Mind, Body & Spirit > Healthy Body & Mind > Live to Live Forever

Live to Live Forever
By Leonard Sweet, Ph. D.

To live to live forever is to abolish the concept of middle age. Increasingly, what is being defined as old is getting older. Where old used to be defined as over sixty, now 32 percent say that old is over seventy, 15 percent say it is over eighty, as 37 percent argue that age is only a state of mind. When middle age becomes something between thirty and seventy-five, it becomes a meaningless category. That's why what used to be called middle age I call mid-youth. When the seventy-four-year-old Illinois Republican Henry Hyde deflected the uncovering of a five-year illicit relationship during his forties with a dismissive the statue of limitations has long since passed on my youthful indiscretions, he had it exactly right. Your forties are youthful.

We are now living in a time when people can be aged to perfection in every way - physically, mentally, and spiritually. Just as the health industry is moving from treating disease to creating health, so the church must redesign itself as a place that creates wellness rather than attends the sick. And wellness incorporates body, mind, and spirit.

Body

Elizabeth Somer calls pursuing physical wellness age-proofing your body. Most age-related diseases are avoidable (70 percent of cancers are lifestyle-related), and many of the body's aging switches are within our control to turn on and off. For example, diet, exercise, and intimacy are three aging switches we can manipulate to forestall aging. The National Institute on Aging says that 80 percent of older people's health problems are not aging-related but due to improper eating, mental, and exercise habits over the course of a lifetime. Dr. Franz Ingelfinger flips the focus and ends up with an even higher figure. He ways 85 percent of illnesses fall within the body's power to heal.

We have medicalized aging to a degree larger than anyone anticipated - all the way from Viagra (sexual decline) to DHEA (growth hormones) to antioxidants (beta carotene, vitamins C and E to combat damage done by free radicals). Etienne Baulieu's antiaging pill may be even more controversial than his abortion pill, RU -486. In some ways these three words -Valium, Viagra, vitaceuticals - say it all about life in the future.

Mind

Mentally, we can be aged to perfection too. Some Boomer somewhere is turning fifty every fifteen seconds. When the statistics tell that 6 percent of Boomers had already retired as of 1998, they fail to show that the kinds of retirement Boomers are looking for is less a change in situation (as with their parents) as a change in state. Boomers are not looking to retiree-rich counties in which to retire, but to small towns or rural counties. The hottest retirement spots in the country are college towns where Boomers can go and do everything but retire. Whereas late moderns slithered off to adults-only communities where they could spend their reclining years breathing each other's fumes, postmoderns want their best years filled with the best in intellectual stimulation, culturally enrichment, and seven-generational incitements. This is why college towns are sprouting age in place retirement communities and assisted-living facilities to provide knowledge workers with the knowledge retirements they want.

This does not mean the work we do and the missions we go on in our nineties or later will be the same as what we did in our fifties and sixties. Composer Igor Stravinsky and poet/preacher Richard Young are my models. In his senior years Stravinsky recognized his limitations and began to focus on what one critic has called making beautiful objects. In Stravinsky's last works (for example, Requiem Canticles), the intellectual fire is still there, but most of the physical energy is gone; it is condensed into a single gesture, a single chord. Similarly, in his later years Young produced a series of single-paragraph sermons that were densely epigrammatic. The bravado of bigness was gone. The perfection of exquisitely crafted smaller works was now on exhibit.

Spirit

In addition to body and mind, spiritually we can be aged to perfection. Paul promised as much in 2 Corinthians 4:16-17, where he testified that when he was at his most impaired physically, he could be at his most accomplished spiritually. The best example of this double ring in which our inner nature can be renewed each day even as our faces become creased and our ears stopped up, is Billy Graham. I want to age like Billy Graham has aged. With every passing year he has gotten better, more forgiving, more loving, more global, more grand . . .

Excerpted from Soul Salsa Check out this book in our bookstore!