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# How to Live with Few Regrets
A note from our editor, Lynn Toomey:
*I was driving with one of my twin daughters the other day and the subject of retirement came up (as it often does in our household) and I was telling her that I’m starting to see people my age (50 plus) starting to retire. I explained that it’s a rather odd thought to me because at 53 I feel like my career is just getting started, albeit a 2nd career. She commented that it’s probably not a good idea to retire anyway when you still have kids in high school. I agreed!  She then asked me if I had any regrets having them later in life (or if I regretted marrying their dad whom I’m now divorced from). I told her unequivocally no on both accounts. I also told her that regret is not good. I’ve lived my life trying hard not to have any regrets because at the time the decision was made, it was what felt right, based on all the information I had at the time of the decision. I told her not to waste time in life thinking about regrets and what could have been. Instead, try to think about what you really want in life, gather all the information possible to help you make the right decisions and move forward.*
*It was ironic that that night I came upon this article about “How to live with few regrets.” I forwarded to her and now I’m sharing it here on our blog. I need to find this Catalan Village in the South of France. Not necessarily to move there but because I love to travel and this does indeed sound like a little patch of heaven. And because I fully embrace the phrase, “If not now, then when?”  That probably explains why at 50 I decided to start a new career. Traveling abroad may have to wait a bit longer…at least until my career is bearing fruit and my girls are independent. No regrets!!*
### “What do you do when you face that pivotal question: If not now, when?” asks writer Karen Karbo.
We’re doing it. My partner of many years and I are selling the house, most of the furniture, the old VW, and KonMari-ing the crap out of our lives to go live somewhere we love.
If not now, when?
We’re moving to a patch of earth that few Americans know about—a Catalan village in the deep southwest of France, where a mountain range hits the sea.
We’re going because after a decade of visiting every summer, we realized: We feel most ourselves there. Our lives balance themselves seemingly without effort there. The Mediterranean beckons, as do the scrubby green foothills and small cafes, where you can sit for hours watching the day go by. Possibly we are drawn there because it reminds us a little of the California of our childhood, only with fewer surfers and more anchovies.
**The moment you truly accept that more of your life is behind you rather than ahead of you, is the day that question becomes a cold shower of urgency.**
Many of the people I know are as free as we’ll ever be. Kids grown, parents gone, and if we’re lucky, a little money in the bank. To paraphrase the late poet Mary Oliver, “What will you do with (what’s left of) your wild and precious life?”
The moment you truly accept that more of your life is behind you rather than ahead of you, is the day that question becomes a cold shower of urgency.
The window of *when* gets narrower with every passing year, until something bad happens and the question has answered itself.
So ask yourself: Do you want to be that person? Who waited until it was too late, and that thing you claimed to want to do you can no longer do because, as Dorothy Parker reminds us “in all history, which has held billions and billions of human beings, not a single one ever had a happy ending.”
## A dream trip
Let me tell you a story about my mother.
I was seventeen, a freshman in college. My mother’s headaches had been diagnosed as brain cancer. In December she had surgery to remove what they could of the tumor, and in March she died.
That fast.
Among her things we discovered a file she was keeping for her dream trip to Europe, stuffed with clippings of things to do in London, Vienna, Paris, and Rome.
**She was waiting to go. Waiting until I was launched. Waiting until money wasn’t so tight.**
She was waiting to go. Waiting until I was launched. Waiting until money wasn’t so tight. Waiting until my father could take off three weeks instead of the two he was allotted. There was always a perfectly good reason now was not the time. And then she died. She was forty-six.
I soldiered on.
The night of her funeral I drove back to school and took an Oceanography midterm. We were a soldiering on kind of family. I have no brothers or sisters. My father, in his stoic, Greatest Generation-way, began dating his old college girlfriend six weeks after my mother was buried.
I’d believed she was the love of his life, my mother, but my father turned out to be a practitioner of the “men-don’t-grieve-they-replace” school of getting on with it. I hated him for it until I grew up a little more, then forgave him.
This was the wound of my life that would become the engine of my life.
**At an age when everyone believed they would live forever, I knew the truth.**
At an age when everyone believed they would live forever, I knew the truth. Life could pull the rug out from under you at any moment. The attitude that you didn’t have to pay attention to every moment? A fantasy.
So, we are leaving our 102 year-old home in Portland, a grey colonial surrounded by scraggly pink rose bushes, and dispatching most of its contents.
Friends and “friends”—the online variety—are cheering us on.
The dubious fall into two categories. The first are those who say they would do this in a heartbeat, but they can’t bear to leave their aged mothers/infant grandchildren/struggling young adult children. They are tethered to their people, which is lovely.
If I had people, I might be tethered to them as well. Who I do have: my guy, with whom I’m making the move, and my grown-up married daughter who is excited at the idea of inheriting property in France when I kick the bucket. We are close, and are counting on Facetime and Delta to help keep it so.
The second group is the “must be nice” crowd, who confuse relocating with vacationing. After we sell the house, furniture, and car in the United States, we’ll be renting a small place in a small village, where wine is cheaper than bottled water, and fresh baguettes set you back about a buck.
**If I run towards joy, it’s only because I worry how I would live with myself if I failed to do this.**
Yes, there is the euphemistically termed “social contribution” in France (taxes!), but you actually get something for your euros, including access to the world’s best healthcare.
The wound of my life has left me with a chronic, low grade sense of dread. If I run towards joy, it’s only because I worry how I would live with myself if I failed to do this. If I succumbed to inertia. If I did not answer “now.” Now is the time.
I remember my mother, bloated and bald from chemo saying, “I guess I will never get to Vienna.”
I came upon a quote once by Buddhist monk and teacher Pema Chödrön: “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest.”
We’re throwing ourselves out of the nest.
 February 18, 2019 By:  in 
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* Is Aging the Secret to Happiness?
# Is Aging the Secret to Happiness?
I’ve always wondered if older people become happier. My mother is 83 and really happy, but then again she’s always been happy. It would be kind of cool to know that even though we age, get wrinkly and our bodies starting hurting, we become happier. In this article we found on:  we find out.
Happiness and age are related, but not in the way you might think. For the most part, our culture is youth-driven, so we assume that the young and beautiful also happen to the be the happiest. A young person who has time on their side may *appear* happy, but the notion just is not true. Happiness actually increases with age.
It might be unfathomable for some young people to believe their grandparents are happier than they are, but research shows that Americans actually get happier as they age despite the health conditions and other problems that arise. Before we celebrate, though, let’s take a look at the evidence on aging and happiness.
Trends in Happiness
Let’s face it: research related to happiness is filled with judgments and subjectivity because happiness is subjective. How can you be sure a research participant who says, “I’m pretty happy,” truly is happy? Maybe they’re content with less? Maybe their happiness is based on material possessions? Maybe each generation has different expectations of happiness? Researchers needed to find a way around these kinds of problems.
Luckily sociologists have consistently conducted more that 50,000 interviews since 1972 for the , a sociological survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. The survey, which is open to the public, provides a wealth of insight into our society and measures happiness over time. By comparing differently-aged individuals over time within the same year, researchers were able to get around some of these limitations, and what they found is that happiness increases with age.
Aging America: A Happy Place
“How happy are you?” That is the big question researchers ask year after year. Not only did researchers find that older people tend to be happier, but that happiness is not something older participants had all their lives. In other words, as people get older, say starting at age 50, happiness comes to them.
As media continue to warn us about the dangers of an aging America, keep this in mind: An *aging* America may be the *happiest* America we have ever seen. Perhaps this is because of the wisdom that comes with age or because older people adjust their expectations in life, but whatever the reason there is solid evidence that older Americans are truly happier than younger ones.
How to Maximize Your Happiness
Improve your own happiness by ignoring the societal norm that youth = happiness. Allow yourself to feel happy as you age. Don’t get caught up in worrying about the small stuff. Take good care of your health and, most importantly, let yourself go. Don’t think that you have to act your age. Here are some more tips to , happy and having fun as you age:
·         Exercise for more energy
·          for healthy aging
·         , have fun
·         Play games for 
 January 17, 2019 By:  in   , , 
 February 18, 2019