning a niche— figuring out a service you can ofer that no one else can. Once you’ve found yours, be prepared to market yourself—on social media and the old-fashioned way. Michael Montgomery, 55, owner of Montgomery Consulting in suburban Detroit, establishes credibility by teaching, giving talks at conferences and producing an annual survey in his field. Another tip: When you’re starting out, ofer to provide consulting in exchange for a testimonial and five referrals, suggests Linda Henman, founder of Henman Performance Group in St. Louis, Mo. Worried about money? Starting a business from scratch, whether you are selling ideas or products, doesn’t always require a five-year plan or a bottomless bank account. “If you start with a giant goal, it’s going to overwhelm you,” says New York City career coach Roy Cohen, author of The Wall Street Professional’s Survival Guide. Carve out an hour a day to work on the project. Take small steps. But do your due diligence. Arrange informational interviews with 10

ILLUSTRATIONS BY PETER OUMANSKI

No, I Regret Nothing BY JOE QUEENAN I left my last job on December 9, 1989. I’d come home from work and found that my wife and two small children were out. They straggled in about eight o’clock, having just seen 101 Dalmatians. I told my wife, “Boy, I would have liked to see 101 Dalmatians.” So I quit my job the next day. And I have been a freelance writer ever since. Would I have quit my job if I really liked it? Maybe not. But I didn’t like any office job I ever had. I did not see a single episode of The Office (nasty Ricky Gervais version) until early this year because I knew that it would d merely confirm my worst fears about the life I had fled. Vile superiors. Moronic coworkers. Pointless meetings. Stomach-turning office parties. I finally watched The Office in March. It was like taking a guided tour of Hell. Have I ever regretted leaving office life behind? No. In fact, I have instructed my children to have my gravestone inscribed:

JOE QUEENAN 1950-2040 DIDN’T SPEND A WHOLE LOT OF TIME IN THE OFFICE Could anything ever lure me back to a desk job? Also no. Here’s why. 1. You can’t throw things when you work in an open plan ofﬁce. Among them: keys, bottles, ﬁre extinguishers. When you’re self-employed you can take a baseball bat and bust up a PC that has gone on the fritz. You can also play fussball or listen to Iggy

Pop or watch provocative foreign films. And nobody gets upset about it. 2. If you work in an office with people you do not like—and who doesn’t?—it means that you spend one-quarter of your adult life in the company of people you despise. Run the numbers; see how well your life is working out. 3. At every job I ever had 3 there were at least two t people I wanted to punch p out. No. make that twenty. o The self-employed punch T out no one. o 4. When you go out on your own, you never have to see coworkers belittled or reamed out by their superiors the way I did at every job I ever held. The routine way employees are humiliated is one of the worst things about life on this planet. It suggests that humans are basically vicious. If the entire world was self-employed, petty cruelty would die out in a single generation. 5. You never have to worry about being fired or downsized when you are self-employed. You never have to worry that you can be replaced by someone who is willing to work for half your salary. You never have to worry about being replaced by an intern named Brandon or Tessa or Skyler. Life is too short to worry about being replaced by someone named Skyler.

LifeReimagined.org / Winter LifeReimagined.org / Winter 2014 2014 33 31

people who run businesses like the one you envision. What are the challenges? What are the revenue sources? Then arrange at least one unpaid, weeklong internship at a venture like the one you want to run, whether it’s powering up the cappuccino machine at a café or helping a consultant do market research. REIMAGINING YOUR DAY JOB The last thing Tom Hart expected when he ran into a colleague in Boston in 2006 was a job ofer. As it turned out, his friend was looking to hire an executive vice president at his stafng ﬁrm and urged Hart, who’s now 56, to apply. Though his background was in IT, he did so—and he got an ofer. It would have been easy for Hart to say no since he didn’t have experience in human resources. “If the company knew I was not a deep subject-matter expert, then they were weighing my business acumen,” Hart reasoned. He said yes to the ofer. “The thought of doing something diferent was very motivating for me,” Hart says. Yes, Hart was lucky—a career doover found him, literally, on a street corner—but he was also versatile and ﬂexible enough to maximize the opportunity. How do you do that? As you seek to become CEO of your own career, forget about job security, a dimly held memory from a kinder, gentler corporate era decades ago.

THE BUSINESS OWNER

Melinda West started a $2 million curtain company in her basement.

The catchphrase today is “skill security,” says Chicago recruiter Alexandra Zaporozec, managing director at Marengo Hampshire Partners. That means ﬁguring out where you can bring unique value to your employer. Look around at the departments that are adding the most people in your company and industry—and what newbies in your ﬁrm are being hired to do. Those are the skills of the future. Acquire them.

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34 32 LifeReimagined.org LifeReimagined.org // Winter Winter 2014

One good way to do that: Volunteer for assignments on “cross-functional teams” that include people from multiple departments. You will be exposed to new projects and get practical experience that will look good on LinkedIn. Community colleges and online learning platforms like Coursera, edX and Udacity are worth checking out as well. “You can control your value and actively manage it by listening to what the market needs and not just your boss,” says Zaporozec. But what about your needs? Do you value the work your company does, or can you use your position to give back? Richard Levychin, 54, saw that black accountants like him were a rarity, so he joined the American Institute of CPA’s National Commission for Diversity and Inclusion. “Giving back to my community has added great reward to my career.”

reimagine work

What Do You Value Most in Life? We say we want a better work-life balance. Yet we keep putting work first. Here’s why—and how to stop We’re suckers for the short-term payoff, says respected Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen, author of How Will You Measure Your Life? Here he chats with his coauthor, Karen Dillon, about how to avoid the temptation to stay late at the office to fire off one last email to the boss—at the expense of precious time with loved ones. Karen Dillon: When I first sat in your

ofce to talk about this subject, I was a middle-aged mom, advanced in my career. What you said to me that day hit me like a ton of bricks: How will I measure my life? What keeps us motivated for the second half of life?

Dillon: Why is that a bad thing? Isn’t it great to have professional success?

Clayton Christensen: It’s an important question to ask yourself at any stage of your life. I was always so surprised that my classmates from Harvard Business School were often disappointed with how their lives had turned out as we met each other at our reunions. These were people who had so much promise when we were students but had ended up living lives that were deeply disappointing to them. How does that happen? Dillon: You’ve told me you believe people invest time and energy on things that provide short-term happiness, not long-term fulﬁllment. Christensen: It’s the same way

companies set their fate—what we call a resource-allocation process. They may think they have a big picture in mind, but in reality, they pick and choose what parts of the business they focus on each day. Which customer gets priority? Do we care more about sales or proﬁts? And so on.

ILLUSTRATION BY ALEX NABAUM

to your career that you won’t spend with your kids. The criterion that we employ is frightfully consistent: The portions of our lives that will get prioritized are the ones that tend to pay of the fastest. Almost all of us have this need for achievement. And so when you have an extra ounce of time or energy, you spend it on your career. Our careers provide immediate evidence that we’ve achieved something.

The same is true for people. You have businesses in your life: family, relationships, career. And you have to allocate your resources. If you decide, “I’m going stay at work another hour,” you allocate energy and time

Christensen: Of course, but only if it’s matched by satisfaction with the life you are building. Many people will ﬁnd themselves disappointed with their lives by the time they hit their 40s and 50s if they’ve focused on building a career that will impress people at the expense of the enduring happiness that comes from relationships with family and close friends. There are other important ways to make sure you do things that have meaning in your personal life: invest in your relationship with your spouse; become involved in your community or church. Getting it right starts with spending time wrestling with the question of what your purpose in life is. The answer won’t be the same for everyone, and it’s deeply personal, but I promise you, spending time answering that question will pay of in the long run.

LifeReimagined.org / Winter 2014 33 35 LifeReimagined.org / Winter 2014

play

Reembrace Recharge

Start Acting Like a Child! Here’s why playing should become a daily habit: “It’s the one thing that can truly lead us to ‘irrational bliss,’” says play expert Stuart Brown, whose thought-provoking research suggests that most serial killers never played as children. He advises charting your own personal play history to rediscover how you really like to have fun. Drag out the photo albums. How did you play as a kid? Did you build a treehouse, devour comics or romp with imaginary pals? Brown encourages reaching way back, even to baby pics: “You’ll get a sense of what your intrinsic being was like, before a lot of crap changed things up.”

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Tell a story. Take the information you’ve uncovered and write it up into a narrative. When did you play— and when did you give it up? How did you get from there to here? Find childlike joy. Whether your early peak moments involved riding horses, traveling or scaring the find neighborhood kids in dodgeball, ﬁ nd ways back. Get ready for a roller coaster. Warning: “There’s often as many tears as there is joy” during this self-exam process, says Brown. “It evokes losses and lost opportunities—an awareness of what was missed.” But it will be well worth the effort. —Fred Cohn

Clockwise from left: biking in Amsterdam; selling local veggies in Traverse City; and elephant riding in Cambodia. For more tips from Sam, visit lifereimagined.org/travel

Find Yourself by Getting Lost: Siem Reap, Cambodia

Majestic Angkor Wat—the world’s largest religious shrine—along with countless other amazing sights is reason enough to go to Cambodia. But it’s the people who’ll most inspire you: They’ve overcome hard times to reclaim their lovely country, and they’ll welcome you warmly. Your ﬂight is the big expense, but once you get there, everything is petty-cash cheap, including dining, shopping and lux accommodations.

Journey to the Center of Yourself

CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT: CARLO ACENAS/TANDEMSTOCK; CLAYTON HAUCK; JIM RICHARDSON/NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC/GETTY IMAGES

Taking a great vacation can change your perspective on life, work, everything. Here are 5 places to hit “reset” BY SAMANTHA BROWN Walk and Wonder: Santa Fe, N.M.

Renew in the Heartland: Traverse City, Mich.

As AARP’s travel ambassador, my universal advice to anyone arriving in a new destination: Get out and take a long stroll. If you’re looking for a place to dream, Santa Fe is a great place to start. You can wend your way through the historic district or take a hike on nearby trails scented with sage with a spectacular view of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. The city ofers up an accessible, come-as-youare art scene. And just a short drive away you can explore ancient clif dwellings built by Anasazi Indians 1,000 years ago. That culture remains vibrant to this day. So let both ancient and modern art expose you to unique perspectives on the world.

Michigan has endured more than its share of economic woes, but quaint Traverse City has seen a renaissance. Visitors ﬂock to the shores of Lake Michigan’s Traverse Bay to experience the lively small-town feel, great shopping and natural beauty. Unwind at the waterfront park. Then checkout the city’s 30 antique shops and hundreds of local vendors selling handmade stuf. And the food— amazing! Bon Appétit picked this as one of America’s top foodie towns, and even chef Mario Batali has raved about local restaurants like The Cooks’ House. With almost 40 wineries, you’re sure to ﬁnd something to sip after a day of exploring.

See Clearly on Two Wheels: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

The Dutch seem uniquely able to celebrate a centuries-old culture while being modern. Cycling is a way of life, and the ideal way to see all the sights. But if you’re not into two wheels, you can hop on one of the many open-air canal boats and take a slow ride through the city. While there, explore the Anne Frank House or see hundreds of works at the Van Gogh Museum. The postcard-pretty Prinsengracht is one of the most charming areas in Europe. Get Closer to Nature: Costanoa Resort, Calif.

The Costanoa retreat in Pescadero, California, has redeﬁned the concept of camping—and everyone’s invited. The place ofers three lodging options: camping out in a tent, staying in large, canvas bungalows or enjoying a cushy hotel. I don’t love camping, but I do love being able to cook meals outside and gather around a cozy ﬁre pit. No matter what your tolerance is for roughing it, you can enjoy a fun eco-adventure. LifeReimagined.org / Winter 2014 35 37 LifeReimagined.org / Winter 2014

reembrace play

O ER THE POWER HE P OF PLAY LA I’M CROUCHING across from Don Norman, a 49-yearold database administrator. He’s a compactly-built guy with the beard of a Rembrandt burgher. He isn’t smiling. Each of us has our hands spread wide, palms up, like sumo wrestlers showing that they carry no weapons or little kids gesturing “who knows?” Then, without warning, he smacks me—hard—on the ﬂeshy part of my hands, right above the wrists. I slap back, harder still. I’m trying to mete out a blow that will land Mr. Database on his butt, but Norman has a low center of gravity and a ﬁghter’s instincts. Soon he delivers a feint from below that sends me reeling backwards. I know I’m in trouble.

By FRED COHN

Score one for Norman—except tury mark. My hands hurt. My head nobody’s keeping score. Scorekeephurts. But around us more slaps ring ing is well beyond the point when out, along with peals of slightlyyou find yourself in a yoga studio on crazed laughter. Norman breaks into the third floor of a ramshackle wooda wide smile. “I feel energized,” he frame house in downtown Portland, says. “I’m ready for something else.” Maine, playing competitive He’s come to the right place. SERIOUS patty-cake. The two of us Every Wednesday night, this HORSEPLAY enmeshed in this pre-K is the scene of “Playing in In a Portland play staple have a combined the Deep,” an event that group, members like Nathan Bawden lose age well past the cenengages stressed-out adults inhibitions with in blissed-out, childlike pillow fights and romps. Earlier tonight, eight hula hoops. other people and myself channeled our inner Three Stooges, running around with arms linked, sending each other careening into the walls. There’s a method to this immature madness, I’m told by “play consultant” Natalie Kinsey, a curlyhaired woman with a sustained air of whimsy who runs the event. “Play,” she says, “distances you from the stuf that makes you feel disempowered.” 38 LifeReimagined.org 36 LifeReimagined.org / Winter / Winter 2014

Goofy? You bet. But plenty of Goofy people are drinking the Blastin’ Berry-flavored Kool-Aid as a play movement sweeps the country, getting adults back in touch with fun-loving instincts. You can walk on a summer day into New York’s Central Park and see dozens of grown men and women staggering through a sack race. In Washington, D.C., Spacious, a two-year-old company, organizes after-work Twister and tug-of-war for anxiety-ridden professionals. In cities across the U.S., men and women compete in oddball mashups like Urban Golf, waged in abandoned lots and undertaken in anything but the spirit of competition: The “rules” include “Everybody sucks.” The movement is invading the workplace culture of companies like Google, with its Lego stations and vintage Ms. Pac Man machines. It has a nonprofit advocacy group, The National Institute for Play and even its own (not remotely whimsical) magazine, The American Journal of Play. All this flies in the face of a culture that does not usually see play as a part of adulthood. In a standard life narrative, horsing around is something you do as a kid; years later—after you’ve toiled to support a family and build a nest egg—you can retire and maybe start playing again. The new

PLAYING FOR KEEPS

Natalie Kinsey (far left) leads her merry pranksters into the blissful contortions of “Playing in the Deep”

thinking: Play should be embraced at every stage of our lives. As Dr. Stuart Brown, the National Institute for Play’s founder, puts it, “The opposite of play is not work; it’s depression.” The statement has become the mantra of the play movement, and Brown, a clinical psychiatrist, its unofcial guru. He’s been studying play for more than 30 years, and wrote the best-seller Play: How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul. “Play is a fundamental part of human design,” Brown tells me. “We can lose it; we can suppress it—but when we do, we’re losing out.” As Brown sees it, most of us go through a period as children when we play unabashedly. But societal pressures typically cause us to leave play behind—and lose our connection to its primal power. “Maybe you began to lose it when your biology teacher said you were a dumbshit, and you started studying all the time,” he says. “Maybe a girl was a tomboy, great at sports, but was prompted to leave it all behind around the time she started to develop breasts.” The results of “play deprivation,” he says, are debilitating: “Mood disorders. A lack of optimism. A difculty in persevering in something you enjoy.” The “play-enriched life,” he says, makes us happy and can enhance our ability to cope with the challenges people encounter in midlife. He cites a recent study performed by neurologist Dr. Louk Vanderschuren in his Netherlands lab, where adult rats were euthanized PHOTOGRAPHS PHOTOGRAPHS BY BY LANDON LANDON NORDEMAN NORDEMAN

at the height of play, their brains dissected. They apparently died happy: “Good things were going on in the frontal lobe,” Brown says. “As far as human play ... well, the research doesn’t go that far.” Over the past four decades, “play science” has become its own discipline, and many of the findings point toward the importance of play throughout one’s life. Sergio Pellis, a scientist at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, conducted a study that compared two groups of rats. The first played throughout their lives; the second, caged with dour adults, was play-deprived. The playful group had more fully developed prefrontal cortexes: all that play shaped their neural pathways to make them more socially adept—and happier—than their counterparts. Of course it’s one thing to set young rats scampering around a cage and quite another to define what “play” means to adult human beings. For Natalie Kinsey, the supervised merriment of a “Playing in the Deep” session embodies the very spirit of fun. For Brown, play is “something done for its own sake. People eventually come to understand: ‘Hey—this has something to do with my health,

my marriage and my state of mind. It’s important.’” Lesley Jones would agree. A regular attendee at the Maine play group, she was diagnosed in 2007 with Lyme disease. “I’ve tried tapes, meds, homeopathic remedies,” Jones, 47, says. “But when I’m playing, I lose track of time and my body doesn’t hurt.” Her conclusion? “Play saved my life.”

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receive 20 percent off Resident Shows and 15 percent off Big Top and Arena Shows at live Cirque du Soleil events when using their AARP membership card. For a complete guide to all that membership offers you, go to aarp.org/ beneﬁtsguide55

LifeReimagined.org LifeReimagined.org / Winter / Winter 2014 2014 37 39

reembrace play

5 Ways to Find Your Inner Monet Feeling blocked? Julia Cameron, author of the classic creativity guide, The Artist’s Way, tells us how to unleash our imagination by letting our minds wander BY DANA WHITE

FOLLOW YOUR INSTINCTS

USE TECH WISELY

BELIEVE. IN SOMETHING

It’s the cornerstone of Cameron’s program. She calls it “morning papers” and recommends that you buy a notebook and write out three pages each day as the sun rises. Don’t check emails ﬁrst; do it while your mind is still relatively blank. “You’re trying to catch yourself as close as you can to your waking consciousness,” she explains. “Stow the laptop; use pencil or pen instead. When writing in longhand (if you remember how), “you go slower, you become more in touch with emotions. This a place where you can vent, where you can daydream, where you can hope.”

Another way to get your mind wandering is to literally wander yourself. Cameron recommends taking a weekly “artist’s date” to feed the soul, free the mind and replenish your well of imagery. “Consider it a ‘festive expedition,’” says Cameron, who is especially fond of long, inspirational walks. “Go to a botanical garden, a concert or a museum. It doesn’t need to be high art; it just needs to be something that seems fun.” Indulge the senses, open your mind to fresh information. “When you do that, you have switched your dial from ‘send’ over to ‘receive.’”

Setting your mind to receive mode sets of a chain reaction. Barriers fall, and all those images and thoughts stir around in your subconscious and are reinvented as revelation and insight. “You start to get hunches and intuitions,” says Cameron. These gut feelings can chart a new course and out-shout our inner censor, what Cameron calls “our second (and third and fourth) thoughts” that tell us we can’t, we shouldn’t, we aren’t good enough. As Cameron—who calls her inner critic “Nigel”—puts it, “Creativity is the only cure for criticism.”

Our reliance on cell phones, iPads and bandwidth is a blessing and a curse. “I don’t think tech is bad; it’s inevitable,” says Cameron. “You just need to curb it.” Turn of your cell during “morning pages,” and leave it home during “artist’s dates.” Still, social media can reinforce that crucial sense of self-esteem we crave when making changes. “Facebook is a good source for what I call ‘believing mirrors,’” says Cameron. “It’s somebody who reﬂects your strength back to you. So when you post something and you get 600 likes, that’s a powerful vote of conﬁdence.”

Cameron contends that spirituality and creativity are one and the same, whether you call it God, karma or The Force. Have faith, in yourself—and in the possibility of a larger will at work. “If we do these tools, it puts us in touch with a larger benevolent something,” she explains. It’s okay to be skeptical, as long as you’re open-minded. She suggests creating a “God Jar,” a vessel in which you put your fears and doubts, your dreams and worries. Literally write them down and drop them in. Close the lid. Your higher power’s got your back. Now get back to work.

WAKE UP. WRITE. REPEAT

TA TAKE YOURSELF ON DATES

40 38 LifeReimagined.org LifeReimagined.org / Winter / Winter 2014

ILLUSTRATION ILLUSTRATION BY BY HARRY HARRY CAMPBELL CAMPBELL

Stiller’s Walter Mitty is a Life photo editor who turns fantasy into a global romp.

What other lives could you envision for yourself?

EXCLUSIVE

Q&A: Ben Stiller The director and star of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty reveals his inner fantasies INTERVIEWED BY NANCY PERRY GRAHAM

WILSON WEBB/TM & TWENTIETH CENTURY FOX

Can grown-ups rediscover their many possible lives?

I hope so. I think that is one of the main themes of The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. It is about a guy who is in midlife and realizes that the life he imagines in his head is actually holding him back from the real life he dreamed. It is about being able to look at where we are in the moment and say: “This is it, this is my life. And even though it has been a series of events up to now that have led me here, it doesn’t mean that this is where I have to end up.” In a lot of ways, it takes much more courage to do this later in life when the options

aren’t as wide open. But there is also a sense you get when you are at a certain age that the time is now, and the moment is all we really have. Is there a case for giving up competence in order to grow?

Well, I don’t know. I think there is a case for not knowing what you are doing and owning that. I don’t think any of us really knows what is happening in terms of why we’re here and what life is all about. A lot of us pretend to, but I think that is just really fear or ignorance. And maybe ignorance is bliss, not worrying about those larger questions.

At one point when I was a kid, I wanted to be a historian or archaeologist. I loved, and still love, reading history. The idea of going into the past always fascinated me. That’s one reason I love movies—you can go into an entirely diferent world. I also could envision having become a scuba diving instructor, and living in the Caribbean in a sort of a Jimmy Bufett song way. But that probably was not going to ever be a reality for me. I am not a big drinker and margaritas give me a bad hangover.

Inner Kill? It’s the dismal state of midlife limbo that traps Walter Mitty—and millions of real people. Richard Leider, co-author of Life Reimagined: Discovering Your New Life Possibilities, deﬁnes Inner Kill as “dying without knowing it.” Recognize the symptoms! • Is irritability your default mode? • Do you avoid making decisions and taking risks? • Do you talk a lot but do nothing? • Do you lay awake at nights, and sleepwalk by day? Inner Kill is an energy crisis. You can surrender to it—or turn it into selfexploration and get your mojo back.

LifeReimagined.org LifeReimagined.org / Winter / Winter 2014 2014 39 41

Imagine If... ...You could ﬁnd your North Star What if you could embark on a new life journey, with no boundaries. Where would it take you? What might you ﬁnd? How would you live? To encourage you to share your discoveries, we’ve teamed with National Geographic to send you on a very special photo assignment. Your mission is to capture in a photograph the person, place or thing that embodies your dream. Submit your “Imagine If” photo by noon on December 16 to National Geographic’s Your Shot ngyourshot.com/lifereimagined, where photo editors will select their favorites to appear in a published story online. What inspires you to reimagine your life? We want to know. PHOTOGRAPH BY JOHN DOOGAN

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