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Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife - Softcover

Hagerty, Barbara Bradley

 
9780399573323: Life Reimagined: The Science, Art, and Opportunity of Midlife
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0399573321 ISBN 13: 9780399573323
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

“Barbara Bradley Hagerty is a wise and engaging guide through the possibilities…of middle age.” —Daniel H. Pink, author of To Sell Is Human and Drive

A dynamic and inspiring exploration of the new science that is redrawing the future for people in their forties, fifties, and sixties for the better—and for good.

There’s no such thing as an inevitable midlife crisis, Barbara Bradley Hagerty writes in this provocative, hopeful book. It’s a myth, an illusion. New scientific research explodes the fable that midlife is a time when things start to go downhill for everybody. In fact, midlife can be a great new adventure, when you can embrace fresh possibilities, purposes, and pleasures. In Life Reimagined, Hagerty explains that midlife is about renewal: It’s the time to renegotiate your purpose, refocus your relationships, and transform the way you think about the world and yourself. Drawing from emerging information in neurology, psychology, biology, genetics, and sociology—as well as her own story of midlife transformation—Hagerty redraws the map for people in midlife and plots a new course forward in understanding our health, our relationships, even our futures.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Barbara Bradley Hagerty is the author of the New York Times-bestselling Fingerprints of God is also an award-winning journalist who spent nearly 20 years as a correspondent for NPR. Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Vogue, and The Christian Science Monitor. She has received the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowship in Science and Religion, and a Knight Fellowship at Yale Law School. She lives with her husband in Washington, D.C.

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Chapter 1.
 
AN ENDING, AND A BEGINNING
 
September 5, 2012, had been a trying day. I devoted much of the afternoon to crafting a response to a listener who disliked a story that had aired the previous day on All Things Considered. When you cover a beat such as religion, as I did for many years at National Public Radio, you brace for a hailstorm of outraged e-mails every time you file a report.
But I never grew used to them, and this one was particularly up- setting.  Just after I sent off my response, I felt a sharp pain in my chest. My breathing became clipped and shallow.  Heat radiated up my back.  Panicked, I googled “heart attack + women.”  The results were not reassuring—are any health-related answers on the Internet reassuring?—and I called my doctor, Brad Moore, on his cell phone. I described my symptoms as calmly as I could.

“I don’t like the shortness of breath,” he said. “I want you to call
911 immediately.”

I made it partway through “I can do that,” when the room lurched and went black.  When I opened my eyes, my colleague John Ydstie was tucking a soft sweater under my head. “An ambulance is on its way,” he whispered. Then I heard Scott Simon’s voice directing the medics to my cubicle. Dr. Moore, who also sees Scott, had called him when he heard me faint.

By the time the ambulance reached the George Washington University Hospital, I was feeling pretty good, well enough to go home, in fact. I explained to the nurse that I was a healthy woman who takes a six a.m. spinning class every day. I could not possibly have a bad heart. The nurse looked at me, handed me a hospital gown, and scanned her notes.

“You’re fifty-three, right?” she asked, as if that number were a clinical condition, like diabetes. “I think we’d better keep you overnight.”

It occurred  to  me then  that  I was suffering  from  a condition:  a physical  and emotional   condition   called  “midlife.” This  condition presented  as  a  disconnect between  my  thirty-something  self-image and my fifty-something  reality.  I recognized it every time I passed a mirror and saw the lined face of my mother in her fifties staring back at me. I spotted  it often  at work,  when  my younger,  ambitious  self insisted that  I clamor to cover that  breaking  story, while my chronological self shrugged, preferring  a good night’s  sleep to another  all-nighter.  Sitting there in the thin hospital robe, I admitted  there were moments,  more  and  more  frequent,  when  I seemed to be pushing  a wheelbarrow full of dense, unfulfilled ambition  up a steep gravel path. It was exhausting, but I didn’t know any other way to live.

I was not left to my thoughts for long. Within minutes, my husband, Devin; my brother, Dave; Dr.  Moore;  and  Marty  Makary,  a good  friend  and  surgeon  at Johns  Hopkins, had  arrived,  creating  a little  party  in our  corner  of the  ER. As the five of us chatted and laughed, e-mails from NPR friends and colleagues began filling my iPhone; someone had sent an All Staff e-mail. My dear friend Libby Lewis called to say she would visit early the next morning. I felt loved, I felt cherished. Why hadn’t I pulled this stunt before?

Eventually everyone left, and I was given a bed at two a.m. I awakened with a dull headache a couple of hours later to a persistent beeping from the bed next to me. I gazed at the ceiling, reflecting on my family and friends and how desperately I wanted a cup of coffee. At six-thirty, I called Devin to see if he could bring me a double espresso. I reached him as he was leaving the house.

“You need to call Dave,” he said.

“Why?”

“Just call him,” he said uncomfortably.

Instinctively, I knew: Dad had died. As it turned out, he had died at five that morning, at age ninety-one.

That night, after I was discharged from the hospital, my family and a few friends collected at my brother’s house for dinner.

“Turns out I was with the wrong relative last night,” Dave quipped when he ushered us in, and it felt good to laugh.

We crowded around the kitchen table and began swapping stories about Dad. We remembered how he learned to swing dance when he was sixty-nine, and how at seventy-four, by then two years divorced, Dad spotted Nancy at church and courted her with such charm and devotion that she had to marry him. We talked about how Dad believed in me: When I was struggling in school as a third-grader, how he spent hours helping me with homework and with prayers written out on yellow legal pads. We recalled how Dad studied French every night between two and three a.m., teaching himself vocabulary and grammar.  He never progressed  beyond  terrible  at French, but  he al- ways  insisted  that  some  things  are  worth  doing  poorly.  I think he meant that some things are so worthwhile that even if you have no talent, even if the results are mediocre, it is still worth your time and effort. In his final years, his mind and body had failed him—he was nearly blind, nearly deaf, and suffered from dementia—but to the end, Dad lived each day with verve.


After hearing that my father had died, Scott Simon sent me a note. He had known Dad. They belonged to the same health club and would occasionally share a cup of coffee, Dad no doubt clueless as to Scott’s fame. Scott mentioned that he had told his wife, Caroline, about my health scare and my dad’s death.

“Caroline said, ‘Darling, I don’t care how far gone someone is, they always feel a tug from their children.  Gene wanted to go instead,’” Scott wrote.  “We believe that Gene somehow knew that you needed a little help and he said to God, ‘Barbie still has a lot of things to do. I’m ready. Take me,’ and he said it with that incredible chiseled smile. And God said, ‘Gene, you’ve got a deal.’”

Even now, several years later, these words make me cry. They re- mind me that Dad loved me fiercely and would have instantly traded his life for mine. Scott’s words  also illumined  a larger truth:  A page had  turned,  Dad  was  gone  and  I was  here, ostensibly  healthy  but keenly aware that a hospital stay or worse was only one stressful event away. I saw it would not be too long before my brother and I would be next at bat, and that the next generation to fall was my own.

At fifty-three, I gained a new sense of my own mortality. Now, what would I do with that?
 
 
ONE MYTH AND THREE TRUTHS
 
For the next two years, I examined the middle stage of life. I traveled the country interviewing brain scientists and marriage therapists, psychologists and kidney donors, geneticists and elite masters athletes—well over four hundred  researchers and ordinary folk trying to figure out how to thrive at midlife. As a result, I have come to believe that the forties, fifties, and sixties are the least understood and, in some ways, the most critical phase of life. Midlife is not flyover territory.  Midlife is O’Hare, midlife is Heathrow, midlife is a bustling hub where the decisions you make today largely determine the...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2017
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0399573321
ISBN 13 
9780399573323
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
464
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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