Читать книгу Creating a Happy Retirement - Dr Ronald W. Richardson - Страница 8

What does it mean to grow older? Everyone has a different response to this question but, in general, there are two types of responses. The first is that growing older is a downhill slide into the grave. This is the sort of depressive response that any of us can recognize and may feel from time to time. In the gym one morning, Ron asked an older man (meaning older than Ron), “How are you doing?” The man responded, “Well, I got up this morning; and a lot of people didn’t.” This is sort of looking on the bright side of the slide.

The other attitude is that aging and retirement is an opportunity to develop new knowledge, skills, relationships, endeavors, etc. We have all heard of 90-year-old marathon runners and others with incredible physical abilities. We know people who go back to school and get a degree or who teach others about what they have learned in their career or their avocation.

We do not want to be oppressed with stories about the amazing feats that people achieve in their old age and feel as if we should be doing this as well. But we do need to have options for how we live in this stage of life and not automatically limit and shutter ourselves within traditional attitudes toward aging. There really are new opportunities for a new life and much of what we can dream about (certainly not all) could well be possible. Ron decided after retirement to take a ski instructor course. He had no intention of instructing, but it was a chance to learn new skills, to use what he knew already about working with and teaching people, and to achieve something he had never thought possible before. It was a proud day for him when he got his instructor’s certificate. Another man we know went to Africa and trained as a big-game tracker, again without planning to actually get such a job. A former teacher went to Kenya to volunteer on the staff and do fundraising for scholarships for girls to go to high school. She did that work for six months of the year for many, many years. We could go on and on with examples of creative and interesting retirement lives.

A number of books offer advice about healthy aging. Most of them are very good. One of the best, we think, is by George E. Vaillant, M.D., called Aging Well: Surprising Guideposts to a Happier Life, from the Landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development. Vaillant has been involved for most of his career in the study of healthy aging and in this book he reports on three longitudinal studies that followed people’s lives for more than 70 years.

Previous studies of adult development tended to stop around the age of retirement – at about 65 years of age. They did not look at how life continues to develop after that point. They tended to say life was going toward decay and illness from this point and not worthy of studying. Vaillant and a few others have discovered that it is just the opposite for many people.

Vaillant offers the best evidence of what makes for healthy aging. Part of what he does in this book is to chronicle his own changing attitudes toward aging as he interviewed most of the people still alive in these studies. Early in the book he quotes Betty Friedan who, in her seventies, wrote, “We have barely even considered the possibilities in age for new kinds of loving intimacy, purposeful work and activity, learning and knowing, community and care…. For to see age as a continued human development involves a revolutionary paradigm shift.” (The Fountain of Age)

Vaillant’s book reports on three groups:

1. “A sample of 268 socially advantaged male Harvard graduates born about 1920.” This is the study he has been the most involved in personally over the years, publishing a couple of books on them earlier in his career. He was ready to stop writing about them or studying them once they hit their mid-sixties until a member of this group challenged him to go further and not give in to the stereotypical view of aging as a downhill slide.

2. A group of “456 socially disadvantaged Inner City men born about 1930.”

3. “A sample of 90 middle-class, intellectually gifted women born about 1910.”

We refer to this book more in Chapter 6, but here is a summary of four of his findings on retirement and aging as a rewarding experience.

• First, people kept adding new friends to their lives. If study members had not added a new friend to their lives in the last ten years, they were not usually aging well. What this meant is that they had not replaced social contacts at work with involvement in other activities that allowed new friendships to develop.

• Second, they knew how to play, whether it was competitive activities like bridge or some other more physical activity that got them out and about in life. The focus was not on “being the best” but just being involved in fun activities.

• Third, they were involved in a continuing form of creativity.

• Fourth, they had a pattern of life-long learning.

Vaillant quotes one man (in his 80s) who typified what he meant about these four retirement activities.

In the last ten years we have made a great many (40-60) new friends, about 30-40 of whom we feel very close to. We have been welcomed into a play reading group, a bowling group and into the local yacht and beach club. These folks brought food and flowers, etc. during my recent illness. Several came over voluntarily to perform tasks that I could not do such as getting stuff put away when the hurricane threatened and getting our vegetable garden ready for winter. We have felt extremely close to these folks for four to five years. I also think that I am closer to my brother and sister-in-law and to my wife’s brother than I was in 1990. (pg. 225)

Other research is bearing out Vaillant’s findings about the new life people discover in retirement. This is not based on income, race, or social standing. The successful retirees are across the board. People at each socio-economic level do well in retirement along with those who don’t do so well.

In addition to the four areas of growth above, Vaillant lists six personal qualities that he found in the people who were aging well. Almost universally, they:

1. Cared for others

2. Tolerated the “indignities of old age” with grace and accepted their dependency on others as needed

3. Remained hopeful about their possibilities in life and were realistically autonomous in pursuing them

4. Had a great sense of humor and found things to laugh about nearly every day

5. Got sustenance from memories of the past as well as engaging in new learning

6. Maintained intimate contact with old friends as well as family

In an earlier report (in the 1990s) on his study of Harvard men, Vaillant said one surprising result was that the men who had the best relationship with their siblings were also the healthiest men in his study. This is not a surprise to us. Good family relationships, or improving relationships, are a sign of the kind of emotional maturity it takes to age well. Those who go into older age still feeling bitter and cut off from other family members generally do not age well, as Ron often observed in his therapy practice.