20 October 2021
For a long time, I have subscribed to a daily email called Wordsmith. Five days a week, subscribers are emailed a piece about a word, its history, an example of its use, and a quote for the day. This September, one day’s quote was from the Italian actress, Sophia Loren.
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 have truly defeated age.
On some levels this is delusional. More deeply, I think it has merit.
No one stays young. If no one stays young, there is no fountain of youth and there is no way of defeating age. I don’t think well-spirited aging people even wish to defeat age—they simply wish to live well. And that’s where the gist of Ms. Loren’s message has some significance.
I see the essence of her message being about two things: directed energy and engagement. If your mind, your talents, and your creativity are consistently and actively stimulated, you are thinking, feeling, doing, and reflecting. To do is to move. Movement, physically and metaphorically, is the essence of life. Literally essential, in that Aristotle (Physics, II.1, 192b10-25) defined life as having “...a principle of motion...[an] innate impulse to change.” If true, there logically must be a counter argument that sameness or stagnation is anti-life, or death.
Sitting is not moving. Fitness Australia has a good website entry on why sitting is the new smoking. Sitting impedes digestion, drains energy and endurance, and weakens bones. Lower body and back (spinal supporting) muscles waste away and ingested calories are not burned off. You gain weight, lose posture, have an increased probability of anxiety, depression, and deadly diseases. Could this be more disheartening?! Although Ms. Loren did not explicitly discuss movement, she did speak of tapping a life source. That source is engaged through movement.
If you are bringing creativity to your life and the lives of those you love, you are involved in life. If you’ve burned some of those bridges, don’t despair. If you build new ones and increase your vitality, two things happen: 1) you don’t have as much time to dwell on the sadness of loss and, 2) those you lost will be much more likely to consider reaching out if they hear you’re living well. Vitality is innately attractive.
Sophia’s sourced fountain consists of mind, talents, creativity, energy, and connection. If you’re well and getting on with life, these five factors seem manageable with the application of discipline and a little more risk-taking. However, if you’re thinking about, or just beginning, sobriety or recovery, your fear of failure can keep you sitting on that couch way too long.
Here’s an alternative that made me laugh. Albert Ellis, long a resource for SMART Recovery (as the founder of the ABCs of Rational Emotive Behavioural Therapy (REBT)), encouraged his clients to break their spells of fear. One example that had me giggling was the fear young people have of asking others out for a date (or whatever it’s now called). To break this spell, from which he himself suffered, Ellis asked 100 girls to date him. It wasn’t about getting a date (which he didn’t!); it was about breaking the fear by voluntary exposure. Ellis called these shame-attacking exercises.
Similarly, he encouraged people to face backwards on busy elevators, sing loudly on buses, etc. I love the chutzpah. I love that he recognized the shortness of human life and the utter waste of not acting for fear of shame. I would like to call such behaviours the key to the fountain of youth, but unlike Ms. Loren, I don’t believe in such fountains. I do believe changing your approach in the face of the shortness of your own life, is a way to laugh loudly and freely and such laugher has long been known as the best medicine. I searched it out and here’s where it began: A merry heart doeth good like a medicine: but a broken spirit drieth the bones(Proverbs, KJV, 17:22).
The thing about the rational animal is that she can change her heart—with consistent effort—from broken to blessed. I believe Sophia Loren would agree.
Dan Chalykoff is working toward an M.Ed. in Counselling Psychology and accreditation in Professional Addiction Studies. He writes these blogs to increase (and share) his own evolving understandings of ideas. Since 2017, he has facilitated two voluntary weekly group meetings of SMART Recovery.
I love this. The biggest difficulty is that when mental health is low, the prospect of improvement, from the person’s perspective, is low or non existent. This is probably caused by a subconscious effort to protect the addiction.
At my worst, I was nowhere near suicidal, but I was perfectly willing to accept that my way of life was seriously decreasing my life span. I had accepted that I was going to age quickly or, not get the chance to age.
I had little desire to be creative or contribute to mine and other people’s quality of life. My only concern was to do as little as possible to maintain my career, just so I could maintain my drinking.
Once I started putting effort in my mental health, everything else started falling into place. Personal satisfaction, relationships, personal achievements, and… better perspective of aging. Considering that I was 42 when I gave up misery, that means that I likely gained a better quality of life for another 42 years or so.
If I compare my outlook on life now to 3 years ago, I feel like I have won the jackpot. It is a chain reaction. I put effort into it, life got better, I got more motivation to put additional effort… prior to that I spent decades waiting for motivation to come and get me.
This blog is absolutely true. Age is just a number. Quality of life measured by your satisfaction of your efforts is actual vitality.
Thanks for reading and responding, Charlie. What you’re saying, if I’m getting it, is that those folks at the contemplation or precontemplation stages of change have no belief that things can or will improve. Therefore they have no motivation to move toward health and the downward cycle continues. If you think back to where you were three years ago, what would have reached you? What did reach you? I appreciate your courage and honesty in sharing this, Charlie. Thank you.