Live Long, Die Short (9 page)

The Masai people of East Africa have a saying: “Life is change.” And indeed it is. Change is occurring all around us, every day, a virtual parade of transformation and alteration. We categorize it according to our personal and societal values as loss, gain, regression, renewal, growth, or decline, but no matter how we choose to classify it, it is change, and it comes with having a pulse.

We often use barometers to gauge change: clock time, birthdays, calendars, holidays, seasons, years, anniversaries, rites of passage, births, deaths. When the passage of time is subtle, like aging, we can easily fail to notice it and the change that comes with it. I have a friend who never had children, and he told me that decades passed in what seemed to be the blink of an eye, decades that parents could gauge by their children’s birthdays, growth, progression in school, graduation, and marriage. If you take a mindful look, you can’t help acknowledging the non-permanence around us. The faces looking back at us in the mirror are daily reminders of it. Our skin, hair, hands all are historical accounts of time passing. Even stones change. Mountains erode. Our oceans are rising, and we are all moving toward an inevitable return to the basic elements—carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and a mix of others—that make up our bodies.

Yet, despite this universal awareness that all things change, we resist it. We set up our lives as if we believed that if we do it right, things won’t change, or at least they won’t get worse. We throw up virtual walls around our lives and then are surprised when the Trojan horse of sickness, or failure, or loss happens. We beat our breasts and wonder, Why me? Or, What did I do or not do that caused this change? How could this happen? Of course, change we consider good we readily accept as the fruit of our labor, or good luck. The bad, however, we psychologically resist as unwelcome and unanticipated. We spend large portions of our lives worrying about such bad change. We acquire things, relationships, status, and then fight to keep them as they are, in near-constant dread of their loss or change. Our Buddhist friends tell us that this, in fact, is the cause of most suffering in the world, our attachment to non-permanent things. Essentially, fearing that things that are fated to change actually
will
change. It is fruitless. And it is tragic.

Why do we do this? Why do we accept change on an intellectual level and resist it on a gut level? Perhaps it begins with our very existence. We all know we will die, yet, for most of our lives, we have a feeling that somehow
we will get out of this world alive. We have myths and deep faith that even if we do die, we will survive, basically as we are now, beyond death. Even without any proof whatsoever, most of us believe strongly in an afterlife.

Change inherently involves moving from what is known to what is unknown. The unknown is daunting. Contained in the unknown is a fear that under the new conditions we may fail or even not survive. I have a friend, Tom, who was a POW in Vietnam for seven years. Even under the worst of circumstances and even though he had constant hope of rescue or the end of the war, he became apprehensive when his captors moved him. Was this the end? Were the new conditions going to be worse than what he had now? We humans are highly adaptive and, indeed, that characteristic is a key to the survival and dominance of our species. Yet, despite a lifetime of successful adaptation, each one of us has a fear that the next challenge might finish us. Our bosses might find out that we’re not as good as they think we are. We may not make friends in the new neighborhood we’re moving to. Will I have friends when I get old? Will I have enough money after I retire? Will I die alone?

The adaptations we make to each situation we’re in, over time, become comfortable. Not always in the literal sense, for there may be parts of our lives that are less than ideal. Yet, we feel secure in that we know we can manage our current life situation. Most of the time, we fully realize that “things could be worse.” Additionally, ritual is comforting. Even if we are bored out of our minds, ritual can bring us an inner peace that comes with predictability. Likewise, ritual can help us “get our hands around” the change that is inevitable—births, marriages, death, and the other rites of living.

Ritual seems to appeal to us just as it did to our ancestors. And perhaps, on a very basic level, our uneasy relationship with change is a birthright handed down to us from those same ancestors, who saw so little change in their lifetimes, who valued ritual, and whose very survival was constantly threatened by any change. Change often meant threat, and with threat came fear and stress.

There are many who’ve excelled at aging, who understand this and have minimized change-induced stress in their lives. The New England Centenarian Study is a longitudinal study of a hundred-plus-year-old population. These very old adults share a common characteristic, which Dr. Thomas Perls, the lead investigator, believes is a key element in their successful longevity formula.
¹
These people know that the future holds change and adversity; after all, they know they are going to die soon. Yet they remain optimistic that whatever awaits them around the next turn in their lives,
they will handle it, as they have everything else in their century-plus-long lives. Or they won’t. In either case, they choose not to worry about it. They choose to live in the moment and enjoy what is now. They refuse to slide into fear, and the darkness that comes with it. And so they are open to whatever changes await them. This approach closely resembles the surrender that Buddhists advocate as a way to deal with stress, fear, and change. Not the “giving up” type of surrender, but the “I accept what is and will deal with it” surrender.

The irony is that we are change survivors. In fact, we have weathered more change than any generation before us. We began the twentieth century with no airplanes, no antibiotics, only a handful of automobiles, and essentially no paved roads. Very few households had bathtubs. There were more people in Iowa than California. Even as late as forty years ago, there were no small computers, cell phones, or Internet. Yes, we’re survivors. Change is indeed an ever-growing part of our lives.

And there is more irony. Despite a built-in skepticism about the change that happens
to
us, we spend a good part of lives trying to make selected change in our lives: making New Year’s resolutions, trying to lose weight, quit smoking, get in better shape. This is self-imposed change, change over which we feel we have some control. This kind is perfectly acceptable to us. But frankly, we suck at it.

You know it’s true. Over the course of the last year, how many times have you resolved to make substantial changes in your life? How many of those changes, if any, have you made? From the New Year’s resolutions to the diets, we are terminally optimistic that we have the power to change. Please don’t misunderstand. I believe we do indeed have the ability to make changes in our lives. During the course of our lives, we make many significant changes. But for most of us, those successful changes represent only a small percentage of our attempts. Some of us learn over time to accept ourselves as we are, warts and all, rather than continue to ride the roller coaster of motivation, resolution, failure, and guilt over and over again. But these people are in the minority, and nearly nonexistent among the young.

Those of us in the business of assisting people in making changes in their lives know that for change, as for so many things, there is a season. James O. Prochaska, a professor of psychology and director of the Cancer Prevention Research Center at the University of Rhode Island, developed a model for lifestyle change that assesses a person’s readiness for change; for Prochaska, making this determination is the first step in any attempt to assist them in making changes.
²
Called the Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change, this model is used by professionals like trainers, therapists, and life coaches to guide their clients through behavior change. It not only identifies six distinct stages of an individual’s path to behavior change but also provides strategies for guiding people through each stage, with the ultimate goal of actual change.

When people are felt to be in the first stage, the
precontemplative stage
, they are not thinking about making changes. In the second stage, the
contemplative stage
, they are aware of the potential benefits of change but still have enough reasons for not changing to prevent them from acting. In the next stage, the
preparation stage
, they have made up their minds to attempt to change, see the value, and begin to put their toes in the water toward the new behavior. In the
action stage
, our travelers on this change journey are “off to the races” with high hopes, motivation, and lots of ideas on how to modify their behavior in the direction of the goal. Once they’ve made
the change and have been able to sustain the new behavior, they’re in the
maintenance stage
and working to prevent relapse into old behaviors. And last comes the
termination stage
(not sure about whether that’s the best term), which means that our evolving humans have reached a point where there is no temptation to return to the old behavior. The new behavior is the new normal.

This model provides some clarity in what is otherwise a free-for-all world of behavior modification. It guides the lifestyle coach or consultant, since the proper approach depends on the stage. For instance, it is fruitless to try to facilitate change in someone who is precontemplative and therefore not interested in changing. Ask any wife who had aspirations of changing her husband’s behavior after they were married. Providing some basic information and backing out of the room is the recommended approach to stimulate change—an approach that allows us to concentrate on those people who are ready, thereby ensuring “more bang for the buck” from our efforts.

Of course, the Transtheoretical Model of Behavior Change is for those facilitating change in others. For ourselves, it pretty much comes down to winging it, and the results reflect this come-as-you-are, wishful-thinking approach to our own change. Having heard now what’s necessary to age successfully, most of us realize we need to make some changes. So how can we do that when we are historically so bad at it?

In his intriguing book,
One Small Step Can Change Your Life
, Dr. Robert Maurer has succeeded in radically altering our views of what it takes for successful behavior change.
³
He roots our colossally consistent failure to effect change in our lives to two basic facts. First, we are wired to fear and resist large change, and second, our culture values only large change. And therein lies the dilemma. Two conditions that battle constantly and that essentially guarantee the failure of our efforts to make positive changes in our lives—two truths looking very meek alone, but that are powerful when pitted together. There is hope, however. Although one of these conditions is not alterable, the other is, and it is there that our hopes for successful behavior change lie.

Let’s first address the part that we can’t do too much about: the fact that we are wired to resist change.

Whatever the reason for our straight-arming of change that threatens our status quo, fear is a major player. It is a powerful inherited force in humans, as it was an absolutely necessary survival skill for our ancestors. Observations of current hunter-gatherer cultures indicate that fear, for them, seems limited to situations where there is a direct and immediate threat that demands just as immediate a response, such as during the hunting of large animals or during the response to a weather threat.

In today’s hectic and competitive world, one that our ancestors could never have dreamed of, fear is self-inflicted and chronic, the by-product of our mind running rampant, chattering and creating virtual fearful situations that provoke a response, but not one that makes the fear go away. Fear of failure, injury, sickness, loss, humiliation, pain, peace, or loss of status has replaced, for the most part, the fear associated with a lion’s attack. For most of us, our minds fail to keep us in the present moment, where there is rarely anything happening that generates fear. This failure to remain in the present moment, accepting this moment for what it is, without criticism or lament, realizing full well it will soon change as all things do, is a source of much of our fear as well as of its constant companion, stress (see
Tip Eight
).

My spiritual advisor, Yoda, the ancient Jedi master from George Lucas’s
Star Wars
(whose teachings are those of famed spiritual teacher Joseph Campbell), tells us, “Fear is the path to the dark side,” and he is correct. Fear cripples us and prevents us from accepting the reality of the present. Fear tortures us with negative possibilities and leaves us in a dark place indeed. Fear paralyzes us from making decisions or changes that can help us grow. Fear of change, or all the reasons for fear of change, can hold us captive, bound by invisible bonds of our own making. This fear, as we will discuss in
part II
, is a powerful destructive force when it comes to health and successful aging. It was protective in the simpler world of our ancestors, when it geared them up for a challenge and then dissipated when the challenge was over. But in our world, with chronic self-induced stress, which is a form of fear, it is not only not protective; it is deadly.