The Element

CHAPTER NINE Is It Too Late?

SUSAN JEFFERS is the author of Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway^® and many other best‐selling books. She didn’t begin her writing career until she was well into her forties. How she did it is a remarkable story.

As a child, Susan loved to read. The best time of the day for her was when she could curl up with a book in the quiet of her room. “I was always curious, and my father was a great one for explaining things. Sometimes he would go into so much detail my eyes would roll back. I remember hearing something on the radio once that I didn’t understand. The word was circumcision. True to form, he didn’t give me a short explanation! He was like a teacher. I think he missed his calling. He’d always wanted a boy, and I was treated to all the things he would have done with a son. I got to go to a lot of wrestling matches!”

Susan went off to college, where she met and soon married her first husband. She dropped out when she got pregnant with the first of her two children. After four years at home, she decided she had to go back to college. This decision created much anxiety: “The years at home had shattered my confidence, and I wasn’t sure I would succeed.” She eventually found her feet at college and even graduated summa cum laude. When she learned of this honor, she began phoning everyone she knew. “Finally I dropped the phone and began crying as I realized that the one person I was trying to reach was my father, who had died a few years earlier. He would have been so proud.”

With the encouragement of one of her teachers, Susan enrolled in graduate school and ultimately received her doctorate in psychology. Then, through an unexpected turn of events, she was asked to become the executive director of the Floating Hospital in New York City. She hesitated at first, as it was a very big job and she didn’t know if she could handle it. But finally, she agreed.

By then, she was having trouble in her marriage, and she filed for divorce. This was a difficult time for Susan. “Even having my doctorate in psychology didn’t help. While my job was rewarding beyond my wildest dreams, I was miserable. I soon got tired of feeling sorry for myself and knew I had to find a new way of ‘being’ in the world. And that is when my spiritual journey began.”

During the ten years she ran the Floating Hospital, Susan became what she calls a “workshop addict.” In her free time, she studied Eastern philosophies and attended all manner of personal growth and New Age workshops. “I discovered that it was fear that was creating my ‘victim mentality’ and negative attitude. It was stopping me from taking responsibility for my experience of life. It was also fear that was keeping me from being a truly loving person. Little by little, I learned how to push through fear and move myself from the weakest to the strongest part of who I am. Ultimately, I felt a sense of power that I had never felt before.”

Sitting at her desk one day, the thought came into her mind to go down to the New School for Social Research, a place she had never been. Since she was learning to trust her intuition, she decided to check it out. “I thought maybe they had a workshop I needed to take. When I arrived, I looked at the directory and noticed the Department of Human Resources, which sounded relevant to my interests. I made my way to their offices. There was no one in the reception area. Then I heard a woman in the office to the right say, ‘Can I help you?’ I walked in and blurted out, ‘I’m here to teach a course about fear.’ Where that came from, I hadn’t a clue! She looked at me in shock and said, ‘Oh my goodness, I’ve been searching for someone to teach a course on fear and this is the last day to put it in the catalogue and I have to leave in fifteen minutes.’ Satisfied with my credentials she said, ‘Quickly write a course title and a seventy‐five‐word course description. Without any forethought, I titled the course ‘Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway’ and wrote the course description. She was pleased and placed my course information on her assistant’s desk with a note to include it in the catalogue. She thanked me profusely and quickly exited. Alone, I stood thinking to myself, ‘What just happened?’ I believe strongly in the Law of Attraction, but to me this was mind blowing.”

Susan was nervous as she faced the first session of the twelve‐week course. The two hours went well, but she then was confronted with a new fear. “I thought, ‘That’s it. That’s all I know about this subject. So what am I going to teach next week? And the ten more sessions to follow?’ But every week I found I had more to say. And my confidence level grew. I realized I had learned so much over the years about pushing through fear. And my students were drinking it up. Ultimately, they were amazed at how shifting their thinking really changed their lives. Teaching this course convinced me that that the techniques that had transformed my life were the same techniques that could transform anyone regardless of age, sex, or background.”

Susan eventually decided to write a book based on the course she had taught. She faced many roadblocks. And after four agents and fifteen rejections from various publishers, she reluctantly put the proposal in a drawer. One of the worst rejection letters she received said, “Lady Di could be bicycling nude down the street giving this book away, and no one would read it!”

During this period, she decided to leave the Floating Hospital and focus on becoming a serious writer. “I remember riding in a cab one evening. The driver asked me what I did. I heard myself say, ‘I’m a writer.’ I suppose until that moment I had thought of myself as a psychologist or an administrator, but there it was. I was a writer.”

After three years of writing articles for magazines, she was going through the drawer that held her much‐rejected book proposal. “I picked it up and had a profound sense that I held something in my hands that many people needed to read. So I set out with much determination to find a publisher who believed in my book the same way I did. This time, I succeeded. What’s more, I succeeded beyond my wildest dreams.”

Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway^® has sold millions of copies. It is available in a hundred countries, and it has been translated into more than thirty‐five languages. Susan has written seventeen more books that are also making their way around the world. Susan was indeed a writer; the Times of London even dubbed her the “Queen of Self‐Help.” She is a sought‐after public speaker and has been a guest on many radio and television shows internationally. About Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway^®, she says, “My Web site receives e‐mails from all over the world from people telling me how my book has helped their lives. Some have actually credited it with saving their lives. I’m so happy I never gave up. My father would really have been proud.”

Is It Too Late?

We all know people who feel locked into their lives. They sincerely wish they could do something more meaningful and fulfilling, but at age thirty‐nine or fifty‐two or sixty‐four, they feel that the opportunity has passed. Perhaps you feel that it’s too late—that it’s unrealistic to pivot your life suddenly in a new direction. Perhaps you feel that you’ve missed the one opportunity you had to pursue your heart’s desire (maybe due to one of the constraints we discussed earlier). Perhaps you didn’t have the confidence to follow the passion earlier, and now believe that the moment is gone.

There is abundant evidence that opportunities to discover our Element exist more frequently in our lives than many might believe. In the course of writing this book, we have come upon literally hundreds of examples of people following their passions later in their lives. For example, Harriet Doerr, the best‐selling author, only dabbled in writing while she raised her family. When she was sixty‐five, she returned to college to get a degree in history. But the writing courses she took along the way raised her prose skills to a new level, and she wound up enrolled in Stanford’s creative writing program. She eventually published her first novel, the National Book Award–winning Stones for Ibarra, in 1983, at the age of seventy‐three.

While less than half that age at thirty‐six, Paul Potts still seemed stuck in an obscure and unfulfilling life. He’d always known he had a good voice and he’d pursued operatic training. However, a motorcycle accident cut short his dreams of the stage. Instead, he became a mobile telephone salesman in South Wales and continued to struggle with a lifelong self‐confidence problem. Then he heard about auditions for the talent competition television show Britain’s Got Talent, created by Simon Cowell of American Idol fame. Potts got the opportunity to sing Puccini’s “Nessun Dorma” on national television, and his beautiful voice brought down the house, leaving one of the judges in tears. Over the next few weeks, Potts became an international sensation— the YouTube video of his first performance has been downloaded more than eighteen million times. He ultimately won the competition and got the opportunity to sing in front of the Queen. Carphone Warehouse’s loss has been a gain for opera fans around the world, as Potts released his first album, One Chance, in late 2007. Singing had always been his Element.

“My voice,” he said, “has always been my best friend. If I was having problems with bullies at school, I always had my voice to fall back on. I don’t really know why people bullied me. I was always a little bit different. So I think that’s the reason sometimes that I struggled with self‐confidence. When I’m singing I don’t have that problem. I’m in the place where I should be. All my life I felt insignificant. After that first audition, I realized that I am somebody. I’m Paul Potts.”

Julia Child, the chef credited with revolutionizing American home cooking and originating the television cooking show, worked first as an advertising copywriter and then in various roles for the U.S. government. In her mid‐thirties, she discovered French cuisine and began professional training. It was not until she was nearly fifty that she published Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and her storied career took off.

At sixty‐five, Maggie Kuhn was a church organizer who had no intention of leaving her job. Unfortunately, her employers made retirement mandatory at her age. Angry at the way her employer showed her the door, she decided to start a support group with friends in similar situations. Their attempts to address the common problems of retirees pushed them toward higher and higher levels of activism, culminating in the creation of the Gray Panthers, a national advocacy group.

We’ve all heard that fifty is the new thirty and that seventy is the new forty (if this algorithm extends in both directions, it would explain the adolescent behavior of some thirty‐somethings I know). But there are some important changes that we should take seriously. Life expectancy has increased in our lifetimes. It has more than doubled in the past hundred years, and is growing at an accelerated rate. Quality of health for older people has improved. According to a MacArthur Foundation study, nearly nine in ten Americans ages sixty‐five to seventy‐four say they are living disability‐free. Many older people in the developed world have much greater financial stability. In the 1950s, 35 percent of older Americans lived in poverty; today that figure is 10 percent.

There’s a great deal of talk these days about the “second middle age.” What we once considered middle age (roughly thirty‐five to fifty) presaged a rapid descent toward retirement and imminent death. Now, the end of this first middle age marks a series of benchmarks (a certain level of accomplishment in your work, kids going off to college, reduction in necessary capital purchases). What comes after this is a second stretch where healthy, accomplished people can set off to reach their next set of goals. It’s certainly either chastening or inspirational—I’m not sure which—to hear boomer rock stars prove their predictions wrong about what they’d be doing “when I’m sixty‐four” or still trying to get some “satisfaction.”

If we have an entire extra “middle age” these days, certainly we get additional opportunities to do more with our lives as part of the package. Thinking that we need to fulfill our grandest dreams (or at least be in the process of fulfilling them) by the time we’re thirty is outmoded.

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.

One way to improve your real age is to take better care of yourself physically, through exercise and nutrition. I know this, because I live in California, where everyone seems to have stock in Lycra, and dairy products have the same health status as cigarettes. I try my best to live healthily, too. I aim to do sit‐ups every day and to avoid dessert. But it’s not only about working out and eating in.

One of the fundamental precepts of the Element is that we need to reconnect with ourselves and to see ourselves holistically. One of the greatest obstacles to being in our Element is the belief that our minds somehow exist independently of our bodies, like tenants in an apartment, or that our bodies are really just a form of transport for our heads. The evidence of research, and of common sense, is not only that our physical health affects our intellectual and emotional vitality, but that our attitudes can affect our physical well‐being. But equally important is the work you do to keep your mind young. Laughter has a huge impact on aging. So does intellectual curiosity. Meditation can also provide significant benefits to the physical body.

The answer to the question, Is it too late for me to find the Element? is simple: No, of course not. Even in the cases where the physical degradations that come with age make certain achievements impossible, the Element is still within reach. I’ll never get that speed‐skating gold, but if the sport meant that much to me (it doesn’t), I could find a way to gain access to that tribe, perhaps using the skills I already have and those I could acquire to make a meaningful contribution to that world.

Keeping Things Plastic

What this really comes down to is our capacity to continue to develop our creativity and intelligence as we enter new stages in our lives. Obviously, it happens in dramatic ways when we’re very young. The infant brain is tremendously active and enormously plastic. It is a ferment of potential. It has somewhere near one hundred billion neurons, and it can make a nearly infinite variety of possible connections, building what scientists call “neural pathways” out of what we encounter in the world. Our brains are preprogrammed to some degree by our genetics, but our experiences deeply affect how we evolve as individuals and how our brains develop.

Consider, for instance, how we learn language. Learning to speak is one of the most miraculous achievements in a child’s life. It happens for most of us within our first few years. No one teaches language to us—certainly not our parents. They couldn’t possibly do that because spoken language is too complex, too subtle, and too full of variations for anyone to teach it formally to a child. Of course, parents and others guide and correct young children as they learn to speak and they may encourage and applaud them. But babies don’t learn to speak by instruction. They learn by imitation and inference. We are all born with a deep, instinctive capacity for language, which is activated almost as soon as we draw breath.

Babies instinctively recognize meanings and intentions in the sounds and tones they hear from other humans around them. Babies born into households with dogs as pets will respond to the noises and growls that dogs make. However, they don’t confuse these sounds with human language. Most children don’t opt for barking as a way of communicating—with the possible exception of the terrible twos and a couple of years in late adolescence.

There doesn’t seem to be any obvious limit to our capacity for languages. Children born into multilingual households are likely to learn each of these languages. They don’t reach a point of saturation and say, “Please keep my grandmother out of here. I can’t handle another dialect.” Young children tend to learn all the languages to which they are exposed and to slip effortlessly between them. I recall meeting three school‐age brothers a few years ago. Their mother was French, their father was American, and they lived in Costa Rica. They were fluent in French, English, and Spanish as well as an amalgam they created from the three that they used exclusively when speaking with each other.

On the other hand, if you are born into a monolingual household, the odds are that you won’t seek out other languages to learn, at least until you need to choose one in middle school. Learning a new language at that point is a much more difficult thing to do because you’ve already paved a large number of neural pathways with regard to language (in other words, you’ve made a huge number of yes/no decisions about what to call a particular item, how to form sentences, and even how to shape your mouth when speaking). Trying to speak a foreign language for the first time in your thirties is even tougher.

The neuroscientist Susan Greenfield illustrates the amazing plasticity of the young brain in a cautionary tale of a six‐year‐old boy in Italy, who was blind in one eye. The cause of his blindness was a mystery. As far as the ophthalmologists could tell, his eye was perfectly normal. They eventually discovered that when he was a baby, he had been treated for a minor infection. The treatment included having the eye bandaged for two weeks. This would have made little difference to the eye of an adult. But in a young baby, the development of the eye‐to‐brain neural circuits is a delicate and critical process. Because the neurons serving the bandaged eye were not being used during this crucial period of development, they were treated by the brain as though they weren’t there at all. “Sadly,” said Greenfield, “the bandaging of the eye was misinterpreted by the brain as a clear indication that the boy would not be using the eye for the rest of his life.” The result was that he was permanently blinded in that eye.

Young brains are in a constant process of evolution and change, and extremely reactive to their environment. During early stages of development, our brains go through a process that cognitive scientists call “neural pruning.” Essentially, this involves trimming away neural pathways that we determine at an unconscious level to have little long‐term value to us. This pruning is of course different for every individual, but it is a tremendously necessary part of development. It serves the same function in our brains as pruning does to a tree—it gets rid of the unnecessary branches to allow for continued growth and increased overall strength. It shuts down pathways that we’ll never use again in order to make room for the expansion of pathways that we will use regularly. As a result, the enormous natural capacities with which we are all born become shaped and molded, expanded or limited, through a constant process of interaction between internal biological processes and our actual experiences in the world.

The best news in all of this is that the physical development of the brain is not a straightforward, one‐way linear process. Our brains don’t stop developing when we get our first set of car keys (though the insurance companies would like to suggest as much). Harvard neurobiologist Gerald Fischbach has performed extensive research in brain cell counting and has determined that we retain the overwhelming majority of our brain cells throughout our lives. The average brain contains more neurons than it could possibly use in a lifetime, even given our increased life expectancies.

In addition, research indicates that, as long as we keep using our brains in an active way, we continue to build neural pathways as we get older. This gives us not only the ongoing potential for creative thought, but also an additional incentive for continuing to stretch ourselves. There is strong evidence to suggest that the creative functions of our brain stay strong deep into our lives: we can recover and renew many of our latent aptitudes by deliberately exercising them. Just as physical exercise can revitalize our muscles, mental exercise can revitalize our creative capabilities. There’s extensive research going on now regarding neurogenesis, the creation of new brain cells in adult humans. It’s becoming clear that, contrary to what we believed for more than a century, the brain continues to generate new cells, and certain mental techniques (such as meditation) can even accelerate this.

We can admire the remarkable work done by people like Georgia O’Keeffe, Albert Einstein, Paul Newman, and I. M. Pei late in their lives, but we should not consider this work remarkable because they did it late in life. These people were simply high achievers who kept their brains sharp so they could continue to be high achievers. That they accomplished what they did at advanced ages should not surprise us nearly as much as it often does.

I mentioned earlier that it’s unlikely that a centenarian will take the lead in Swan Lake. It’s not impossible, just unlikely. The reason, of course, is that, at least until medical science takes several leaps forward, some of our capacities do deteriorate with age, especially physical athleticism. There’s not much point in denying this, though some of us try desperately to do so, to the point of embarrassing ourselves in public.

However, this isn’t true of all of our capacities. Like a good wheel of Parmigiano‐Reggiano, some of them actually improve over time. There seem to be seasons of possibility in all of our lives, and they vary according to what we’re doing. It’s widely accepted that our abilities in mathematics, for example, tend to grow and peak in our twenties and thirties. I don’t mean the ability to work out the food bill or to calculate the odds of your team winning the Super Bowl. I’m speaking about the kind of higher math done by world‐class mathematicians, the Terence Taos of the world. Most math geniuses have done their most original work by the time the rest of us have signed up for our first mortgages— which is something we probably wouldn’t do if we were better at math. The same is true of learning the technical skills of playing a musical instrument.

But in other ways and in other areas, maturity can be a genuine advantage, especially, for example, in the arts. Many writers, poets, painters, and composers have produced their greatest work as their insights and sensitivities deepened with age. One can say the same about disciplines as diverse as law, cooking, teaching, and landscape design. In fact, in any discipline where experience plays a significant role, age is an asset rather than a liability.

It follows, then, that “too late” arrives at various times, depending on where your search for the Element takes you. If it’s toward internationally competitive gymnastics, it might be too late by the time you’re fifteen. If it’s toward developing a new style of fusion cuisine, “too late” might never come. For most of us, we’re not even close to “too late.”

Engaged Forever

One of the results of seeing our lives as linear and unidirectional is that it leads to a culture (true of most Western cultures, in fact) of segregating people by age. We send the very young to nursery schools and kindergartens as a group. We educate teenagers in batches. We move the elderly into retirement homes. There are some good reasons for all of this. After all, as Gail Sheehy noted decades ago, there are predictable passages in our lives, and it makes some sense to create environments where people can experience those passages in an optimal way.

However, there are also good reasons to challenge the routines of what really amounts to age discrimination. An inspiring example is a unique educational program in the Jenks school district of Tulsa, Oklahoma.

The state of Oklahoma has a nationally acclaimed early‐years reading program, providing reading classes for three‐ to five‐year‐olds throughout the state. The Jenks district offers a unique version of the program. This came about when the owner of another institution in Jenks—one across the street from one of the elementary schools—approached the superintendent of schools. He’d heard about the reading program and wondered if his institution could offer some help. The superintendent responded positively to the idea and, after clearing some bureaucratic hurdles, welcomed the other institution’s help.

The other institution is the Grace Living Center, a retirement home.

Over the next few months, the district established a preschool and kindergarten classroom in the very heart of Grace Living Center. Surrounded by clear glass walls (with a gap at the top to allow the sounds of the children to filter out), the classroom sits in the foyer of the main building. The children and their teachers go to school there every day as though it were any other classroom. Because it’s in the foyer, the residents walk past it at least three times a day to get to their meals.

As soon as the class opened, many of the residents stopped to look through the glass walls at what was going on. The teachers told them that the children were learning to read. One by one, several residents asked if they could help. The teachers were glad to have the assistance, and they quickly set up a program called Book Buddies. The program pairs a member of the retirement home with one of the children. The adults listen to the children read, and they read to them.

The program has had some remarkable results. One is that the majority of the children at the Grace Living Center are outperforming other children in the district on the state’s standardized reading tests. More than 70 percent are leaving the program at age five reading at third‐grade level or higher. But the children are learning much more than how to read. As they sit with their book buddies, the kids have rich conversations with the adults about a wide variety of subjects, and especially about the elders’ memories of their childhoods growing up in Oklahoma. The children ask things about how big iPods were when the adults were growing up, and the adults explain that their lives really weren’t like the lives that kids have now. This leads to stories about how they lived and played seventy, eighty, or even ninety years ago. The children are getting a wonderfully textured social history of their home‐towns from people who have seen the town evolve over the decades. Parents are so pleased with this extracurricular benefit that a lottery is now required because the demand for the sixty available desks is so strong.

Something else has been going on at the Grace Living Center, though: medication levels there are plummeting. Many of the residents on the program have stopped or cut back on their drugs.

Why is this happening? Because the adult participants in the program have come back to life. Instead of whiling away their days waiting for the inevitable, they have a reason to get up in the morning and a renewed excitement about what the day might bring. Because they are reconnecting with their creative energies, they are literally living longer.

There’s something else the children learn. Every now and then, the teachers have to tell them that one of their book buddies won’t be coming any more; that this person has passed. So the children come to appreciate at a tender age that life has its rhythms and cycles, and that even the people they become close to are part of that cycle.

In a way, the Grace Living Center has restored an ancient, traditional relationship between the generations. The very young and the very old have always had an almost mystical connection. They seem to understand each other in a fundamental, often un‐spoken way. Our practice in the West is often to keep these generations apart. The Book Buddies program shows in a simple yet profound way the enrichment possible when generations come together. It shows too that the elderly can revive long‐lost energies if the circumstances are right and the inspiration is there.

There’s Time

What everyone from Susan Jeffers to Julia Child to the book buddies teach us is that remarkable, life‐enhancing things can happen when we take the time to step out of our routines, rethink our paths, and revisit the passions we left behind (or never pursued at all) for whatever reason. We can take ourselves in fresh directions at nearly any point in our lives. We have the capacity to discover the Element at practically any age. As the actor Sophia Loren once said, “There is a fountain of youth: it is your mind, your talents, the creativity you bring to your life and the lives of the people you love. When you learn to tap this source, you will truly have defeated age.”