I don’t mean to say, of course, that we all can do anything at any time in our lives. If you’re about to turn one hundred, it’s unlikely that you’re going to nail the leading role in Swan Lake, especially if you have no previous dance background. At fifty‐eight, with a wobbly sense of balance, I’m getting used to the idea that I’ll probably never take the speed‐skating gold at the Winter Olympics (particularly since I’ve never actually seen a pair of ice skates in real life). Some dreams truly are “impossible dreams.” However, many aren’t. Knowing the difference is often one of the first steps to finding your Element, because if you can see the chances of making a dream come true, you can also likely see the necessary next steps you need to take toward achieving it.
One of the most basic reasons for thinking that it’s too late to be who you are truly capable of being is the belief that life is linear. As if we’re on a busy one‐way street, we think we have no alternative but to keep going forward. If we missed something the first time, we can’t double back and take another look because it takes all of our effort just to keep up with traffic. What we’ve seen in many of the stories in this book, though, are clear indications that human lives are not linear. Gordon Parks’s explorations and mastery of multiple disciplines were not linear. Chuck Close certainly has not lived a linear life; disease caused him to reinvent himself.
Sir Ridley Scott had a decidedly nonlinear approach toward entering the film world. He told me that when he first left art school, “I had absolutely no thoughts about making films. Films were something I would go to on a Saturday. It was impossible to think of how you would make that a leap into film from the life I was leading.
“I then decided that fine art wasn’t for me. I needed something more specific. I need a target, a brief. So I moved around and tried other forms of art practice and finally I found my feet with Mr. Ron Store in printing. I loved the printing process. I loved having to grind stones for each color of the lithograph. I used to work late every day, go to the pub for two pints of beer, and get the last bus home. I did that for four years, five nights a week. I adored it.”
A short while after this, he started moonlighting at the BBC. “I was always trying to break the boundaries of what I was doing, maximizing the budgets. They sent me on a year’s travel scholarship, and when I went back, I went straight in as a designer. After two years at the BBC, I was put into the director’s course.”
From there, though, he made another leap, this time into advertising, because it was “fantastically fun. Advertising has always been a dirty word in relation to fine art and painting and you know, that side of things. I unashamedly grabbed it with both hands.”
Directing commercials led to directing television. Only after that did Ridley Scott become immersed in the film world that would define his life’s work. If he’d believed at any point along this journey that he had to follow a straight path in his career, he never would have found his true calling.
Human lives are organic and cyclical. Different capacities express themselves in stronger ways at different times in our lives. Because of this, we get multiple opportunities for new growth and development, and multiple opportunities to revitalize latent capacities. Harriet Doerr started to explore her writing skill before life took her in another direction. That skill was waiting for her decades later when she turned back to it. Maggie Kuhn discovered her inner advocate when the opportunity arose, though she was probably entirely unaware that she had this talent until that moment.
While physical age is absolute as a way of measuring the number of years that have passed since you were born, it is purely relative when it comes to health and quality of life. Certainly, we are all getting older by the clock. But I know plenty of people who are the same age chronologically and generations apart emotionally and creatively.
My mother died at the age of eighty‐six, very suddenly and very quickly from a stroke. Right up to the end of her life, she looked ten or fifteen years younger than her birth date suggested. She had an insatiable curiosity about other people and the world around her. She danced, read, partied, and traveled. She entertained everyone she met with her wit, and she inspired them with her sense of style, her energy, and her sheer pleasure in being alive—in spite of multiple hardships, struggles, and crises in her life.
I’m one of her seven children, and she was one of seven as well—so when we gathered in one place with our extended family, we were a substantial crowd. My mother took care of us during times when there were few modern conveniences and little help apart from what she could drag reluctantly from us when we were not actually creating work for her. When I was nine, we all faced a catastrophe. My father, who was the pillar of the family, and had been so distraught at my getting polio, had an industrial accident. He broke his neck, and for the rest of his life was a quadriplegic.
He was himself an extraordinary man who remained firmly at the center of our family life. He was sharply funny, deeply intelligent, and an inspiration to everyone who came within range of him. So, too, was my mother. Her energy and zest for life never diminished. She was always taking on new projects and learning new skills. At family gatherings, she was always the first on the dance floor. And in the last years of her life, she was studying ballroom dancing and making dollhouses and miniatures. For both my mother and my father there was always a clear, substantial difference between their chronological ages and their real ages.
There’s no shortage of people who achieved significant things in their later years. Benjamin Franklin invented the bifocal lens when he was seventy‐eight. That’s how old Grandma Moses was when she decided to get serious about painting. Agatha Christie wrote The Mousetrap, the world’s longest‐running play, when she was sixty‐two. Jessica Tandy won the Oscar for Best Actress at age eighty. Vladimir Horowitz gave his last series of sold‐out piano recitals when he was eighty‐four.
Compare these accomplishments with the premature resignation of people you know in their thirties or forties, who behave as if their lives have settled into a dull routine and who see little opportunity to change and evolve.
If you’re fifty, exercise your mind and body regularly, eat well, and have a general zest for life, you’re likely younger—in very real, physical terms—than your neighbor who is forty‐four, works in a dead‐end job, eats chicken wings twice a day, considers thinking too strenuous, and looks at lifting a beer glass as a reasonable daily workout.
Dr. Henry Lodge, coauthor of Younger Next Year, makes the point sharply. “It turns out,” he says, “that 70% of American aging is not real aging. It’s just decay. It’s rot from the stuff that we do. All the lifestyle diseases… the diabetes, the obesity, the heart disease, much of the Alzheimer’s, lots of the cancers, and almost all of the osteoporosis, those are all decay. Nature doesn’t have that in store for any of us. We go out and buy it off the rack.”
The people at realage.com have pulled together a set of metrics designed to calculate your “real age” as opposed to your chronological age. It takes into consideration a wide range of factors regarding lifestyle, genetics, and medical history. What’s fascinating about this is that their work suggests that it’s actually possible to make yourself younger by making better choices.