Download Your Free Chapter

Hard to believe, but a friend wants to know whether I'll speak to his marketing class. What I don't know about marketing fills volumes so we'll see how that works out.

At the same time, I can read and learn and the people who seem to know something about selling books indicate that one way to promote a new book is to offer a chapter free. So this morning I put up a free PDF of chapter 1 of Pears, Grapes, and Dates: A Good Life After Mid-Life.

The book is available at CreateSpace and from Amazon for you Amazon Prime members, but this way you can take a peek first.

Loneliness and Life Expectancy

"Ask people what it takes to live a long life," begins the press release from Brigham Young University, "and they’ll say things like exercise, take Omega-3s, and see your doctor regularly."

Then comes the kicker, "Now research from Brigham Young University shows that loneliness and social isolation are just as much a threat to longevity as obesity." And there is no doubt that despite the internet, smart phones, texting, and Skype, people are more lonely than ever.

Tim Smith is professor of counseling psychology and special education at BJU and co-author of the study commented, “Not only are we at the highest recorded rate of living alone across the entire century, but we’re at the highest recorded rates ever on the planet. With loneliness on the rise, we are predicting a possible loneliness epidemic in the future.”

As we get older we can see the roots of loneliness. Children move away. Friends move away or as time continues to pass, friends die. Church attendance is down in America as is involvement for those who do attend on Sunday mornings. We can feel "old and in the way." We can feel that we're a burden on others. Add to that divorces or just unhappy isolated spouses with no energy for renewing their marriage.

It's a recipe for emotional disaster and now we learn a recipe for physical disaster.

The good news is that loneliness can be cured and the problems reversed. According to Smith, "In essence, the study is saying the more positive psychology we have in our world, the better we’re able to function not just emotionally but physically."

And reversing loneliness is more than just a good thing personally. It spreads the health when we engage others who may be lonely--particularly young people who the BJU study found are more vulnerable to the dangers of loneliness than seniors. In fact, the study found, "Although older people are more likely to be lonely and face a higher mortality risk, loneliness and social isolation better predict premature death among populations younger than 65 years."

Loneliness is one of the questions I take on in my new book Pears, Grapes, and Dates: A Good Life After Mid-Life. (Also available at Amazon and soon on Kindle). No one should have to die of loneliness. 

Older and Wiser

This weekend I played golf with Jake, a friend who recently turned eighty. He's had some back problems so he can't hit the ball the way he used to, but he's out there twice a week with his wife or with friends. And while the ball may not go as far as it once did, it usually flies straight as an arrow.

But it wasn't his golf game that impressed me. Jake is thoughtful about his life, wanting to live as full a life as he can. We talked about forgiveness: How do you forgive people who have deeply hurt those who are dearest to you? We talked about goal setting: Where, he asks, do I want to be in five years? We talked about the spiritual life: How do I get closer to God?

He's also genuinely interested in others, listening intently to anything I had to say, wanting to know about my life, my ideas, and my opinions. Which is another way of saying that he hasn't stopped and he won't stop learning. He still retains that sense of wonder in the sense of awe and in the sense of "I wonder...." Despite his age, he sees the world through young eyes.

Jake is cheerful, positive, fun to be around. He's also and most importantly wise. And while I didn't have him in mind for the character of John in my book Pears, Grapes, and Dates: A Good Life After Mid-Life, he's a real life example of what I had in mind. What a pleasure it was to spend time with him and what an inspiration for my own good life after mid-life.

My New Book

Pears, Grapes, and Dates: AGood Life After Mid-Life

This book began as a series of journal entries and grew into a dialogue. It sat around my computer and I've finally published it. 

The book is available now, a Kindle edition is in the works. 

What can we or should we expect from the last (let's be optimistic) third of our lives? For many of us, children are grown, careers are winding down, and this thing they call "retirement" looms. Rather than just slipping into someone else's idea of what we'll be and do, we have the opportunity to make the life we want - a life that counts and satisfies.  

This book doesn't explain what decisions we should make, but rather the character qualities we need to make wise, fulfilling, and meaningful decisions about how to live a good life after mid-life. 

If your fifty years old or older - or if you hope to be someday - then this book is for you. 

Let me know what you think.

"Midway Upon the Journey of Our Life"

Dante began his The Divine Comedy with these words:

Midway upon the journey of our life

            I found myself in a dark wilderness,

            for I had wandered from the straight and true.

How hard a thing it is to tell about,

            that wilderness so savage, dense, and harsh,

            even to think of it renews my fear!

The wilderness into which Dante wandered, says translator Anthony Esolen, “represents the confusion of choices in a life not obedient to reason and thus not oriented toward man’s happiness.” That is, the wilderness is a life that has gotten out of control pushed about by whims, emotion, desires, and by the demands, expectations, and wishes of others. The wilderness is also the threshold to Hell, the subject of the first book of The Comedy, the Inferno.

Dante attempts to climb out of the dark wilderness to obtain the happiness he can see in the distance, but is driven back in despair by beasts representing his uncontrolled urges and cravings “to where the sun is silent evermore.”

There is only one way out of the wilderness and that is through self-discovery and a reordering of life his. For that, Dante must descend into the depths of the Inferno and climb the mountain of the Purgatory before he can enjoy the good, the true, and the beautiful in the Paradise.

The Comedy like other spiritual classics such as John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Hannah Hurnard’s Hinds Feet in High Places is at its core an allegory of the inner life. It’s a comedy not because it’s funny (it’s not), but in the classical sense that it’s a story that, despite all manner of suffering and sadness, has a happy ending. And even though thinking about the wilderness renews Dante’s fears, he goes on:

It is so bitter, death is hardly more—

            but to reveal the good that came to me,

            I shall relate the other things I saw.

In Pears, Grapes, and Dates: A Good Life After Mid-Life, I call the journey of self-discovery being a pear and the older of the two main characters is, like Dante, generous in sharing what he has learned in life.

My publisher has okayed the galley of the book and, with a bit more work on my part, it will be available next week.

In the meanwhile, I’ve reposted an article about Dante’s journey to Hell on my website and will follow up by posting about the Purgatory and the Paradise.

(The quotes are from Anthony Esolen’s translation of the Inferno, Canto I, Lines 1-9)

A Good Life After Mid-Life

Three lines from T. S. Eliot's poem "Chorus from 'The Rock'" sum up my fears about myself and my generation.

And the wind shall say: “Here were decent godless people:
Their only monument the asphalt road
And a thousand lost golf balls.” 

The first of seventy-seven million (that’s 77,000,000!) of us—the baby-boomers—have begun to retire. That’s about 10,000 every day and maybe more than that as the economic downturn turns long-term job searchers into reluctant retirees.

The wealth of experience, wisdom, and energy this represents is beyond calculating. And it would be a tragedy to squander it in a retirement orgy of decent and respectable godlessness, road trips, and lost golf balls.

Or at least I want more than that out of whatever years I have left and I don't think I'm alone. There are, I believe, ways to live a good life after mid-life marked by peace, contentment, fruitfulness, and joy. And exploring them is by itself half the adventure.

So beginning with some journal entries, Pears, Grapes, & Dates: A Good Life After Mid-Life began to take shape exploring the attitudes needed for that kind of life and how to set those attitudes.

Just think of the possibilities