A Hermosa author helps sociologists, brain researchers and gray-headed bloggers redefine aging
Some years ago a popular magazine ran a big splashy spread announcing that women over 50 could continue to be vital and worthy of our admiration, despite their advanced years. The spread was devoted to a small number of celebrity women who, it turned out, were considered vital because they could still look like they were 30. You too can refuse to age!
If the spread was reprinted today, it would really tick off a number of increasingly important people.
Like Ronni Bennett, 69, a former TV and radio producer who spends her retired life as matriarch of the influential TimeGoesBy.net blogging website, which hacks away at the fallacies of aging that bloom throughout our youth-conscious culture.
And Lars Tornstam, a Scandinavian sociologist regarded by many as a key re-definer of age within the so-called soft sciences.
And some medical researchers in the so-called hard sciences, who are busy following tiny synapses to the wisdom of the aging brain.
It’s fair to say the magazine would have passed far beneath the notice of psychology pioneer Carl Jung, one of the seminal minds of the last century, who held steadfastly that healthy aging means, first and foremost, accepting rather than denying one’s years.
And the spread would not likely have endeared itself to Hermosan Jaki Scarcello, a corporate coach and author who based her book Fifty & Fabulous, the Best Years of a Woman’s Life on interviews with women on three continents who challenge the time-worn view that life – rich, stimulating, satisfying life – is only for the young.
Scarcello, 59, who will help women explore their roles “in the second half of life” at a Sunday event at the Beverly Hills Country Club, adds her voice to a chorus that is growing in numbers and clout as the baby boomer generation continues to gray.
“I really have been supporting baby boomers all the way through their working lives,” she said. “The next step for this group is retirement, and that’s my next step as well.”
As she interviewed women for her book, Scarcello found that they were happier when they took Jung’s advice to “accept the reality of their age, integrate the earlier threads of their lives and look for what is new.”
As Jung maintains in his book Modern Man in Search of a Soul, “…we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning – for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”
Scarcello interviewed women age 45 to 102 in the U.S., Canada, Russia, India and England, diverse in their cultures, their economic circumstances and their status as married, single or divorced.
“They shared some important things,” she said. “When they were embracing the age they were, they were much more capable of accepting things that came into their lives, and much more accepting of life’s ups and downs.”
One American woman in midlife had spent decades wanting to be married, and never realizing that dream.
“Her whole life she wanted to be married. In her mid-50s she came to the realization that probably was not going to happen. Then she found this enormous freedom. She told me, ‘I went down this long passage of my desire, and I expected to find a wall, but I found a door. I found this great freedom.’ It turned out her desire had owned her,” Sarcello said.
“She was able to ask, does this suit me any more? Is this what I want? I don’t know if she wound up getting married, but she became happier,” Scarcello said. “She found a greater satisfaction with her life.”
Women willing to look age straight in the crow’s feet also found “a whole new sense of confidence, a sense of exploration. They tend to operate without boundaries — like all the social norms, the dos and don’ts — and they show a keen interest in the mysteries of life. It’s an expanded perspective on life, which gives us a very different energy to explore,” Scarcello said.
“This is not something that is just available to the affluent or the healthy,” she said. “I found this in women I interviewed who were still working at 70 because they couldn’t afford not to. And some were ill. But they could see age with this new perspective. They didn’t hold their age as a limiting belief.”
Wise old brain
Jung wrote of the reflective nature of age, and “elderblogger” Bennett said brain researchers might be reaching toward a “biological definition of wisdom” by finding that “in our old age the distinctions between the two halves of the brain become fuzzier, and we draw on both sides of the brain.”
Some researchers have associated high intuition – a trans-rational faculty that asserts itself in dreams, meditation and flashes of deep insight – with a well-developed corpus callosum, a bridge in the brain that allows information to transfer between the two very different hemispheres.
On the down side for the aging, a recent study by researchers at the University of Michigan found that a greater flow of information between the brain hemispheres can make people less efficient in motor tasks. From that perspective, the researchers described the corpus callosum not as a bridge, but as a dam that keeps too much information from seeping back and forth.
So it could be that as old people become somewhat clumsier, they are compensated with increasing wisdom, becoming a sub-population of slow-driving mystics.
Bennett also pointed to research showing that even as we get old the brain keeps “growing,” so to speak, by creating new cells and new synaptic connections.
“There’s a lot of new brain research showing that our ability to learn new things slows a bit, but we can still learn new things,” she said. “We don’t automatically become stupid when we turn 55.”
Quiet strength
Despite the universalities among the interview subjects for her book, Scarcello found some cultural differences.
“I talked to Indian women who were strong and confident, and they didn’t seem as body-obsessed [as in some other cultures],” Scarcello said.
But that might be changing.
“One woman said ‘That is true for my generation and my mother’s generation, but as we are becoming more westernized we are becoming more body obsessed.’ I thought, oh no,” Scarcello said with a laugh. “There are good things to copy from us if you are a developing country, but that’s not one of them.”
She also found “a quiet strength” in some older Indian women.
“You won’t see them being aggressive; you won’t hear a loud voice. You won’t see them correcting their spouse in front of others. There is a blending of their cultural ways and their power. It was a distinctly female power,” she said.
“In our society we tend to think that to be powerful you need to imitate men. Women can wind up with a power that is not their own. And walking around with something you don’t own, that takes a lot out of you,” she said.
America’s baby boomers might be especially well positioned to redefine their later years, often taking up new interests from art to golf to “saving the world,” Scarcello said.
“I think every generation is different,” she said. “They are a group that will take something on, and then change it if it does not suit them.”
Cosmic consciousness
Scarcello makes use of the work of Scandinavian sociologist Lars Tornstam of Uppsala University in Sweden, who has drawn attention with his theory of “gerotranscendence,” which links aging with a pronounced spiritual expansion.
Old people, he maintains, become less interested in superficial relationships and material things, develop a greater need for meditation and positive solitude, and often experience a redefinition of time, space, life and death. They shuck aside life’s trivialities and transcend their earlier states of consciousness.
Tornstam uses quantitative studies and interviews to explore aging, and freely offers nods to Jung and Erik Erikson, another pioneering psychologist quick to see religion or spirituality as crucial human drives.
Bennett, whose comprehensive TimeGoesBy.net gets tens of thousands of hits per month, nods as well to Jung, whose “seven tasks of aging” were prominently dusted off in feminist Betty Friedan’s 1993 book The Fountain of Age.
“Jung really knew what he was talking about. I first read [Jung on aging] when I was probably in my 20s. I thought it was kind of interesting and tucked it away for my old age,” Bennett said. “I want to age consciously. These things bubble up, and I don’t think I would have understood them without Jung.”
She said the first task described by Jung is “facing aging, which starts when you’re in your 50s maybe, and goes on until you die.”
Not the enemy
Like Scarcello, Bennett believes older people are often misunderstood by the non-aged, and mischaracterized by the popular media.
“We’re not the enemy, and we’re made to look like the enemy every day. On TV, and to a lesser extent the internet, you would think all old people have at least 25 disgusting diseases, from incontinence to constipation, acid reflux – terrible, disgusting things that everybody thinks we have,” Bennett said.
“And there’s a misperception that we’re all frail,” she said. “…Eighty percent of old people make it to the grave living independently. People have this impression that we all live in nursing homes, and we don’t.”
Needless to say, Bennett sees the use of Botox and facelifts as a refusal to undertake Jung’s first task of aging. And the advertising term “anti-aging” really sets her off.
“Number one, there’s the word itself. Anti-aging is the most ageist word out there. Calling anything “anti” makes it the enemy. If you type ‘anti-aging’ into a search engine, you get 15-plus million returns [15.7 million on Google],” she said. “Ninety-nine percent of it is potions, creams, even some illegal drugs. It’s a $7 billion-a-year industry, and it’s bogus,” she said. “The perception is that youth is the gold standard of life.”
And that is not what she is finding at age 69.
“I’m smarter, sharper, kinder,” she said. “Everything about my life is better than it ever was. Yes, I have aches and pains every now and then, but I’m in great health, which I guess is just luck.”
“I’m more patient. I’m happier. I like me so much better than when I was younger. I’m not competing in the workforce any more. I don’t care what I look like anymore. It removes so many worries. With all you’ve been through, when things come up you know that this too shall pass. You don’t know that when you’re younger. It makes life so much easier.”
Jaki Scarcello will bring a “Fifty+ Fabulation Event” to the Beverly Hills Country Club, 3084 Motor Ave., Los Angeles 90064, from 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 26. She will guide participants to “answer the questions that often haunt them as they try to come to terms with changes prompted by the process of aging.” Participants will make timelines of their lives, review how they have grown and developed, and “use that to explore the next stage of life.” Scarcello said the event will be especially helpful to women in transitions, including retirement, new careers or empty nesting. Registration is $130, and includes refreshments, lunch and all materials, and a signed copy of Scarcello’s book. More information can be found at fiftyfab.com. ER
