Ed note: Can we look at the delights in our lives? Our friends at Skyline? A smile from the staff? A greeting in the dining room? Some help with your computer? Coffee with a friend? A ride to an event? Sharing a book? A card from a friend? A chance to be of service? This article reminds us to take a look on the positive side of our lives!
By Catherine Price in the NYT
Ms. Price is the author of the How to Feel Alive newsletter. Her latest book is “The Power of Fun.”
Here’s an idea for the new year: Let’s make 2024 the year of delight.
Does that sound ridiculous, given the state of the world right now? Hear me out.
The basic premise of a delight practice (which I learned about in the essay collection “The Book of Delights” by Ross Gay) is simple: You make a point to notice things in your everyday life that delight you. This could be anything — a pretty flower, a smile you share with a stranger, the sight of a person playing a trumpet while riding a unicycle down a major Philadelphia thoroughfare (true story). Nothing is too small or absurd. Then whenever you notice something that delights you, you lift your arm, raise your index finger in the air and say, out loud and with enthusiasm, “Delight!” (Yes, even if you’re alone.) Ideally, you share your delights with another person.
The concept of prioritizing delight may sound silly or almost irresponsible, given the heaviness of current events, feelings of burnout and the upcoming U.S. presidential election, in which it seems democracy itself could be at stake. But this is exactly why it is so important. Far from being a frivolous practice, making a point to notice and share things we find delightful can improve our moods, outlooks, relationships and even physical health.
How? Noticing delights requires us to pay attention, something that is required for our happiness and satisfaction but can be difficult in our increasingly distracted world. Essentially, this is a form of a gratitude practice — i.e., cultivating the habit of noticing and appreciating the things for which you’re thankful.
Gratitude practices are popular for good reason; if you make one a habit, the associated mental and physical benefits include reduced symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress and (probably relatedly) improved biomarkers for heart health.
But if you keep up a gratitude practice long enough, you may find yourself expressing your appreciation for the same things over and over, almost out of a sense of obligation. You are grateful for your friends and family. You are grateful that you have enough food. You are grateful for having a place to live. Eventually, the practice can begin to feel less nourishing and more like a chore.
In contrast, a delight practice taps into the deep power of gratitude without the risk of becoming trite. That’s because the things that delight us are often novel — I doubt I’ll see another trumpeting unicyclist any time soon.
Noticing and sharing delight is also a form of what psychologists call savoring, the practice of deliberately appreciating positive life experiences. Savoring has been shown to boost people’s moods as well as counterbalance our brains’ natural tendency to focus on the things that stoke anxiety and fear. (Being attuned to potentially threatening stressors is helpful from an evolutionary perspective; it takes work to focus our brains on the positive.)
What’s more, the effects of savoring are stronger if you make a point not just to notice positive things but also to label them and share them. (This is why it’s important to say “Delight!” out loud and put a finger in the air, even if it at first feels silly.)
And that’s perhaps my favorite part of the practice: sharing delights with other people. Start a meeting or a class by inviting people to share one thing that delighted them that day. Use delight sharing as an icebreaker or as a ritual before family meals. I have multiple delight group chats, and every new message boosts my mood, makes me feel more connected to others and inspires me to notice and share more delights.
For example, a friend once sent me a photo of frost crystals on his windshield with the caption “Delight!” Not only did this make me feel closer to him, but it also made me resolve to try to find delight in situations (such as having to scrape frost off my car) that might otherwise be annoying.
These moments of connection are good for our physicalhealth. As Surgeon General Vivek Murthy’s recent advisory about the nation’s loneliness epidemic noted, a lack of social ties is associated with increased risks for high blood pressure, heart disease, cognitive impairment, depression, anxiety, Type 2 diabetes and susceptibility to infectious disease. In fact, one well-regarded meta-analysis concluded that the health risks of loneliness and isolation are comparable with those of smoking up to 15 cigarettes per day.
It makes me wonder: What might happen if we, as individuals and as communities, committed to a delight practice? How would it affect our happiness and health? And what might it do to the country’s political climate if we paid less attention to the things that divide us and more to the things that spark delight? It’s possible to disagree with people, to acknowledge life’s challenges, to debate, to sit with sadness, grief and fear while marveling at and seeking out simple joys.
You may be amazed by how much there is to marvel at. As Mr. Gay writes, “It didn’t take me long to learn that the discipline or practice of writing these essays occasioned a kind of delight radar. Or maybe it was more like the development of a delight muscle. Something that implies that the more you study delight, the more delight there is to study.”
This year, like all of them, will be filled with conflict and tragedy. But it will also be filled with delights. Resolve to notice them.
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For lessons on how to age well, we could do worse than turn to Richard Morgan.
At 93, the Irishman is a four-time world champion in indoor rowing, with the aerobic engine of a healthy 30- or 40-year-old and the body-fat percentage of a whippet. He’s also the subject of a new case study, published last month in the Journal of Applied Physiology, that looked at his training, diet and physiology.
Its results suggest that, in many ways, he’s an exemplar of fit, healthy aging — a nonagenarian with the heart, muscles and lungs of someone less than half his age. But in other ways, he’s ordinary: a onetime baker and battery maker with creaky knees who didn’t take up regular exercise until he was in his 70s and who still trains mostly in his backyard shed.
Even though his fitness routine began later in life, he has now rowed the equivalent of almost 10 times around the globe and has won four world championships. So what, the researchers wondered, did his late-life exercise do for his aging body?
Lessons on aging from active older people
“We need to look at very active older people if we want to understand aging,” said Bas Van Hooren, a doctoral researcher at Maastricht University in the Netherlands and one of the study’s authors.
Many questions remain unanswered about the biology of aging, and whether the physical slowing and declines in muscle mass that typically occur as we grow older are normal and inevitable or perhaps due, at least in part, to a lack of exercise.
If some people stay strong and fit deep into their golden years, the implication is that many of the rest of us might be able to as well, he said.
Helpfully, his colleague Lorcan Daly, an assistant lecturer in exercise science at the Technological University of the Shannon in Ireland, was quite familiar with an example of successful aging. His grandfather is Morgan, the 2022 indoor-rowing world champion in the lightweight, 90-to-94 age group.
What made Morgan especially interesting to the researchers was that he hadn’t begun sports or exercise training until he was 73. Retired and somewhat at loose ends then, he’d attended a rowing practice with one of his other grandsons, a competitive collegiate rower. The coach invited him to use one of the machines.
“He never looked back,” Daly said.
Highest heart rate on record (continued)
They invited Morgan, who was 92 at the time, to the physiology lab at the University of Limerick in Ireland to learn more, measuring his height, weight and body composition and gathering details about his diet. They also checked his metabolism and heart and lung function.
They then asked him to get on a rowing machine and race a simulated 2,000-meter time trial while they monitored his heart, lungs and muscles.
“It was one of the most inspiring days I’ve ever spent in the lab,” said Philip Jakeman, a professor of healthy aging, physical performance and nutrition at the University of Limerick and the study’s senior author.
Morgan proved to be a nonagenarian powerhouse, his sinewy 165 pounds composed of about 80 percent muscle and barely 15 percent fat, a body composition that would be considered healthy for a man decades younger.
During the time trial, his heart rate peaked at 153 beats per minute, well above the expected maximum heart rate for his age and among the highest peaks ever recorded for someone in their 90s, the researchers believe, signaling a very strong heart.
His heart rate also headed toward this peak very quickly, meaning his heart was able to rapidly supply his working muscles with oxygen and fuel. These “oxygen uptake kinetics,” a key indicator of cardiovascular health, proved comparable to those of a typical, healthy 30- or 40-year-old, Daly said.
Exercising 40 minutes a day
Perhaps most impressive, he developed this fitness with a simple, relatively abbreviated exercise routine, the researchers noted.
Consistency: Every week, he rows about 30 kilometers (about 18.5 miles), averaging around 40 minutes a day.
A mix of easy, moderate and intense training: About 70 percent of these workouts are easy, with Morgan hardly laboring. Another 20 percent are at a difficult but tolerable pace, and the final 10 at an all-out, barely sustainable intensity.
Weight training: Two or three times a week, he also weight-trains, using adjustable dumbbells to complete about three sets of lunges and curls, repeating each move until his muscles are too tired to continue.
A high-protein diet: He eats plenty of protein, his daily consumption regularly exceeding the usual dietary recommendation of about 60 grams of protein for someone of his weight.
“This is an interesting case study that sheds light on our understanding of exercise adaptation across the life span,” said Scott Trappe, director of the Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University in Indiana. He has studied many older athletes but was not involved in the new study.
“We are still learning about starting a late-life exercise program,” he added, “but the evidence is pretty clear that the human body maintains the ability to adapt to exercise at any age.”
In fact, Morgan’s fitness and physical power at 93 suggest that “we don’t have to lose” large amounts of muscle and aerobic capacity as we grow older, Jakeman said. Exercise could help us build and maintain a strong, capable body, whatever our age, he said.
Of course, Morgan probably had some genetic advantages, the scientists point out. Rowing prowess seems to run in the family.
And his race performances in recent years have been slower than they were 15, 10 or even five years ago. Exercise won’t erase the effects of aging. But it may slow our bodies’ losses, Morgan’s example seems to tell us. It may flatten the decline.
It also offers other, less-corporeal rewards. “There is a certain pleasure in achieving a world championship,” Morgan told me through his grandson, with almost comic self-effacement.
“I started from nowhere,” he said, “and I suddenly realized there was a lot of pleasure in doing this.”
Ms. Jackson is the author of “Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure.”
A close friend’s daughter was getting married in the pandemic summer of 2021. “We can’t invite friends to the wedding,” in order to keep it small and safe, my pal told me. But she did invite friends, I learned from a Facebook post. Just not me. Feeling humiliated, I initially kept quiet. But being together grew awkward and I sensed a growing distance. And when I tried to discuss the widening rift, she called a “pause” in our relations by text and stopped reaching out for a year.
My first thought was to consider the friendship ended. Something in her tone felt so final, like a breakup, case closed. But after a time I asked myself if I really knew what had happened and what she had meant by excluding me. Perhaps there was more to the story. Despite my hurt, I tried to keep the problem and my own mind open. I discovered what Rebecca Solnit calls the “spaciousness of uncertainty,” a realm of possibility. When at last my friend broke her silence with a text, I was ready to reconnect and move forward, even if I couldn’t get answers to all my questions. Meeting her rejection with unsureness gave me perspective and the courage not to shun her in turn.
Humans naturally need answers and so typically find uncertainty aversive. With a presidential election, war erupting in multiple zones, rising climate volatility and myriad other types of flux, it’s easy to feel overwhelming angst for the future and see certainty as a beacon in a darkening time.
But a wave of new scientific discoveries reveals that learning to lean intouncertainty in times of rapid change is a promising antidote to mental distress, not a royal road to angst, as many of us assume. A growing body of evidence and a range of new interventions suggest that skillfully managing uncertainty in the face of what’s murky, new or unexpected is an effective treatment for anxiety, a likely path to building resilience and a mark of astute problem-solving ability.
Learning to contend with uncertainty won’t completely fix the problems of our day. But at the start of a new year rife with high-stakes unknowns, we should rethink our outdated notions of notknowing as weakness, and instead discover this mindset as a strength. The implications for taming today’s epidemic distress, divisions and stalemates are vast.
Studies of the pandemic era offer a starting illustration of the links between uncertainty and flourishing. Ohio State researchers have found that adults who scored high on a measure of “intolerance of uncertainty” were more likely to struggle with stress and anxiety during the pandemic. Akin to personality tests, uncertainty intolerance assessments gauge people’s tendency to see unknowns as a threat rather than a challenge. Individuals who eschew not knowing tend to yearn for predictability and engage in binary thinking. During the pandemic, higher levels of uncertainty intolerance were associated with more maladaptive coping responses, such as being in denial, disengaging from life and abusing substances, a British study found. In contrast, those who struggle less with uncertainty weremore likely to accept the realities of the situation.
Ed Note: I was contacted (see below) today by the Washington Seriously Ill Care Coalition about good news on the legislation moving to a committee hearing on the 16th. I plan to testify and have submitted my comments and the “My Take” article I wrote for the Seattle Times. Please consider adding your support and comments.
Dear Colleague/Stakeholder/Washington Resident,
PLEASE HELP IMPROVE ACCESS to POLST: Ensure people get the care they want!
There is a long awaited bill ( HB 2166 “POLST Access”) being proposed that will do TWO important things:
It will:
1) mandate the DOH to establish a POLST registry with 24/7 accessibility
2) establish protocols for EMS to honor certified “evidence” of a POLST/DNR order, which could take the form of a wallet card, or jewelry (we have asked that this also include smartphone app).
The hearing for this bill is set for January 16th at 1:30 pm.
We ASK that everyone DO THIS TODAY: please use the link below to log into the page for the public hearing and
1) giving emergency responders immediate access to POLST orders via a 24 hour accessible registry will ensure that people will get care in the field that aligns with their wishes and honors medical plans that those individuals have thoughtfully created with their care team.
2) Having 24/7 access to a person’s stated and medically ordered wishes to receive or NOT receive CPR is the only dependable way to ensure that people’s rights to have a voice in their care and that they do not receive unwanted care in an emergency.
3) having these orders certified on wearable jewelry items or other forms of evidence brings peace of mind to those wishing that anyone who might find them unresponsive will have a way to know what their wishes are.
4) A fully functional registry will take more than legislation!
It will involve significant dedicated funding to:
—create a system that functions well in both the uploading of documents and the 24/7 accessibility.
—that the system will take into account the interface with electronic POLST in existing EMRs.
—launch a public campaign to educate about the benefits of using the registry and the expanded evidence (jewelry)
—develop/disseminate education and support to ensure that medical teams are aware of/empowered to upload documents,
—ensure that the access to the registry is well-thought out: secure electronic access, 24/7 staffing,
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Last week, after President Joe Biden went to Valley Forge and then spoke in Pennsylvania, I got a chance to sit down with him to ask a few questions.
What I wanted to hear from him illustrates the difference between journalists and historians.
Journalists are trained to find breaking stories and to explain them clearly so that their audience is better informed about what is happening in the world. What they do is vitally important to a democracy, and it is hard work. One of the reasons I always try to call out the names of journalists whose articles I’m describing is to highlight that there are real people working hard to dig out the stories we all need to know and that we are all part of a community trying together to figure out what’s happening in this country.
Historians do something different than journalists. We study how and why societies change. We are trained to see larger patterns in the facts we find in documents, speeches, letters, and photographs…and in the work of journalists. Some historians believe that mass movements change society, and so they focus on such movements; others believe that great figures change society, and they focus on biographies. Still others focus on economic change. And so on.
In my case, I am fascinated by the way ideas change society, and I am especially interested in the gap between what people believe and what is actually happening in the real world. That interest means that I always want to know how people think and especially how their worldview informs the way they act. Then I compare that worldview to the real-world policies they are putting into place. I sometimes think of what I study as the place where the rubber of ideas meets the road of the real world.
I have twice now been able to interview President Biden. (And let me tell you, it is an odd experience to have your historical subject be able to talk back to you!) The opportunity to ask a historical figure how he thinks, after I have spent years studying his policies, is mind-blowing.
To that end, I wanted to know why he chose to go to Valley Forge, where General George Washington quartered his Continental Army troops for six months in the hard winter of 1777–1788, to start his 2024 presidential campaign. Valley Forge looms huge in American mythology, but most people probably can’t say why. So what did it mean to him to launch his 2024 presidential campaign from there?
I also was deeply interested in what he means when he says he has great faith in the American people—something he says all the time but usually without much context. So what exactly is it about the American people that gives him such faith?
The answers are important, I think, and I found at least one of them surprising.
As I say, it is an odd thing to have a historical subject who can talk back to you, but in all the right ways: it forces you to adjust your understanding of our historical moment. That’s the sort of information that will make the historical record clearer and that, when today’s society has itself become history, will help historians in the future better understand how and why it changed.
Posted inHistory, Politics|Comments Off on Heather Cox Richardson Interviews President Joe Biden
In the past several years, we (the Skyline retirement community; The Terraces is its Skilled Nursing, Memory Care, and Assisted Living branch) have had four big fires along Ninth Ave, #2 just across Cherry Street from the Terraces. Google Maps image from 2022 along Ninth Avenue from James Street to Spring Street (1018 Ninth Avenue was #3; both wings have now been demolished). Fires #1, #4 were at 823 Madison (right of center; seen before fires).
Fire #1. Looking south from our 26th floor on July 13, 2022. Wind out of SE.
Fire #2. Looking South from our 26th floor; Ninth & James Street is at upper left; bottom-center shows the Cherry Street uphill. That’s the 11th-floor roof of the Terraces at lower left. This fire next door, in December 2, 2022, is in that old grey building that remains across Cherry Street from us, a continuing hazard that the city seems unable to tear down. It was apparently the second fire there. Here the wind is from the SE; the prevailing winds from the SW would carry heat, fumes, and flames across Cherry toward the vulnerable populations in the Terraces.
Fire #3 in the vacant apartment building at Ninth & Spring Street, 2023. The congested intersection is Ninth and Madison Street. Below is the Street-View image of the vacated building.
1018 9th Avenue, vacant when the south wing burned in the summer of 2023. Both wings were demolished in late 2023. Exterior paint is not a good guide to habitability.
Fire #4. After the 2022 fire, repairs were made to 823 Madison; some East wing repairs survived the 2024 fire. BELOW: A month later, demolition has given us a view of Madison Street.
All four fires seem to be in buildings a century old, walk-up flats from the era before elevators and sprinklers. There are more such old buildings in our vicinity; 801 Ninth Avenue (NW corner of Ninth and Columbia; the city’s housing for senior homeless men) is not one of them, having been built at the same time as Skyline in 2006-2009. In aerial photos such as the top figure, four-story buildings without a stairwell housing on the roof (say, 804 James, west of #2 fire) would be worth further analysis. Homeless people trying to heat and cook in these buildings shows how inadequate Seattle’s provisions have been for inspection, patrol, and alternative housing.
One example of the risk to Skyline from a fire upwind of the Terraces:
I intend this only as a fact sheet, not a project proposal that I can help with (climate commitments).
“While it’s important to ensure that the Mar-a-Lago Messiah never gets anywhere near the White House, it’s also important for frustrated Americans to remember that the USA is not where it is today as a nation because of Donald Trump.
We are where we are today because for over four decades, a giant Republican wrecking ball has been constantly swinging over the heads, homes, healthcare, hopes and voting booths of 99% of Americans. Four plus decades of anti-tax, anti-union, anti-healthcare, anti-worker, anti-government, anti-women, anti-regulation, anti-democracy extremism AND pro-billionaire, pro-1% moneyed speech, pro-dollarocracy obstruction AND minority rule tactics successfully executed by the Grand Oligarch Party has very effectively drowned democracy in the GOP bathtub, allowing the will of the people to be consistently ignored and overruled by GOP kabuki political theater and culture war distraction.
And while this Republican 0.1% wrecking ball has also corrupted some Democrats as well, the fact of the matter is that the Democratic Party is the only ticket out of our current Gilded Age.
But given the reality that the USA is NOT a democracy, the Democratic ticket requires an electoral supermajority to achieve forward progress, a reality that many Americans are tragically oblivious to.
The reality is that if Americans pull the R voting lever, their only reward will be yet another scrumptious tax cut for billionaires. D to go forward; R for really, really rich people.”
Claude Monet, “Snow in Argenteuil” (1875).Credit…Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York
By Mary Pipher in the NYT
Dr. Pipher is a clinical psychologist and writer in Lincoln, Neb., and the author, most recently, of “A Life in Light: Meditations on Impermanence.”
The mornings are dark, the late afternoons are dusky, and before we finish making dinner, the daylight is gone. As we approach the darkest days of the year, we’re confronted with the darkness of wars, a dysfunctional government, fentanyl deaths, mass shootings and reports of refugees crawling through the Darién Gap or floundering in small boats in the Mediterranean. And we cannot avoid the tragedy of climate change with its droughts, floods, fires and hurricanes. Indeed, the world is pummeled with misfortune.
We can count ourselves lucky if we do not live in a war zone or a place without food or drinking water, but we read the news. We see the disasters on our screens. Ukraine, Israel and Gaza are all inside us. If we are empathic and awake, we share the pain of all the world’s tragedies in our bodies and in our souls. We cannot and should not try to block out those feelings of pain. When we try, we are kept from feeling much of anything, even love and joy. We cannot deny reality, but we can control how much we take in.
I am in the last decades of life, and sometimes I feel that my country and our species are also nearing end times. The despair I feel about the world would ruin me if I did not know how to find light. Whatever is happening in the world, whatever is happening in our personal lives, we can find light.
This time of year, we must look for it. I am up for sunrise and outside for sunset. I watch the moon rise and traverse the sky. I light candles early in the evening and sit by the fire to read. And I walk outside under the blue-silver sky of the Nebraska winter. If there is snow, it sparkles, sometimes like a blanket of diamonds, other times reflecting the orange and lavender glow of a winter sunset.
We can watch the birds. Recently, it was the two flickers at my suet feeder with the yellow undersides of their wings flashing, the male so redheaded and protective, the female so hungry. Today, it may be the juncos, hopping about our driveway, looking for seeds. The birds are always nearby. Their calls are temple bells reminding me to be grateful.
For other kinds of light, we can turn to our friends and family. Nothing feels more like sunlight than walking into a room full of people who are happy to see me. I think of my son and daughter-in-law on my birthday, Zeke making homemade ravioli and Jamie baking an apple cake, their shining eyes radiating love. Or of my friends, sitting outdoors around a campfire in coats and hats, reciting poetry and singing songs.
We also have the light of young children. My own grandchildren are far away, but I spend time with 9-year-old Kadija. My husband and I are sponsoring her family; they arrived here from Afghanistan, with only the father speaking English, just a few months ago. Already, she can bring me a picture book and read “whale,” “porpoise” and “squid” in a voice that reminds me of sleigh bells. I know someday she will be a surgeon, or perhaps a poet.
In our darkest moments, art creates a shaft of light. There is light in a poetry book by Joy Harjo, in a recording by Yo-Yo Ma and in a collection of Monet’s paintings of snow.
The rituals of spiritual life will also illuminate our days. In my case, it is sun salutations, morning prayers, meditation and readings from Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and influential Zen master. Also, it’s the saying of grace and the moments when I slow down and am present. Whatever our rituals, they allow us to hold on through the darkness until the light returns.
Finally, we will always have the light of memory. When I recall my grandmother’s face as she read to me from “Black Beauty”or held my hand in church, I can calm down and feel happy. I feel the light on my skin when I remember my mother at the wheel of her Oldsmobile, her black doctor’s bag beside her. Driving home from a house call, she would tell me stories from her life on a ranch in the Great Depression and during the Dust Bowl.
Deep inside us are the memories of all the people we’ve ever loved. A favorite teacher, a first boyfriend, a best friend from high school or a kind aunt or uncle. And when I think of my people, I’m suffused with light that reminds me that I have had such fine people in my life and that they are still with me now and coming back to help me through hard times.
Every day I remind myself that all over the world most people want peace. They want a safe place for their families, and they want to be good and do good. The world is filled with helpers. It is only the great darkness of this moment that can make it hard to see them.
No matter how dark the days, we can find light in our own hearts, and we can be one another’s light. We can beam light out to everyone we meet. We can let others know we are present for them, that we will try to understand. We cannot stop all the destruction, but we can light candles for one another.
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