Your Senior Life Manual – After Age 60, It’s Wise to Revise

When you were born, I’m confident that you didn’t receive an instructional manual (with your name on it) that described the right way to live your entire life. But it happened another way: Your family and people at various social institutions installed a virtual manual as stated in their words, demonstrated by their example, and enforced with their discipline (subtle or otherwise).

This process occurs during early childhood when we lack a filter, meaning that everything goes into the unconscious of your brain-mind. As we grow up, your manual’s instructions feel natural as we think and react to life; they become how you define yourself and your world. While the experiences of maturing add new and dislodge old manual content, the original core instructions remain largely constant.

That is, unless two things overlap to disrupt and amend your installed manual:

• External events that are powerful and/or cumulative happen.
• Internal processing leads you to question, doubt and change parts of your deep manual.

Why Revising the Senior Manual Is Critical

If you’re over age 60 (I’m 80), let’s face it, we’re in life’s home-stretch, also called Act 3 or the senior or wisdom years. As they say, growing older is not for sissies – given all that can disrupt our physical, mental, emotional, social, financial and spiritual conditions. That’s especially true if we go through life on automatic pilot – unaware of how our brain-mind works, and how to improve it to live a more amazing life.

Regarding the life manual for seniors, we basically chose between two approaches:

• Repeating the original manual’s rules. As to the world and with you, both have substantially changed over the past 60 or more years. So, this stay-the-course approach risks an out-of-step life of stagnation, struggle and suffering.
• Revising the senior life manual. For a better Act 3, this approach can enhance our mindset, mission, goals, strategy and actions. The intent is to upgrade and enjoy a healthy, vibrant, meaningful, joyful, loving, fulfilling and peaceful life – even up to the moment of exiting this world.

For boomers (born 1946-64 or so) to make it successfully through a post-1960s minefield, I believe they need to revise their senior life manual. This advice is based on the past 20 years since my 60th birthday – a time of serious physical and emotional challenges, from diseases to losses. So, after 60 or when approaching it, I urge seniors: To review thoroughly and continually your senior life manual, and make critical changes, so you’re clear and certain you’re living your best life possible.

Your life’s senior manual review is as important to your quality of life (wellness and happiness) and quantity of life (healthy longevity potential) as is your annual medical check-up.

Evaluating and editing your manual involves these two steps:

• Remove what no longer serves you in navigating and negotiating life’s many older-age issues. Anxieties, illnesses, injuries and elder abuses lurk that can diminish or decimate the quality of life for yourself and those close to you. The primes suspects are obsolete, negative and limiting beliefs, attitudes, actions and habits. They impact all areas of your life: Eating, drinking, sleeping, recreating, relating, de-stressing, loving, relaxing, communicating, spending, judging, healing, appreciating, forgiving, etc.
• Install new beliefs and habits that can create the worthwhile senior years you desire and deserve. Examples of the potential benefits include physical vitality, no disease and injury, freedom and flexibility, independent living, mobility, robust cognitive functions, positive emotions, loving relationships, sexual intimacy, passionate life purpose, enjoyable adventures, personal development, financial security, spiritual awareness, peace of mind, and impressive longevity.

My Original Life Manual

Using my long and full life as a case, here are examples of the guidelines in my original life manual:

• My parents’ committed marriage with two children.
• My father’s guarded personality and modest career goals.
• My mother worried about life, appearance and approval.
• In the lower-middle class, financial goals driven.
• Parents pushing me to practice Judaism, while they didn’t, and lacked a spiritual perspective.
• Philadelphia area seen as the best place to live, and near parents.
• Culturally low-brow, yes to movies and Broadway shows, no to museums and classical music.
• Men watch sports, as an expression of masculinity.
• College education is fine, if the major is in a practical field, with a bachelor’s being enough.
• Pursue a professional, entrepreneurial or corporate career.
• Trust only American cooking and avoid ethnic restaurants.
• Vacation only within the U.S.

It may be useful for you to recall what your original manual looked like, as a way to see how you have changed it over the years, and what might be ripe for modifying to live your ideal senior life.

My original manual laid out above may look like a good-enough life. But even in my teens, I started to experience it as a narrow, limiting, unexciting and uninspiring life design. It simply didn’t fit me! Yet, for a long time in my mind, I vacillated: Trying to follow most of the rules, rebelling against many of them, and feeling there was somehow something wrong with me.

Daring to Revise My Life Manual

Into my 20s, I followed the key dictates of my life manual. Early on and for several decades, I figured out the best way to behave consistent with my manual was to put on a series of masks to put on a happy face. In that way, I could stick to the letter – or at least the spirit – of the manual, while disguising my real mind and true heart.

During my 30s to 50s, my life became more about ignoring my manual’s rules, and removing my defensive masks. I finally realized that many of my life choices were to do the opposite of what my original manual had required of me!

Here are mid-life examples of how I was marching to a different drummer:

• Living outside Philadelphia and moving around: New York/NY, Amherst/MA, Tokyo/Japan, Sedona and Tucson/AZ, and Pompano Beach/FL.
• Marrying and divorcing a highly cultured woman.
• Not having children.
• Coming out as a gay man to people close to me, except my parents.
• Practicing Judaism among a variety of Universal Spirituality beliefs and practices.
• Earning a Ph.D. degree (in Marketing).
• Spending my career in academia as a professor and administrator.
• Visiting 30 countries, and living in Japan for a decade.
• Working for an Asian holistic health company.
• Entering show business at age 71.

My life has been driven by discovering who I authentically am, and experimenting outside of my manual’s margins. Slowly but steadily, I’ve chosen new beliefs and behaviors that have negated my manual’s ill-fitting rules, and created life strategies uniquely mine in substance and style. In short, I’ve revised my manual to become true to my inner self, and actualize my life in awake, aware and alive ways!

Resetting My Senior Manual

Since entering my 60s, editing my life manual has become more extensive and intensive. Now that I’m into life’s final stage (Act 3), I see the years ahead as my last chance to live (thanks, Frank Sinatra) my way! That means from a place of maturity, wisdom, love, joy and service.

These are examples of the many key revisions I’ve made to my senior life manual:

• Diet – greater nutrition, mainly plants and little meat, very little sugar and salt, more raw and organic foods, and no highly processed foods.
• Exercise – aerobics, yoga, walking, swimming, qigong, fitness club equipment, and free-form and social dancing.
• Stress-minimization – mindfulness, naps, negative emotions releasing, immersion in Nature, downsized living space and possessions, lifestyle simplification, and reduced financial commitments.
• Relationships – renewed and new interactions with family, friends around the world, conscious and creative affinity groups, neighbors, online contacts and communities.
• Singing – for health, enjoyment and performance, new songs learned, chorus participation, original lyrics written to favorite music, and songs spontaneously created and sung.
• Purpose – passionate expressions of life’s gifts, edutainment (The Larry Show, creating and performing solo musical shows based on my life’s gritty stories), and coaching and writing (Adventurous Aging for seniors seeking wanting an enhanced Act 3).
• Consciousness – multiple religions and traditions, expanded spiritual awareness, rituals and prayers, positive affirmations, spiritual readings and videos, sacred site visits, service to benefit others, and the rediscovery of Judaism (the religion of my birth).

A Fulfilling Life at Age 80

I endeavor to think of advanced age as little as possible – concluding that overthinking “aging” ages us! I believe it’s not the number of my years, but the energy that’s more meaningful.

These days, with the Boomer Generation increasingly comprised by seniors – population number, wealth accumulation, and anti-aging/stay-youthful pursuits – living into our 60s and 70s is no longer considered old age. But going into my 80s and imagining my decades afterwards was another story!

Weeks before my 80th birthday, I felt an unfamiliar anxiety about aging, reflected deeply about my emotions, and finally understood and declared I’m an Extraordinary Elder – with accumulated wisdom, talents and divinely inspired gifts. And thus, I have a responsibility to do good for people, and help create a better world!

Wanting to thrive in my senior life, not just survive into my 80s and beyond, I’m aligning with these my-best-years-yet priorities:

• Longevity – living as long and healthy as possible to keep learning and celebrating life, and bettering Humanity.
• Wellbeing – enhancing my holistic dimensions (physical, mental, emotional and spiritual) for a healthy and vibrant life.
• Intuition – cultivating and trusting the internal guidance coming as my Soul’s language.
• Consciousness – awakening to life’s higher dimensions of reality, to live a spiritual and peaceful life.
• Relationships – belonging and benefiting from closeness to family, friends, neighbors and communities (local and global).
• Mission – pursuing one or more passionate purposes that use my full potential (having counted 18 life skills), and serving others (from individuals to Humanity).
• Adventures – enjoying personal growth and development experiences for living large, with creativity, fascination and inspiration.

Is It Time to Revise Your Senior Manual?

Given the unique and severe forces affecting people over age 60, it’s worthwhile to conduct major and continual revisions of our senior manual. That is so we can consciously live in the present not the past, and live to the best of our potential and aspirations.

To seniors of today, I urge you to:

• Look into the mirror within, and ask yourself the big questions regarding your quality of life – Who am I? What do I want in this life? What are my dreams and longings? Am I happy with how my life is going?
• Come up with a series of fulfilling goals.
• Make systematic changes in your life to better achieve these goals – as it’s never too late.
• Become part of circles and communities that encourage and support your amazing life.
• Consciously evolve your life passionately until the final curtain.

The for-the-rest-of-your-life manual you were given many decades ago is now obsolete. If you’re still sticking to your rarely-updated manual, you face the prospects of being out of step with the world, and thus disadvantaged as an individual. So, it’s imperative to carefully examine your manual’s content, and update it to fit the evolving you and a new-world situations.

But there are mental limits to revising your life manual by yourself. So, it may be valuable to find a person or even a team – with a track record of having creatively and successfully revised their life manual – and work with them to systematically revise your life manual.

During my senior years, I’ve faced rough times, but being resilient and resourceful, I forged a practical philosophy, positive mindset, healthy lifestyle, and passionate purpose – and created my best manual version so far. After a decade of applying this approach (which I call Adventurous Aging) on myself, I’m pleased to be coaching Boomer clients in transforming their life manual. In this way, I hope more seniors will live an amazingly fulfilling life – of pleasure, people, purpose, projects and peace.

For a fuller description of Adventurous Aging, see my Facebook page; to discuss this method with Larry, contact him at larryros@gmail.com. (Note that the icons below Larry’s bio will also take you to his email address and his Facebook page.)