Book Review – New Passages

Many of us remember Gail Sheehy’s 1976 book Passages: Predicatable Crises of Adult Life, which discussed how we transition between different stages of life.  But you may not know that in 1995 she wrote New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time , referencing later stages of life not addressed in her earlier book.  Below are some excerpts from New Passages about what she calls the ‘Age of Integrity’ (65+):

• While many of us can now expect to live longer lives, many ‘imagine those years only in terms of infirmity and dependency…Whether we like it or not, many of us are going to live a lot longer than our parents did’
• ‘When older patients complain about feeling dizzy or depressed or their memories are foggy or their balances are off, doctors often ascribe these symptoms to old age, when they may be side effects of drugs’
• ‘Modifying your diet, using nutritional supplements, committing yourself to regular exercise, cutting our cigarette smoking, and learning various techniques to reduce stress can help not only to avoid drugs that may suppress your own immune response but if they become habits, to help ensure that you will be less subject to disease when you reach later life.  And later life may be much longer than you think’
• What keeps us in good health?  Per contributor Christine Grimaldi, ‘Mental stimulation – People who keep themselves active and don’t isolate themselves as they get older are the ones who…stay healthy’
• ‘Exercise appears to be the single most effective nonmedical elixir to retard aging…Long daily walks are part of the job of successful aging…We are never too old to benefit from exercise’
• ‘The Age of Integrity is primarily a stage of spiritual growth.  Instead of focusing on the time running out, it should be a daily exercise in the third age to (live in) mark the moment’

But of course, there is loss, so we must ‘cultivate greater appreciation and acceptance of what we cannot control.’  It’s better to ‘learn to accept your life not as a series of random events, but as a path of awakening.’

Like her earlier book, Gail Sheehy’s  New Passages is well worth reading so you can learn how to increase your chances of aging well.