Title: Life Gets Better: The Unexpected Pleasures of Growing Older
Author: Wendy Lustbader
Reviewed by: Susan, a Main Library staff member
This book gave me a big attitude adjustment in how to approach the rest of my life. It’s really a book for all ages: for the teenager who needs to understand why grandpa suddenly wants to build birdhouses; for the daughter who wants to help her elderly mother find more joy out of life; for those who have reached the AARP stage and want to sign up for shag-dancing lessons but are afraid of what others might think.
There are so many encouraging, pithy passages, but my favorite chapter is “Beginner’s mind.” As we grow older, some of us tend to close up and stay stuck in the ways we always did things. Lustbader says, “Living long softens us and opens us up.” She reminds us that although “aging is public,” it is our attitude, and the willingness to adjust and adapt ourselves to find new ways to be who we are, that bring us happiness. And even if we don’t learn anything new, we learn to rechannel what we can do and reexamine what we are. It is a loving, inspirational read for all of us who face growing old reluctantly. I recommend it, wholeheartedly!
Publisher’s Description:
From our earliest lives, we are told that our youth will be the best time of our lives-that the energy and vitality of youth are the most important qualities a person can possess, and that everything that comes after will be a sad decline. But in reality, says Wendy Lustbader, youth is not the golden era it is often made out to be. For many, it is a time riddled with anxiety, angst, confusion, and the torture of uncertainty. Conversely, the media often feeds us a vision of growing older as a journey of defeat and diminishment. They are dead wrong. As Lustbader counters, “Life gets better as we get older, on all levels except the physical.”
Life Gets Better is not a precious or whimsical tome on the quirky wisdom of the elderly. Lustbader-who has worked for several decades as a social worker specializing in aging issues-conducted firsthand research with aging and elderly people in all walks of life, and she found that they overwhelmingly spoke of the mental and emotional richness they have drawn from aging. Lustbader discovered that rather than experiencing a decline from youth, aging people were happier, more courageous, and more interested in being true to their inner selves than were young people.
Life Gets Better examines through first-person stories, as well as Lustbader’s own observations, how a lifetime of lessons learned can yield one of the most personally and emotionally fruitful periods of anyone’s life. As an eighty-six-year-old who contributed her story to the book noted, “For me, being old is the reward for outlasting all the big and little problems that happen to all of us along life’s pathway.”
The collected stories in Life Gets Better provide a hopeful corrective to the fear of aging aggressively instilled in us by the media. Don’t dread the future: The best years of our lives just may be ahead.
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