Winning and Losing in Love Relatiionships, Part II

What an irony that we spend so much of our lives longing for our “soul-mate” and then, when we find him/her, it doesn’t take long before we begin finding fault and treating our partner as if he/she is our competitor rather than our teammate.  This is inevitable.  Once the romantic period is over, our deeper psychological dynamics from our early years reassert themselves.  Unfortunately, there is no short-cut for eliminating the powerful impulse to make our partner wrong and ourselves right.  Its roots are tenacious.  Being “wrong” as a child has such hurtful consequences, we quickly learn to be “right” or at least avoid being “wrong” in our parents’ eyes.  The speed with which we as adults throw up defensive arrays of verbal and behavioral countermeasures, speak to the fact that we each grow up experiencing thousands of interactions with our caregivers that follow certain patterns because our caregivers have their own deeply grooved ways of being.   Look, I loved my parents and they loved me…and, like all of us parents, they were far from perfect.  My mother had a subtle way of shaming me when I made a mistake, did something outside her wishes or exhibited feelings that caused her discomfort.   My father resorted to teasing and sarcasm.  Both of them occasionally engaged in frightening outbursts of anger along with swatting the back of my head or my butt.  No doubt, many of us go through memorable moments of big, visible trauma.  But the idea that we all suffer them, and that they are the principle cause of distortion in our development is probably over-emphasized.  However, what is true for nearly all of us is that we are immersed in family cultures as children that have their own strong color schemes, as mine did.  That scheme is quickly absorbed into our cells.  We are “stained” into adaptive responses by the sheer volume and force of interactions and our powerful need to be safe and belong.   We accommodate because we actually are dependent as children.  The simple ability to feel and express those feelings clearly is often a casualty of this process.  Consequently, as adults, anytime we sense “wrongness” coming our way, we mobilize against it and the hurt it unconsciously summons from those early years.  You could say our defenses are psychological white blood cells trying to kill an infection.  The density and vigor of that counter-attack is one measure of the force of early messages. 

 If as adults we could just release the “fight to be right” by thinking our way out of it (using solely a cognitive approach) the world would already be a much calmer and more harmonious place.  Taking on a new thought is relatively easy.  Changing our ways of reacting emotionally and behaviorally is a much tougher undertaking.  For the most part, we humans are not run by cognitive, logical and linear processes.  Daniel Kahneman won the Nobel Prize documenting this in a field as seemingly logical as economics.  The evidence is overwhelming that no quick and easy fix exists.  Sports metaphors such as I cited in Part I, can be seductive for their simplicity. In basketball, there is a play called a “kick-out”.  The ball-handler drives toward the basket hard as if he’s going to shoot.  The defense “collapses” in around him, leaving other shooters free on the perimeter.  The ball handler now reins in his desire to go for the two-point dunk and instead passes the ball out to one of his teammates who is free of defenders and has a clear shot at a three-pointer.  Now imagine yourself driving hard toward the idea that you have to be right in a given moment.  And imagine that just as you are ready to hammer home your point and make your partner wrong, ripping at the flesh of your relationship, instead, you kick-out…releasing the need to be right and refusing to engage in that struggle.   When you push less to be right, your partner has to push less, too, and perhaps, with a little luck, you both let the issue go, realizing that the energy beneath it is from the past and the consequences in the present are relatively minor and quite workable. 

    It’s good to remember the “kick-out” option.  It’s one of those touchstone ideas that might help you let go once in a while.  But most of us know that once we’re triggered into “fighting to be right” it is very difficult to just switch off that energy, which derives from our survival endowments channeled through the family landscape.  For real healing, there’s no avoiding the depths.  Long before modern psychology, philosophers, religious figures, poets and story-tellers have had implicit knowledge of this.  Fairy-tales and contemporary literature attest to the real “threat” hiding in the shadows, in the cellar or attic, in an old house, at the bottom of a lake, the top of the beanstalk,  in a cave, under a bridge, or close to natural forces such as volcanoes, dark forests, the untamed sea.  Unconsciously, the entire human race knows where the nemesis hides.  However, only a small percentage of us appear to be explicitly conscious of it. The birth of deception is self-deception.  For those of us trying to transcend early destiny, we know a great initiation is unavoidable.  We know the “monsters”  born in those tender years when our brains were not fully developed must be defrocked of fiction till the bare truth is before us. 

We can do this.  Now we are adults.  Our brains are fully developed (finally, by around age 25!) so we  have the resources to experience fully what was held in a kind of cryogenic freeze within us because it was overwhelming for our tender, underdeveloped brains and beings.  As Tara Brach has pointed out in a recent article in Psychotherapy Networker, C.G. Jung referred to this unprocessed pain of childhood as unlived life.  He urged us to be courageous and live out that unlived life so that we can integrate it and move on.  He is exhorting us to a hero’s journey.  The irony and the great challenge are that we are wired to avoid the lairs of predators and the pain and fear they cause.  However, and this is key, if the pain and fear are already in us, avoiding them means accepting that we are divided selves. 

How can we heal a sundered inner world?  By surrendering to what the Persian poet Rumi referred to as “the pearls of God,” meaning tears.  Our unshed tears from those early events are the waters of unlived life, held like crystals in caves high and low along the fault lines of the soul.  Their resolving force awaits us, awaits the moment when we are ready to transform them from solid back into liquid for the ride up and out of their subterranean holds into daylight. Without this liberating adventure, the division within us as individuals will become a division between us and our partners.

Because this work is indispensable to releasing psychological energy and literally rewiring the basis of  personality, the Imago Dialogues embody, for couples, the essential wisdoms and practices.  Developed by Harville Hendrix and Helen La Kelly Hunt, the Dialogues are arenas that invite the emergence of the heroes hiding within us.  They are crucibles for grieving and empathy.  When, in dialogue, we get beneath an issue in the present and visit the subterranean depths of our own divided inner world as it was wrought in our early years, we ride unshed tears into the sun.  Suddenly, our partner is no longer a competitor with whom we must struggle to make our own needs dominant.  He or she is a witness to our life.  So touching is this moment, and neurologically dynamic, that it leads directly to a releasing of clenched fists on the weaponry of winning without any admonition to do so--we by living out the unlived grief, our partner through the experience of profound empathy.  Grieving and empathy are the two great resolving alchemies of human life.  By taking turns as griever and witness over months and years, we emerge into daylight over and over again until the shadows recede and we own the day, together.

Fierce Attachment III, Couplehood, the Final Frontier

 

I have an old friend who is passionate about our founding father, Thomas Jefferson. He speaks of him with the adoration and devotion of a young boy for his dad. As I write this on the morning of October 6, 2011, many people across the world, myself among them, are mourning the loss of Apple founder, Steve Jobs. He might well be seen as the founding father of a new age. Never in the history of human business and culture have so many people been so enamored of a corporate CEO and the brand he birthed. I use the word "enamored" with intention. In its core, you see "amor"...meaning love. Between Jefferson and Jobs, we could identify a very long list of public figures who have been the objects of enormous affection on the part of huge numbers of individuals. This is just more evidence of the centrality of fierce attachment in human existence.

I have been very fortunate in my life to learn at the feet of some very smart, wise and talented people. I will readily admit to you that I am fiercely attached to these beloved mentors. Given that I am sixty-four years old, you might think I am done seeking mentors and am busy being one. Maybe there are a lot of people smarter than I am. I am aware of still having a lot to learn and I cherish people who can bring something new, potent and truthful to me. Most recent in that category are Harville Hendrix and Helen LaKelly Hunt, the husband and wife team behind Imago Relationship Therapy, as well as Bruce Crapuchettes and Francine Beauvoir, the senior faculty members of Imago Relationships International, under whom I have done most of my training over the last three years. What have these four people brought to me in my sixties that is so valuable? Since this is a blog post, not a book, I'll be brief, at the risk of understating their gifts to me.

I went through a lot of individual therapy when I was younger...a key moment of which I shared in my last post. The process of regaining my capacity to grieve over childhood hurts literally helped me save my life and grow into adulthood.

Harville and Helen brought a major new insight to the therapeutic process. I don't think it's a stretch to call them the true founding father and mother of transformational couplehood. They have shown us that no matter how much work we do one-on-one with a therapist, there will be wounds that will never be addressed, can never be addressed until and unless we are in a love relationship in which both of us are committed to help each other heal. As intimate as is the one-on-one patient-therapist relationship, as capable as it is through the process of transference of stirring up old feelings for healing, there is no relationship that more closely resonates with the vulnerability of our first connections in life with our primary caregivers--usually mom and dad. In the womb, in infancy, in early childhood and all the way into adulthood, we are at our most dependent and sensitive. Templates of the basic dynamics of relationships are being imprinted in us. As adults, with our lover, we are as open as children once again, hopeful, joyful, ecstatic and dependent. So old early hurts that have managed to lie dormant for decades can be suddenly triggered when our partner seems to ignore us, or talk to us with edge in their voice, or give us a cold shoulder or forget to do something for us. There are just some layers of feelings that only a lover can trigger and make available for processing--not a boss, not a friend, not a therapist, not even a child.

Not only have they shone a bright light on a key truth about human existence. They have presided over the training of thousands of therapists in specific practices that couples can actually learn in workshops and in therapy sessions. Those practices constitute a comprehensive toolkit that has been tested and honed. It is very user-friendly. It is the iPhone of couplehood.

You might be thinking that Harville and Helen's insight naturally raises a question about the limitations of a solitary wisdom path such as meditation. That would be right. Notwithstanding that there is genuine value in the practice of meditation, the iconic journey away from civilization is not, for me, the optimal or even most heroic.

The final frontier of human development is not on a mountaintop in Tibet or in an ashram in Massachusetts. Couplehood is the final frontier. But it is not "out there." It is "in here" or "down there." It is the ultimate site for personal and relational archaeology. Couplehood unearths what has remained hidden in spite of serious efforts through many other methods and moments. Without couplehood, we cannot fully become whole, and unless we become whole, we cannot fully experience couplehood--a challenging, yet sweet and virtuous loop.

Through the application of Imago practices I have repeatedly seen people discover things about their own life journey that were utter epiphanies for them and brought transformational energy. In my own practice with my darling wife, I have processed and learned things that shaped my consciousness from my first breath, things that were still hidden from me as I entered my seventh decade of life, in spite of a great deal of inner work. I have been called to new levels of consciousness, honesty, courage and understanding. The power of these revelations is self-affirming. I'm convinced that it literally reorganizes brain synapses...making us into a qualitatively different human being, more feeling, more compassionate, more curious about our partner, more honoring of their otherness and, above all, more capable of being attached appropriately as adults, rather than caught in the co-dependence that results from being over-burdened with unconscious injuries from our earliest years.

For the insight of couplehood as the final frontier, for the practices to help us navigate that realm and for the sweet, steadfast and patient teaching I have received, I celebrate my fierce attachment to my Imago mentors. Above all, I whole-heartedly celebrate my fierce attachment to the woman who brought me to the Imago well to drink, my true partner, the amor of my life, my Andrea.

C2011 Bob Kamm

True Love versus Real Love

 

I propose that from this moment forth, the term “true love” and all its derivatives (true, truest love) be used to describe the feelings we experience when we fall in love. During this initial romantic phase, we are bathing in ecstasy. We feel that we and our partners were destined to be together. We’re soul-mates. We’ll always be together, adoring each other, complementing each other, supporting each other’s dreams. Our hearts will always ache when we’re parted and burst when we reunite. We’ll always have passionate love-making that fuses our souls and refuses description. We just can’t do enough for each other and are willing to bend to the breaking point to bring happiness to the eyes of our partners. The world is beautiful again and we are sure we are going to live happily ever after.

Why call this true love? Is it really true? I embrace the term for two simple reasons. First, it has been around a very long time, leaping from the lips of the earliest poets, troubadours and balladeers. So to honor that tradition, I say, “Let’s go with it.” The second reason is that it feels true while it is unfolding. In fact, it feels like the ultimate truth, the truth that makes life worth living and brings everything into perspective. Its power is oceanic and not to be denied. So even if, later, we look back with a wholly different perspective, I say, “Let’s honor the moment of it. It’s pretty incredible.”

So, then, if that’s true love, what is “real love”? For me, real love is the term we should use henceforth and forever more to describe the enduring and ever-growing bond between us when falling is love has passed and we have stood up and been walking together in love for some time. We have come to know each other. We have bumped up against each other’s limitations. We have felt our way through a period of disillusionment and frustration. We have begun to accept that we are not perfect, either of us as individuals. We are not the perfect re-assembling of Aristophanes’ sundered prototypic humans, as recounted by Plato. We have discovered that we are both burdened by injuries from early in life, injuries that drive us to do sometimes hurt ourselves and each other, to sometimes make less than optimal decisions, to sometimes just fail to consider each other. With all this, we choose to be together (see my poems, The Choice, from Love Over 60 at www.loveover60.com ) and embrace our “misses”, our imperfections and inadvertent elbowing and stepping on each other’s feet—we embrace all of these as part of reality. We learn to feel what is a childhood wound and what is real in the present so that we are less likely to project, making our partner into mom or dad, big sis or big brother. We come to relinquish the quest for conventionally conceived absolute happiness or perfection in anything and begin to suspect that real perfection is just what we are experiencing—our many-faceted humanity…as the old saying goes: “warts and all.”

We gradually learn to embrace our partner not in spite of his/her wounds but simply, with them. This means that we can love the scar even though our hearts break at the scarring. This means that when our partner does project something onto us, we can stand in our own truth and help them feel what is theirs, rather than reacting, escalating and compounding the fracture. This also means that we accept the reality that no one can meet all of our needs, nor is it his/her responsibility to do so, but that the joy of a love relationship is that we do fulfill a lot of each other’s needs. Included in this is an understanding that the powerful urge to have it all actually arises from early in our infancy when, indeed, we should have pretty much had it all, given how vulnerable and dependent we were. But that time is over. We may grieve it periodically for years to come, but we know that our partner is not responsible for that deprivation and cannot heal it all for us any more than we can heal it all for him/her. Having said that, we also learn that presence, compassion, patience and curiosity about our partner’s world goes a long way toward creating the safety he/she needs to feel that old hurt, not to mention to develop in the present into the person he/she is really capable of becoming.

Perhaps above all, we come to cherish each other’s companionship in its small and large expressions, in its passion and in its tranquility. We come to savor the moment, described in the beautiful children’s book, The Velveteen Rabbit, when we have so loved and been loved by our partner that our fur is rubbed off; we may appear used and worn to the outside world, but to each other we are, at long last, real.

C 2011 Bob Kamm

Are Relationships Really About Happiness?

 

"And they lived happily ever after." I'm sixty-four years old. I've seen a lot of things in my life and being a gregarious guy, I have known a lot of people. I have yet to meet anyone who actually lived happily ever after. And I am not a cynic. I'm just sayin'! I'm actually an optimist and an incurable romantic--for which I offer my love poems as evidence. Still, you have to wonder where this line came from--out of what psychological state. Maybe someone, someday will write a Masters or Ph.D. thesis on that question, because it's an important one. From the earliest age, we are fed misinformation about relationships. We are given gauzy animated fairy tales that usually occupy themselves with the quest to find "the one" and end right there.

The glass slipper fit Cinderella perfectly and she and the Prince lived happily ever after.
The Prince gave Snow White (and Sleeping Beauty--that guy gets around!) the kiss of true
love. She awakened and they lived happily ever after.

When we get to adulthood, Hollywood cranks out for us an endless stream of romantic scenarios that follow the same line. Maybe we should consider the possibility that these stories are actually dumbing us down from an early age and not the best parenting on earth. I love good stories. I'm sure we can come up with some better, fuller fairy tales. Let's give little humans a bit more credit:
"When the Prince brought Cinderella to his castle, at first she was dazzled. It was really big and her house had been really small. But after a while, she felt really sad and withdrew into her room. The Prince didn't understand at first. He stood outside her door begging her to come out. He got angry with her and walked away for a while to sulk in his own room. But then, it suddenly made sense to him that Cinderella wasn't feeling at home in his castle. It was 1000 times bigger than the house she had known. And she had been a servant to her sisters for all those years. He couldn't expect her to suddenly feel comfortable being a princess in a palace. He went back to her room and talked to her through the door. He talked to her in a soft, loving voice. He told her he understood and it was ok. He heard her crying through the door and told her she had every right to those tears and he knew it would take some time before she would really feel at home with him. He told her that he had been very lonely before he met her and he really needed her. Cinderella opened the door and they held each other for a long time. They cried together because it felt so good for each of them to finally have someone who really understood what they were feeling. A few days later, Cinderella told the Prince that even though her sisters treated her badly, she liked living in a little house. So he offered to build her a small cottage not far from the palace, just for her...where she could go whenever life as a princess stopped being fun. She accepted and he built it. Over the years, Cinderella went there less and less as she grieved over her early life with her stepmother and sisters. She grew inside and became the Prince's true partner in life, sharing responsibility for running a kingdom where nobody was ever treated again like a servant by his or her own sisters or brothers." I mean, is it really so hard to tell a captivating tale that has some element of reality to it?
Maybe the word happiness has been so overused that it has become nondescript. The love I have for
Andrea is way bigger than a "happily ever after" love. It is an enormous terrain with all kinds of different eco-systems within it.. Why would humans think that love can or should be reduced to a single quality, like happiness? Happiness and its counterpart, joy, have both become words that leak fluid, like an old transmission. What do they mean?
" I'm happy that I got a new iPad."
" I'm so happy that I got that job."
"I'm joyful over my new VW."
"I'm going to be on Oprah and I am beside myself with joyful happiness"
I enjoy these moments as anyone would. But the point is that they are moments, call them semi-peak moments because they're not in the same category as the vaunted "peak experience." If you come into a love relationship expecting or thinking you're entitled to always feel like someone just gave you a new iPhone or 2 cruise tickets to Barbados, you are in for a majorly rude awakening.
What would I replace this language with? If I were limited to one phrase it would be
"a sense of rightness", a sense that you fit, even when you don't. Paradox? Yes, but truth. Even in the ways that you sometimes hurt each other and struggle with each other, totally miss each other's intent and then have to reconnect; even on days when you are both so busy that it seems all you can do is kiss each other goodnight; even on days when you go temporarily insane and really don't like each other; even on days when repugnant aspects of the world intrude on you and throw you way off balance...on these and many other kinds of days and moments, you have a sense of being with the right person in the relationship you're supposed to be in, slowly but surely growing and creating something meaningful together and helping each other stand up in the world as the whole persons you are both capable of being.
For me, this is more a "deep" than a "high"--so the words happiness and joy are too limiting. A deep is something we feel when our feet are firmly planted in the real world where relationships unfold in their own subtle, sometimes painful but beautiful way. Real love is so may things. Let's give it room to breathe. Let's not imprison it in a box with a bow that reads, "Happily ever after."

C 2011 Bob Kamm

How to Express a Feeling

 By the time we reach adulthood, we have heard a lot of "don't" messages from our culture. This begins with our primary caregivers but quickly fans out to include other adults in our lives...and other kids who have already become agents of the culture. These are powerful shaping experiences. One of the many results is that as adults trying to actively be in a love relationship, we have lost or hidden away the capacity to express a feeling in a straightforward manner.
In our work, we frequently hear people go down the wrong road by using this phrase: "I felt that..."
What usually follows is the word "you" and a criticism or indictment of their partner. In other words,
criticism comes through masquerading as a feeling. "I felt that you disappointed me" is not a feeling.
"I feel that you are never really going to understand me" not a feeling. "I feel that you'll never do the things I need you to do so I can feel respected" not a feeling. All of these are criticisms. When you point your finger at your partner, they put their fingers in their ears.
So how do we express a feeling? Ask yourself how young children do it. They say, "I feel really hurt," "I feel sad," "I'm mad," "I'm really scared," "I feel bad," "I'm so happy!" They just say the feeling. There is no "that".
They say the feeling and feel the feeling at the same time. As adults, if we really want our partners to hear us and be empathetic and possibly change some aspect of how they interact with us, we have to unlearn the Language of Hurt which is "you, you, you," shame, blame, criticize in a variety of disguises...and sometimes undisguised contempt! We have to relearn our natural language, the Language of the Heart, the Language of Healing by owning what lives in us and is so painful. It is painful for a lot of men to say, "I'm so sad, I could cry for a week," or "I'm really afraid...I'm afraid I'm going to be alone." It's very painful for a lot of women to say, "I'm angry. I'm just so angry!" We could go down the gender difference trail further but for our purposes here, not necessary. Because, frankly, it is painful for most adult human beings to just say their deepest feeling out loud at any moment, unless they are happy...but a lot of people even have trouble saying that, as if there is an inner voice telling them it's not good to be too happy, an unwelcome residue of our Puritan founders.
Some people joke and tease about the phrase "inner child" or the phrase "how does that make you feel?"
The truth is, we make fun of them because they make us feel uncomfortable...because nearly every last one of us is carrying around an emotional heritage that includes some very painful memories. Yet, until we get fully real with ourselves and our partners, until we claim our right to express our hurt, to tell the story of what we experienced as vulnerable children, we can not experience true intimacy as adults. It is a great and sad irony that vulnerability set us up for hurt as children...but without vulnerability as adults, we cannot be intimate. We must risk telling our story in its true form, or face the greater risk of living a life under cover.
C 2011 Bob Kamm

Love Over 60, Part IV

In my list of How to Find Love Over 60, I began with these words:

“Stay healthy and fit. However people used to look at this age a generation ago is irrelevant now. We have the knowledge to stay active. Get out and move. Eat sanely. Take care of yourself. There’s a good possibility that many of us Boomers will live well into our nineties…and what better reason than for love?”

So people ask me what I do specifically. Well, I eat a lot of fruit, vegetables and nuts. I do eat meat but fish, turkey, chicken and eggs (mostly whites). I used to love steak. I ate enough steaks for a lifetime by the time I was 50. In the last 5 years, I doubt I’ve eaten 2 lbs of red meat. I love the taste but don’t like the way it sits heavy in my gut. It’s very dense and takes longer to digest than a lot of other foods. It feels hard on the entire digestive system to me. I eat as much raw food as I can. Raw food has lots of fiber and live enzymes in it that help you digest the food itself. What a cool setup that is! When you cook food too much, you kill the enzymes so it’s harder to digest it…even vegetables. A lot of people don’t know that our stomachs have a finite capacity to produce their own digestive enzymes. As we get older, the system is less efficient…which is why most antacid commercials show middle-aged people in distress. I also generally avoid the whites—white flour, white sugar, white rice, white potatoes, white pasta (I LOVE pasta, but it loves my belly more, so I avoid it). My body turns starch into fat very quickly so I avoid it. I love bread but don’t eat much and when I do, it’s wheat or seed bread of some kind.

I generally eat a light breakfast that includes fruit. Lunch is my big meal. I often don’t eat a sit-down dinner. I prefer to graze from about 5 in the evening until 8—mostly having fruit and some nuts, generally almonds, which I love. I do snack between meals but generally it’s healthy stuff—an apple, a banana, some pineapple, a small yogurt.

This really isn’t rocket science at all. As we get older we should benefit from the accumulated experience of what serves our health and what doesn’t. You can find more detail on this if you go to www.bobkamm.com and click on “essays and excerpts” on the home page. There is very thorough piece on health and nutrition that sums up what I’ve learned over thirty years reading a lot about nutrition. Single best book on nutrition? The China Study by T. Colin Campbell.

As to exercise, I’ve always been a kinesthetic person. Even as a kid, I didn’t like board games because you had to sit still to play them. I wanted to be outside running around, climbing trees, building snow forts and so on. As an adult, I ran quite till my mid-forties. Then, my joints and lower back told me they’d had enough. I switched to biking for a while and still do some, though less now. My favorite thing to do is just walk…but especially up hill. So I guess that qualifies it to be called hiking. I live at the base of 1250 foot mountain and generally climb it at least 3 times a week. It’s about 40 minutes to the top—a good aerobic workout, and the downhill return is good for a natural cool-down and working the legs the opposite way. The round-trip is about 4 miles. Several times a year, I do longer hikes with younger clients who come out for 3-day personal retreats (see www.bobkamm.com , The Ultimate One-on-One). We’re talking anywhere from 5 to 10 miles, depending on how fit these folks are. I try to mix it up a bit in warm weather and swim some. It’s great exercise but it tends to bore me, unless I’m in the tropics snorkeling or scuba diving. Now those are fun!

I also hit the gym 3 times a week, do some free weights and some of the machines. Jack LaLanne lives in our area and I’ve run into him numerous times over the years. He counsels to do a lot of reps with light weight as we get older. So I’ve followed that advice. I generally work one or two body segments per visit (e.g. chest and back) and spend no more than 30 minutes at it. One of my other fitness gurus told me that if you’re working out right, you shouldn’t spend more than twenty to thirty minutes per day, unless you’re in training for some big event or trip. Works for me.

I’m going to turn 64 in less than a month. I’m just shy of 6 feet tall and weigh 190. I love the feeling of vitality. My legs have really benefitted from the hikes. I’m quick on my feet and can jump from rock to rock. But I’m no fool. I always take a walking stick for extra balance. I got turned onto sticks in Peru in 1996 when I did the Inca Trail. All these Europeans were marching up and down the Andes with what I thought were ski poles but soon learned were telescoping sticks specifically designed for walking. I use the Leki Photo, sometimes two.

When I travel for a consulting job, I take stairs, not escalators and walk rather than using the moving sidewalks in airports. There are some airports where I know exactly how many stairs there are from this level to that, I’ve taken them so many times. If the weather allows, I walk from my hotel to the business. In the evenings, I often will do some short bursts of push-ups, sit-ups and leg lifts. Anything just to move the blood and feel my muscles. Otherwise, with all the sitting involved in air travel and consulting, I get stiff and my back gets gamey.
I do take supplements such as C, a broad B, resveratrol, acai, l-glutamine, milke thistle, and a blend of things to keep my mind sharp.

All this is working for me because I deeply enjoy being active and pay attention to what my body likes. The payoff? I rarely have a cold or any other illness in the course of a year. I have a terrific sense of well-being most of the time and more energy and stamina than most people I meet who are my age. I’m also told a lot that I don’t look anywhere close to my age. My blood pressure is 120/70; my resting heart rate around 60 (was peskily stuck at 72 for decades!) I haven't had a BMI done in a long time but I'm sure my fat % is down around 20. I do take rosuvastatin for cholesterol because no matter what I did, it was frustratingly high. My doctor says it's genetics--Eastern European Jewish stock. I resisted this med for a long time, trying everything I could. Finally, I consented as long as it didin't make my legs ache, which is a common side-effect of the statins. Well, it didn't. My cholesterol at last reading was 170.
When we travel, we don’t sit on tour buses. I get out and do stuff—hiking, zip-lining, sailing, snorkeling and so on. Just two and a-half years ago, we were in Peru (my 6^th visit—I’m just in love with the place!) and I did a one day hike from about 9000 feet all the way up to 12,800. I’d only been in the country for 5 days so the breathing part was challenging but my legs were good. I plan to take a group there in 2012 and have a number of hikes like that planned.

There’s two other pieces to health and fitness that are really important. I pay a lot of attention to keeping the stress levels tolerable in my life. We’re active and productive. We have a lot going on and we love our life and make sure we don’t take on too much at once.

The other thing, of course, is love. Love is the greatest health tonic. My book, Love Over 60 is testimony to that…but then, I think my previous three books are, too, in different ways.

My good friend, John Ramstetter, is my age and is built like a bull. He can still run marathons, bless his joints! He also cycles ridiculous distances. I have another friend who is 67 and plays the meanest game of squash you can imagine. His partners are all younger and he wins at least as much as he loses (and doesn’t mind losing to a talented person who makes his game better). Finally, we had a resident in town here who was a very dear man. His name was Dr. Paul Spangler. After a 3 mile run, he lay down on the couch and went to sleep forever. He was 95. I met him when he was 83…at the high school track. He shuffled his legs very quickly but he really moved. I don’t know if anyone has broken his record, but at the time of his death, he had won more Senior Olympics gold medals than anyone. Now here’s the mind-blower: he didn’t even start running till he was 67! So what more proof do we need that it’s never too late to get out and get moving. If you have a partner in life, it’s all the more joyful to do it with that person. If you don’t, you’ve got a much better chance of finding one if you are healthy, active and fit. Healthy is attractive. Healthy is sexy. And healthy will get you a lot more years to love someone…which is especially great as we age because we’re better at companionship, if we’ve been paying attention! So...that's what works for me. Howabout you? Please comment!
C 2011 Bob Kamm

What is Love?

Love is an enduring active devotion to the well-being of another. Look at the origin of the word. It means "the act of consecrating by a vow". The word "vow" is not to be taken lightly here. It's not equivalent to our contemporary use of the word "promise". The brittleness of modern man is well exhibited by the saying, "Promises are made to be broken." Excuse me, but vows are not. When the word was created, a vow was something you took in a sacred setting, before the deity. You could not break a vow without serious consequences to your soul.
So when you love someone, you take a vow before all that you hold sacred, whether you're a believer or a humanist, to stand up for that person, walk with that person, care for that person, even when it doesn't suit you, even when you'd rather not.
You could call this blog, How to Find Love Over 60, Part IV...because the last item in the list of 12 things on my website is "Choose Love." Love is a choice. After you are done swimming around in the glorious neurochemical seas of falling in love, you climb out onto the shores of true possibility. There you make a choice. To love or not to love. It's that black and white. To love means you're all in. Anything less than that and you are not choosing love. You are toe-dipping or dancing. Love is not for tap-dancers. You will be tested to the limit in love. Humans are relational creatures, creatures of the bond. We need to be entwined with another, to be interdependent with them, to care and be cared for with them. But few of us have what could be called a clean emotional heritage. We have all learned about how to be relational from imperfect people, who learned it themselves from imperfect people. This is not blame. This is cause and effect. If somewhere back in your blood line your people had to survive war, natural disaster, economic calamity...they suffered and such suffering is not easily healed. We deny this generational cascade of hurt at our own risk. It has had its iimpact when we were most vulnerable...as children. A distant or angry father. An overly protective mother. All their behaviors are understandable when we know what they endured...but still, the impact was made. We carry it inside us. The past is not past, but lives in us as ongoing present, deeply imprinted in our brains, bodies, hearts and souls. We tend to see what we have learned to see; tend to hear what we have learned to hear; tend to act as we have learned to act...sometimes to reach out, sometimes to strike out, sometimes to run. All of this unfolds once we choose love. So to be in enduring devotion to the well-being of another includes embracing their imperfection and even the fact that they will inevitably touch our old hurts, sometimes inflict new ones, sometimes really get us and sometimes really miss what's going on with us. The quest for perfection is a sad affliction. To love, we must embrace the fullness of our imperfect humanity. Sunlight and Shadows (see the video of the poem by that title on my website). If we are fortunate, if we are smart, if we are "all in" we may yet gradually learn the gentle presence that will help each of us in this love to heal from that past
and ultimately love each other as the fully developed beings we are capable of becoming.
Life is too short and too fragile to do anything but get up each day with devotion on our minds. To whom am I devoted today? How will I move in that devotion? What can I learn about my partner today? What can I learn about life? To love is to live in the vow, to insist on making space for what is most dear--truth, even painful truth about myself, about my lover; and beauty different from what I was raised to see...the astonishing, pulsating reality of my lover's world as separate from mine; and bond, attachment, entwinement, deep in the eyes, tender against the body, fully devoted to protecting the sacred ground where we meet.