“Lovely female shapes are terrible complicators of the difficulties and dangers of this earthly life, especially for their owners.”  ~George du Maurier

I was caught by a news headline that showed, in a recent Nutrisystem poll of one thousand people, approximately 50%  of  female participants say they would rather go without sex for the summer than gain 10 pounds. One quarter of the male respondents agreed. The poll was supported by recent European research with 12,000 participants.  This study found that obese women were 30% less likely to have a sexual partner than normal weight women. Interestingly, this did not hold up for obese men.

How we imagine other people see our bodies and how we perceive ourselves when we look in the mirror, or touch and smell ourselves, has a significant yet complex impact on how we think about ourselves sexually. Body image doesn’t just include our estimation or our shape and weight compared with the ideal cultural body type, it also often includes our feelings about specific body parts. Our feelings about our bodies are a learned response based on the messages and images of ideal beauty that our society and families value. Growing up comparing ourselves and being compared to a specific type of beauty is how our feelings about our bodies grow in us. Think about how different these beautiful body ideals have been across culture and time.

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For years the word on brain development in aging adults was not pretty. The idea that your brain was slowly dying, in step with the deterioration we witness in our bodies was the prevailing view. Happily for most of us, enough smart baby boomer scientists started looking deeper and found that in fact, the middle-aged brain, which shapes our thinking from our 40s to our late 60s is in fact still developing and in fact hitting its peak in many areas of cognition and problem solving.

“The single best thing you can do for your brain is to just be around people in a meaningful way. That doesn’t mean just working with people – it means genuine face-to-face interactions. The absence of human interaction is just deadly for the brain.” Lawrence Katz, Phd neurobiology at Duke University

I go downstairs to find my glasses, only to forget when I get there, that I was looking for my glasses. In the midst of setting the table for dinner, I go to find the Dijon mustard and am literally lost in the refrigerator trying to remember what I opened it for in the first place. Let’s not even discuss the fantasy of multi-tasking that used to feel like second nature to me. I can barely stay on track with one thing at a time. I know I am not alone in this, most of my friends report similar frustrations accompanied by a quiet fear that we try to laugh off, but in secret wonder what this means about where we are all headed.

For years the word on brain development in aging adults was not pretty. The idea that your brain was slowly dying, in step with the deterioration we witness in our bodies was the prevailing view. Happily for most of us, enough smart baby boomer scientists started looking deeper and found that in fact, the middle-aged brain, which shapes our thinking from our 40s to our late 60s is in fact still developing and in fact hitting its peak in many areas of cognition and problem solving. Sure, our brain is not quite as fast and agile as it once was, but according to a recently released book by Barbara Strauch, The Secret Life of the Grown-Up Brain, we all have reason for optimism.

Recent research on aging brains has made the important distinction of how the adult brain creates a kind of default mode, not unlike the daydreaming space that occupied early childhood. As we age, our brain slips into this inner dialogue more easily and regularly which makes it hard to keep hold of other thoughts. The good news is that distractibility does not equal dementia. It turns out that forgetting your train of thought in mid action or losing your niece’s boyfriend’s name are just part of the territory of aging, but not a predictor of your brain capacity. Whew… and there are ways to work with this new slip of mind.

For me, this is the most optimistic part of the story. What we do to train and develop our mind during this extended mid-life period is foundational to what happens to our minds in our old age. The developing adult brain gets better at recognizing the central idea, the big picture. Through continued use and development of the brain, we can continue to build pathways that help us to recognize patterns and, as a consequence, see significance and even solutions much faster than a young person can. Our intuitive sense about people and our ability to deal with multi-layered complexity is at its peak.

Keeping our brains lively is a perfect task for relationships. Dealing with people who have different points of view is vital training that aging brains need to wake up the synaptic fibers around what we already know. The kiss of death for the aging brain is closing ourselves off from challenging relationships and the sweeping changes around us. Aging brains need to learn how to stretch out of their comfort zone of the well-trodden synaptic connections and challenge our perceptions of the world. Developing relationships with people who rock your world and wake you up to how you are thinking is actually nourishing to your brain.

This news adds a whole new dimension to thinking about my relationship with my teenagers and their friends. I can now take heart in the exasperated moments of bewilderment about their new techno world and can see that our lively disagreements are actually keeping me sharp. The same, I guess holds true for the ongoing debates with my husband. After all these years, I suppose I am content now, that I never got him to agree with me.

“Most people give up just when they’re about to achieve success. They quit on the one yard line. They give up at the last minute of the game, one foot from a winning touchdown.” –Ross Perot

This week’s announcement about the end of the 40-year marriage of Al and Tipper Gore caught me off guard. I am sure I wasn’t the only one surprised by them calling it quits. They were one political couple whose mutual respect and admiration stabilized all of us through some difficult times. Despite the pressures and public viewing, their marriage seemed vital and authentic. Admittedly, any marriage always runs deeper and includes much more than what is available to its witnesses, so I have been reflecting on what happens when people quit on each other.

In part this has been on my mind as I have been experiencing my own relationship dissolution lately with a dear friend. For reasons that I don’t understand and can’t even name, she has pulled away from the relationship, clear and articulate only that the reflections I provide are not what she is wanting in her life. Ever the loveologist, I tried leaving messages of all kinds, until suddenly I stopped. I quit because the pain of rejection and all of the internal messages it triggered was too intense. It took up too much space in my heart that I couldn’t resolve. It was easier to bear the pain of loss.

Often when a relationship dissolves we look for a single event that caused the end. The truth is that even when there is a precipitating event, it is almost always the result of a long chain of minor exchanges where one partner feels dismissed or disrespected. While these moments may often go by unacknowledged, they are nonetheless recorded in the body of the relationship. It is in the smallest day to day interactions that we experience the love in our relationships, or become habitually defended to injury. It is easy to imagine in the high profile public life of the Gores, how defended, yet cordially you learn to co-exist.
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“Win as if you were used to it, lose as if you enjoyed it for a change.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson

These opposites have more in common than we might expect. Learning how to win or lose with grace is another way to define how to live and grow with maturity. Richard Bach summed it up when he said: “That’s what learning is, after all; not whether we lose the game, but how we lose and how we’ve changed because of it and what we take away from it that we never had before, to apply to other games. Losing, in a curious way, is winning.”

In the midst of another state tennis tournament I am witnessing hundreds of boys who have worked throughout the year to get to compete. Already I have seen some boys head hung low, dejected after hours of playing their heart out and coming up short. My own son has suffered the same fate several times. In some cases it took weeks for him to come to terms with who he was as a player and a person. This is the gift of losing, the self-examination and forgiveness that must process through you for you to be a player at any game, and life itself.

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‘What is without periods of rest will not endure.’ -Ovid

Rest is not the opposite of effort, it is the source, the nourishment, the energetic food for all that we aspire to accomplish. Most of us never really learn to savor the sweet release of rest, instead we give in grudgingly to our exhaustion, sleeping just enough to get up and start all over again, but never really surrendering to the empty, silent space that real rest takes up. I am not alone, not being one who rests. Our culture loves the rush, the frenzy of the chase; for most of us, resting is akin to laziness.

Our collective exhaustion is visible everywhere, although interestingly, according to a recent National Sleep Foundation study when life squeezes our time, it is our attention to our health and relationships that goes first. Work is reportedly the last thing to be sacrificed. Sadly one of the first things to go is our interest in and willingness to explore our sexuality. Being too tired for sex was the number one reason sited in a study of more than 1000 sexually active people. Not only the need for sleep, but the worry that you won’t sleep well often makes the idea of sex unappealing, which is ironic because sexual activity actually improves the ability to sleep for most people.

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“Adversity causes some men to break, and others to break records.”- William Ward

Heartbreaking is a word often associated with soccer matches that come down to shoot-outs after long extended play has not been able to decipher a winner. Five players against the goalie; whoever scores more goals wins. It is a terrible win, hardly reflective of the fact that it is merely luck that decides the winner. The moment of the kick after the whistle blows is seconds long, but similar to car crashes where time slows to a halt the ‘in’ breath lasts a while. Reaction time between players is clocked in milliseconds, like how Olympic swimmers win races; time as long as a fingernail.

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‘Faith is love taking the form of aspiration.’ -William Ellery Channing

I have been studying positivity for over six months now. There are many days when I have tried to make myself think or feel positively and was completely unable to get out of my fear or pain that held me. What I have learned from those moments, especially in my relationships is that when I aspire to simply being open to what is actually happening, positivity can and often does slip in the back door. I have always liked the idea of aspiration. I like the feel of it as it rolls off my tongue and I have always held the meaning dearly of a heartfelt reaching towards something high or great.

Yet aspiration also means breathing, or specifically taking in air. Our ability to breathe deep happens when we feel open and relaxed. As much as breathing is autonomic, it is one of the rare body functions that can be seriously enhanced through attention. It is not surprising that breathing is the foundation of most mindful meditation techniques. If you are truly watching how you breathe, your mind cannot run circles around you. Being fully present to the act of taking in and letting out air is one of the most fundamental ways to open to the world. In a very real and concrete way our aspirations both in breath and dreams create the world.

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‘Man is a knot into which relationships are tied.’ ~Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Life is made of moments of unraveling. There are good reasons everyday that things come undone, but perhaps none so painful as the un-doing of our most intimate relationships. It is easy to understand how living with the difficult emotions of disappointment, embarrassment and the irritation and resentment associated with loving people up close, can bring out the least attractive parts of ourselves. And how in turn this most difficult emotional space can impact our ability to stay loving and present in the relationships we have chosen.

Attributing the places where life unravels to the people we are with is a natural response to dealing with the most disquieting and ugly places we hold. More often it is a reflection of the universal experience of not being good enough. The quiet doubt of self worth has a million faces and touches people from all walks of life, regardless of educational background, income level and even family history. We are all a broken somewhere and suffer the debilitating effects of not feeling worthy of love, our own or anyone else’s during some points in our life.

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‘Betrayal can only happen if you love.’ -John Le Carre

If ever an expression defined human behavior, it is the notion that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. Ovid, an ancient Roman philosopher and poet was perhaps the first when he said that ‘the harvest is always more fruitful in another man’s fields.’ This sense that life is better for others has perhaps its strongest and most debilitating hold on us as it affects our relationships. Infidelity, the most cutting breach of trust that we experience in our intimate relationships is rampant. It is so common that not having some form of the experience is uncommon. While the stories of infidelity are as unique as the millions of people who engage in them – our shared human biology, emotional needs and the thinking errors that allow them – are universal.

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“Mother’s love is peace. It need not be acquired, it need not be deserved. ” ~Erich Fromm

I have been a mother for most of my adult life. I often say that my children are my one great work in this life. Although I take precautions to not live life vicariously, I know that my life is more often a reflection of them than it is of me on many days. Whether through text messages, or my own internal barometer which is always set to how well my least well child is faring, my thoughts are almost always split, between my own priorities and the seemingly  millions of details that make up my growing children’s lives. The details change with the years, but the amount of them remains surprisingly steady.

I know that this isn’t everyone’s experience. My own childhood memories are not full of a mother’s intense loving presence, the kind that my children are at once oblivious to, and simultaneously crave and resent. We develop our mothering style in response to what we got or didn’t get in our own childhood. I raised my children as the anchor at the center of the wheel and so should not be surprised now that with all of their lives at full tilt, I am pulled in multiple directions continuously. As a young mother of four, I was the multi-tasker par excellence, home schooling two grades and changing diapers in the same moment. Unlike other skills that improve with practice, my capacity for multi-tasking diminishes and I sometimes buckle under the weight of the complexity.

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