Your retirement years should never be spent chugging down medicine or lying in bed all day. Spiritual architect and meditation teacher Wayne Lehrer is here to talk about his book, The Art of Conscious Aging. Together with Zach Gurick, he shares practical tips on navigating the “third act” of your life so you can focus your later years on finding renewed purpose through service, creativity, and connection. Wayne also discusses how to achieve personal freedom by embracing your own mortality and the right way to turn your survival mode into a powerful energy to thrive.
The information presented in Fully Alive is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified healthcare provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or treatment and before making changes to your health regimen. Guests’ opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the podcast host, production team, or sponsors.
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Conscious Aging: Navigating Life’s Third Act With Wayne Lehrer
Welcome back to Fully Alive, where we are unlocking the secrets to your healthier, happier, and longer life. I’m your host, Zach Gurick. In this episode, we’re exploring one of the most profound frontiers of human experience, which is how to grow older consciously, creatively, and with purpose. My guest, Wayne Lehrer, is a true pioneer in the field of conscious aging. He’s an artist, an author, and a teacher whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and the science of longevity. His groundbreaking books, The Art of Conscious Aging and The Prodigy Within, offer a roadmap for how we can live the third act of life with meaning, vitality, and joy.
Wayne has spent decades guiding others to awaken their innate creativity, embrace change rather than resist it, and rediscover the gifts that are uniquely theirs to give. His message is especially powerful for anyone who feels that life’s greatest chapter is still being written. In this conversation, we’ll talk about how to move from achievement to alignment, how to turn fear of aging into freedom, and how to find renewed purpose in service, creativity, and connection. Whether you’re entering your own third act or simply want to live more consciously at any age, you’ll love this episode. Here’s my conversation with Wayne Lehrer on The Art of Conscious Aging.
Wayne, it’s such a gift to have you with us here. Ever since we had the chance to meet and talk a little while ago, I’ve been excited to connect with you in this way and for our audience to connect with you and the amazing work that you’ve done. Thanks so much for being with us. Thanks for taking the time. I’m looking forward to this fun conversation.
Thanks, Zach. Me too.
Wayne Lehrer On The Art Of Conscious Aging
You have a new book out, The Art of Conscious Aging. You’ve described yourself as this lifelong seeker. You’ve shared some of your story and background with me, but I love to start with what first inspired you to explore this concept of conscious aging. What was the origin story for you of how this came to be?
It’s two-fold. Firstly, I’ve prepared my whole life for this. I’ve always been aware of diet and exercise. I’ve been a meditator for many years. I’ve always been, I guess, consciously aging. About ten years ago, I was teaching yoga and meditation at a retreat for the USC School of Gerontology, which is the top gerontology and aging school in the world. In that one weekend, I met the dean of the school, the president of AARP, and pretty much the world’s foremost exercise person for Baby Boomers. She was the one who invented exercise videos in the ‘70s.
I became best friends with all three of them. All three of them at that point said, “You should do something in this regard.” Around the same time, these two women, whom I talked to every week, had a Mastermind group, and we had been talking for years already at that point. They both said, “You should write something on aging. You know a lot about it, and you look good for your age.” That was the genesis of it, and the bug got under my skin. I started with a collection. I’ve already written a book before, and I’ve been a writer my whole life. I thought, “If I’m going to do this, what would I write on?” I wrote out 94 chapter titles. Fortunately, for my readers, they didn’t all make it into the book. There are about 30 or 32 of them, but that was the beginning of it. That hooked me.
Taking On Life As A Three-Act Journey
Instead of 94 chapters, we have 33 chapters on The Art of Conscious Aging. That’s probably a little more bite-sized. I would love to dive in, though. You talk about this book that you’ve put together, and thank you for the great work you’ve done to distill it down, and to do that is an operating manual for a healthy, happy third act. Could you maybe talk about the way you see life as three acts and what those are, and describe those for us a little bit?
It’s pretty much a modern phenomenon. This is important. In the world of literature, theater, and film, everything is done in three acts. The first act is usually the setup. In our lives, I see the first act is going from 0 to 20 years old. That’s the period of time that comes under the idea of dependence. You’re learning who you are. You’re exploring and you’re recognizing your place in the world to begin with, your station. You’re beginning to explore your skill sets. That’s the first twenty years. During that time, most of your decisions are made for you, your parents, school, and sports. You make some of the decisions, and you begin to express yourself.
What happens is that at the end of that period of time, and I’ll come back to this, we have this identity crisis that they talked about, particularly in the West. I don’t think it happens in a lot of other places. All of a sudden, you’re going from being dependent to becoming independent, which is the beginning of the second act. The second act goes from 20 to mid-50s or 60 years old. It’s a 35 to 40-year stretch. During that time, what you’re doing is you’re now taking that skill set, and you’ve been ushered along this conveyor belt. In school, you make decisions about what classes you’re going to take. You start meeting your mates. You start finding your place in the world, and you’re shuttled into the second act.
The second act is achieve, acquire, accumulate, build, succeed, and compete. It’s the development of the ego in a separate self. In the first act, you’re dependent, and the self is part of an extension of the family. You then start redefining yourself. At that point, that’s the period that I call independence. Now it’s me and mine. I’ve separated and I’ve built my family, my job, my workplace, and my skill set. That’s the second act. That goes from somewhere around 20 to late 50s or early 60 years old.
The third act comes along. Historically, at 60 years old up until the last 50, 60, 70 years, there was no third act. It was very short, two to five years. Obviously, people of our age now, we’re going to have a third act that can be as long as our second act. It can literally be 40 years from 60 to 100. Many people who are now in their middle years are going to live to 100 years old. The third act is very distinct from the second act.
Historically, it was going from that place of dependence to independence. You went back towards dependence again. What people in the third act historically found was comfort, security, and a habituated lifestyle, where everything was winding down. In 1900, the average lifespan was 47 years, and of course, that includes infant mortality. Most people live to their 60 or mid-60s, and that was pretty much it. There are outliers who live to 80, but for the most part, that was it. You had this very short third act. It was considered to be a long, slow downhill slide for being youthful, becoming financially viable, and building your empire, to all of a sudden, holding on to it, not acquiring anymore, losing your skills, your mobility, and all this other stuff. That has historically been the case.
After the Second World War, all of a sudden, we had this idea of retirement. There was no such thing as retirement before. Retirement was two to five years, maybe ten. I remember, in my 60s, people used to ask how old I was. I used to say, “I’m the age that was dead when I was a kid.” When I thought of a 65-year-old when I was ten years old, it was a really old person. This is 74, 74 didn’t look like this, 74 didn’t go to the ocean every day, 74 didn’t jump out of airplanes or do whatever it is that many older people are doing now.
The third act, or what I consider the new third act, was the impetus for writing the book. It’s a time where you’re taking all the skill sets of your life and you’re bringing them together in a new way. I call it the re-years, reimagine, recreate, redesign, and reinvent. Instead of comfort, security, and having it, they’re about building community, collaborating, giving back, being an elder, and making a contribution. That’s the period that’s called interdependence. We go from being dependent to independent to interdependent.
Now we’ve got this period of time that, for many of us, is going to be from 20 to 40 years. Rather than sitting around and watching our financial resources dwindle, watching our bodies be able to do less and less things, becoming less and less mobile. Historically, with the third act, your world was shrinking. In fact, you can open up an entirely new life. Rather than think of it as a stage in the aging process, I think of it as a completely new stage of life. Rather than it being a stage of aging, where these are the things that happen as you move towards death, this is a whole new stage of life.
Eventually, dying is the endpoint, but we don’t have to have this long, slow downhill creep towards it. My generation, someone who is 60, 70, or 80 years old, is part of the Baby Boomers. We’re the first generation to be the recipients of modern psychology, of nutrition. There was no such thing as nutrition, exercise, or modern medicine. All of those things not only help us live longer but also help us live better. I’m the first generation to experience all those things that came after the Second World War.
There are so many purposeful things you can do as you grow older. It does not have to be a long and slow downhill creep towards death.
There was some exercise stuff. There was some nutritional awareness, but in terms of it booming into the culture, that was it. My book is sort of the spokesperson for this idea now that there’s a whole new kind of beingness that happens from the end of our second act through to our death. To me, that’s a period of time where we recognize what our value was. We give something back, create a new value, feel the value, and become the recipient of the value that we’ve generated in the world.
I love all of what you’re saying and the way you frame it like that. As you said, it’s a new stage of life that’s being developed. I’ve heard a statistic before that two-thirds of the people who’ve ever lived to be over 65 years old are alive today. You are in that demographic. You’re 74 years old now. Right, Wayne?
Yeah.
You all are pioneers. You’re creating a roadmap for what that new stage of life looks like. As you mentioned, it’s probably for a lot of people can be a 40-year stage of life or even more. The work that you’re doing and even the book that you’ve written is helping to create that roadmap. Thank you for that work.
The Lack Of Role Models For Our Third Act
What’s important about that, Zach, and I believe one of them, the biggest challenge for people as they age right now is that historically, when we made that transition from the first to the second act, going into deciding what our job was, finding our family, looking for what our path was through life, where our places in the world was, we had unbelievable amount of role models. Do you want to become wealthy? Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk. Do you want to become famous? We got all these supermodels and social media mavens and all that stuff. Whatever it is, there’s a role model for it. They’re in your face all the time.
The media is covering them all the time and touting their value so much so that most of us live in a world where we are never going to measure up. We’re never going to be enough, but at least we have a role model. I believe that the biggest challenge between the second and the third act is that there are no role models. The media does not tout people making that transition and what that transition looks like. Even AARP Magazine, the predominant voice of aging in America, still put on a cover that says, “Tom Cruise, 57, still does his own stunts.”
Rather than value what he’s doing as part of the third act operating system of giving back, creating value, living one’s purpose, being an elder, and being wise, they’re still valuing him for his second act abilities to do these phenomenal things. We’re all now stuck measuring ourselves by that. No wonder so many people, as they start to age, hit this place of quiet desperation, a low-grade depression, and a feeling of being lost. “What have I done with my life?” That actually is what happened to me at 65. I hit this wall, and I didn’t have any role models. That was the predominant thing that got me to write the book. I needed to chart a way through for myself. I was desperate and depressed.
Experiencing Identity Crisis When Transitioning To Your Third Act
Is that part of that third-act identity crisis? You mentioned the identity crisis we go through from the first to the second, but then you talk about this identity crisis moving from the second to the third. Is that part of it?
That’s exactly what it is. At 65, I hit this low-grade depression, and I didn’t know what was happening. It was like this malaise. I was also starting to face things. Nothing major, but my body was breaking down. I needed a knee replacement, this and that. Also, I was looking at how much savings I had. I don’t have enough savings for another 40 years. All of the issues that begin to hit us as we enter the third act came on all at once, and they created this depression. I went to find a therapist, and I found a gerontological therapist, somebody specializing in aging. I went and I was going for about two or three months, and they weren’t helping me at all. They were dealing with my depression.
Meanwhile, I had already started writing the book, and I didn’t know this when I started writing the book. The quickest thing I began to see was that the book, yes, it’s the operating manual, but it’s about making the transition. Making the transition is getting an operating manual. “Now I know where I’m going and what I need to do.” There wasn’t anything like that for me at that time, and this therapist didn’t have a clue. He was helping me with depression, and my issue was that I was stuck between operating systems. I was stuck in a second-act mindset that said, “My body is not working as well. I don’t have enough money. I’m no longer valued at my work. People are better than me at what I do now, and I’m being left behind.”
All of the things come with that, when in fact, all I had to do was shift my modality and say, “If it’s about wisdom, I’ve accumulated a lot of that. If it’s about purpose, I can reinvent myself,” and I am now one of the predominant people in the movement on conscious aging. All of these things hadn’t happened yet. When I started discussing this with him, he was taken aback. He hadn’t even considered that. No one had talked about this transition.
I think that, probably, almost everybody, as they go to the second or the third act, needs help making that transition. If nothing more than to identify what you’re leaving behind, which includes grieving. You hear about this all the time, “I’m grieving the loss of my youth.” You don’t get to move forward with your life when a loved one dies until you grieve them. You don’t get to move forward with your life after you finish college until you let go of wanting to go to frat parties every night. We have to give up a previous stage to a certain degree and let it be what it was, a valuable experience that I got lots of gifts from, that I’m the beneficiary of, and now I’m moving in this entirely new direction.
The entirely new direction of the third act is not entirely new. It’s a movement that’s hierarchical as opposed to being in a new direction. It brings all the pieces of your life together. That’s what I believe, anyway. For people who successfully do it, they bring parts of themselves, like when they were kids, what they were passionate about. You hear people all the time, like, “I used to paint when I was a kid. When they retired, like Joni Mitchell, Herb Alpert, George Bush, and many people, they started taking up painting, and that became their passion. All of a sudden, their life has meaning again in a new way.
Life’s third act is not an entirely new direction. It brings all the pieces of your life together.
My favorite third-act role model is Jimmy Carter, and he made the transition beautifully. He had this incredible second act. He was a president whom many people spoke not entirely positively about, but then he went on to create Habitat for Humanity. His third act and who he became in his third act was, I believe, one of the greatest examples in role models of how you do that. He took all of his skill sets. Clinton did the same thing with the Clinton Initiative and dealing with malaria and helping find fresh water in Africa.
These guys took the whole skill set of all the things they had ever done. They took not only the skill set but the contacts, the gifts, and the passions they have. They asked the question that I think is a very important question to successfully transition from your second to the third act, which is, “How may I be of service? What out there in the world speaks to me that I have the skill set to be responsive to?”
If I go back to your first question about why I wrote this book, when I looked back, I had been preparing my whole life to do this. It’s all of the things I’m talking about. There’s a chapter in the book about sleep. There’s a chapter in the book about diet. There’s a chapter in a book about purpose. My previous book was about finding your life’s purpose. I had prepared in every which way to bring all of this together in fashion and offering.
The offering doesn’t have to be enormous. It doesn’t have to be Habitat for Humanity or writing a book that changes the way people think about aging, if I were ever lucky enough to have done that. It may be as simple as being the person who champions a victory garden in your neighborhood, where a bunch of people come and plant their own vegetables and flowers. You create a new sense of community, which I believe is one of the skill sets and identifying elements of a healthy third act, somebody who is building community and engaged in a very positive elder way in a community.
I love that. To go back and think about, we have all these people helping us move from the first act to the second act. We have youth pastors. We have career counselors. We have entire institutions dedicated to helping people make that transition. Now, we don’t have any resources. You’re creating the resources for helping people move from the second to the third act in a healthy way. You’ve pointed out some amazing examples, and you’re doing it yourself. Thank you for the work you’re doing and for helping others on that journey.
That’s the idea of having an operating manual. How am I going to face this issue? There’s a chapter in the book called The Story You’re Telling Is the Life You’re Living. All of a sudden, you’re 60 years old. We know a lot of 60, 70, and 80-year-olds, and all they do is tell you about the good old days. That’s the life they’re living now. They’re living in regret and memory instead of building a new story. The story I’m telling now is, “I wrote this book and now I’m writing this novel. I’m excited about doing a ten-day silent meditation retreat. I did a five-day fast.”
That’s one story and all of those things, if I tell that to anybody else, they take that and go, “What about me? That would be interesting. I never even thought of doing that.” As opposed to a story like, “When I was 40, I was big at Johnson & Johnson.” That’s the scope of their life. How do you let go of that old story? You can’t begin to tell a new story of all you’re doing is continuing to tell the old story. One of the elements in the operating manual is Let Go of Your Own Story. The whole first section of the book is about letting go. You can’t move on to your third act if you’re defining everything still by your second act parameters and by the ego achievements that you have to go by.
Start Living A Healthy Lifestyle In Your Second Act
You’re living your third act. I would be someone who is still in the second act, but I aspire to be someone who incorporates the wisdom of the third act sooner. I don’t want to wait until I’m 60, 70, or 80. I want to have that wisdom now and live that way now. What advice would you give someone like me who is like, “I want to live as if I’m in the third act for my whole journey?” I know we talked about people who have done that. What advice would you give?
Read the book. None of these things are things that you need to start at 60. My biggest regret in life happened to me in my 40s. I rose to the top of a field. I was designing museums and world’s fairs for a living. There was one that I had done. I was the top designer for the Korean World’s Fair. When it came time for the World’s Fair to open, the company that had hired me sent me back to America because they didn’t want to share the stage with me. I literally designed six pavilions made of 3D IMAX film.
I designed a slew of stuff. I was one of the top designers, if not the top designer, for this entire event. I went home, and I was shattered because I didn’t get the payoff of like, “I did this thing. This is great.” Instead, it is a great regret, and that regret turned into a frozen moment for me as opposed to a victory. I got stuck in that moment. I could have started dealing with letting go of that moment a lot sooner. It took me a bunch of years to let go of it, building a new arena that I was successful in, becoming a well-known and valued yoga meditation teacher, and writing my previous book.
All of those elements of learning how to live well, in your third act, are already happening in your second act. For example, there’s a chapter in the book on diet. I had to make a decision. I’m not a doctor, I’m not a nutritionist, but I’ve done every imaginable diet from keto to vegan, to vegetarian, to macrobiotics, you name it. In the course of my life, I’ve done a 40-day fast. I’ve done everything there is around diet. Out of it, I’ve got some wisdom.
The main thing I got was that the only thing you need to know about diet, if I were to boil it all down in your third act, is the same thing you need to know in your second act, which is to eat anti-inflammatory foods, because inflammation causes disease. Inflammation ages the body. I have a chapter in the book called It’s Not Negotiable. When you’re younger, everything is negotiable. You can eat all the inflammatory food you want. French fries every day for a month and you’ll have no side effects. If I eat French fries for three days, I’m going to get foggy, constipated, and sick.
My diet has to be so refined at this point for me to continue to hum instead of how my body is the thing that always pulls me back below ground zero. My son is 47, and he’s feeling the dieties on now. We’ve talked about an anti-inflammatory diet. Those are things you start young, doing them. Do you know what period of critical demise is?
It’s when you’re beyond your health span.
In 1900, the critical demise for the average human was about half of 1% of their life expectancy. If your life expectancy was about 47 years, it was about three months. What happened then was you got pneumonia that lasted two to three months, and you died. Now, the period of critical demise is six to eight years. That’s six to eight years of less mobility, less health, less vitality, less interest, more complaints, more doctor visits, and more surgeries. That’s a long time.
If you want to shorten that period of critical demise and live like the Native Americans used to say, “Today is a good day to die,” that’s what I want to do. Wake up one morning and go, “I’ve had a good run. See you later.” I don’t want six straight to ten years going from a cane to a walker, to a wheelchair, to being lifted in and out of bed, and having that bedpan changed. I’d like that to be a relatively short period of time.
The answer is to start practicing conscious aging at 20, 30, and 40 years old. Some of the things are obvious, like diet and exercise. Exercise in the second act is going to break down all the time. Push yourself further, build, build, build. For example, I was a mountain runner in my 20s, 30s, and 40s. Terrible wear and tear on the body. If you run 3,000 feet of altitude in 7 to 10 miles in the mountains every day, you pay a price. No one looks at that. All I looked like was the fittest guy around. The ego is going up above, “Look at me.” The truth is that I was taking my health span off the back end. Does that make sense?
Yeah.
That is what happens. Now, you should only do exercise for as long as it feels good. No pain, no gain. Once you start to get that place when you’re older, you’re going to pay the price. You’re either going to take a long time to get your energy back at the end of the day. You’re going to be foggy, or you’re going to have injuries that plague you that keep you from being able to come back to do whatever it is you love doing tomorrow. Rather than running 2 miles and being happy today, you run 7 miles one day because you think, “I’m feeling so energetic.” The next thing you know, you’re off the board for a week. Maybe even into the surgeon’s room. All of that mentality has to shift. It can shift at 60 when you have no choice, or you can become proactive and start living the elements of conscious aging in your 20s, 30s, 40s, and 50s.
If you only exercise as long as it feels good, you will pay the price when you get older.
Striking Balance Between A Happy And Healthy Life
I love how you’ve taken things and broken them down to their most important elements. As you said, with diet, you’ve tried everything and boiled it down to eat anti-inflammatory diet. We can all go figure out what that means for us. With exercise, exercise until it feels good. What else can you tell us about sleep and some of those more practical things, too?
All the things that have to do with health are plain old common sense. Someone recently asked me, and this will answer your question in the most uber way possible. Someone recently asked me, “If I were to boil my whole book down to one element that you need to know for conscious aging, what is it?” I said, “Balance.” When is enough enough? One of the questions I ask myself with everything I do now is, “What’s the price of admission?” In other words, “If I do this, am I going to pay for it afterwards, and how high is that price going to be? Is it going to take me off the board?”
Some things are worth being taken off the board. For example, traveling coach class, flying to India, and spending seventeen hours on a plane is going to take you out for a week or two. When you come back in terms of jet lag, would you want it to affect you like that? When you are younger, that may be worth the price of admission for three weeks of this extraordinary thing. Going to the gym and doing ten extra reps, five extra times, and waking up uncomfortable the next morning that I can’t go run and walk on the beach and jump in the ocean, it’s not worth the price of admission for me. That’s just ego.
This idea of balance, to me, is the center of it. What’s cool about that idea of that’s how you determine what is the art of conscious aging is that you now, at 60 years old, for the first time in your life, you have a feedback system that’ll tell you very quickly when you’re out of balance. When you’re younger and you can get away with everything, you’ve got no feedback system. The whole basis of science is that the quicker I can gather statistics, the better my experiments are going to go. For example, my body doesn’t do well on carbs, specifically on wheat or flour products. If I do those and I say, “I want to write a book,” and tomorrow I’m going to be foggy and I’m not going to be able to write as well. That’s the price of admission.
I’ve now got a feedback system. Here’s the deal about conscious aging, and this is the key to why it’s conscious aging, which is that I have to pay attention to the effects that I am consciously or unconsciously choosing are the causes. I need at least six and a half an hour to seven hours of sleep a night, but I need them before 10:30 at night. If I get them after 11:30, nine hours, and I’ll still be tired tomorrow. That’s knowing my body.
If I’m going to go to a concert and see the Eagles or something, and stay out till midnight, and know that I’m going to be a vegetarian tomorrow because it’ll impact me big time. The concert is over at 11:30. I’m home. I’m in bed by 12:30 or 1:00, and I never wake up later than 6:30 in the morning. That means I got four and a half or five and a half hours. I’m going to pay the price. That’s worth the price one day because I now know how to ameliorate how heavy that price is. I know it’s going to be one day if I’ve taken care of everything else.
The main thing I’m getting at here is this idea that now that I have a conscious feedback system, I now have a vehicle for becoming a more conscious human being. It’s not just about having the awareness to improve my quality of life, but I’m actually improving my quality of consciousness, which is I’m now aware of the cause and effect relationship between me, the life I’m living, and what I can and can’t do, what does and doesn’t pertain to this body anymore. Feedback system, I never had that.
By having a conscious feedback system, you have a vehicle for becoming a more conscious human being who is fully aware of improving quality of life and consciousness.
What happens to most people my age is that they don’t want to pay attention to the feedback system. They keep trying, and every time they go to the gym, all they talk to you about is their sciatica. What a great workout you had, and what a wonderful payoff. I don’t want to hear that. I want to hear how wonderful the ocean was, what a great walk you had in nature, the butterflies you saw, or whatever. That’s the issue. The issue is you’ve got this feedback system. Balance is paying attention to it. Having a healthy and quality of life third act is choosing to be conscious of what balance is for you.
I love how you said that you have this more dynamic, quick feedback loop. I ate the French fries. I felt like this the next day, the next hour, or whatever you have, that happens more quickly. I love how you tied it back to you actually becoming a more conscious human being by practicing these things within our bodies. It’s more expansive than that. We’re becoming more self-aware and more conscious human beings of the world around us, our identity, our purpose, the meaning we’re getting from life, and all of those things. That’s a beautiful analogy.
Also, as we do that, as we get the payoff from making those conscious decisions, we’re motivated to become more conscious. I start making choices like, “I’ve never had a meditation practice. I think I’ll add that. I’ve always stayed up late at night to watch the late-night TV, but it doesn’t feel good.” Not only am I going to bed early and getting more sleep, but all of a sudden, I’m waking up early in the morning, and now I’m choosing in the morning to immediately do something healthy with it too. It becomes a qualitative momentum. It continues to help us become more and more conscious. I believe, for the people who are choosing this, and I see many Baby Boomers doing that, I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life.
I’m not earning a ton of money. I’m not dating supermodels. There are a lot of things I’m not doing anymore. Everything I’m doing, I’m enjoying tremendously. Almost everything I’m doing, and this is the criteria for a good life, I’m choosing the life I’m living. That doesn’t necessarily mean I choose to go to the beach, take a run, and jump in the ocean every morning. That’s great, but there are other things that are happening in my life that I’m choosing to be present for and enjoy. All of them aren’t necessarily things I would choose when left to my own devices. Because they’re in my life now and I have to, I choose to do them as well, rather than fight a dragon.
There’s a compounding effect is what you’re saying.
You talked to a lot of people in their 70s and 80s, and they’ll tell you, “This is the best time in my life.” It’s not because they’re going on Viking Cruises up the rivers in Amsterdam or whatever it is. They may be doing that, but that’s just one of the little things. The real quality of life is what happens between 6:00 AM to 10:00 PM, seven days a week. It’s not the highlight reel that people used to think of as a third act. At a gate, golf game, went on a cruise, and saw my grandkids, end of conversation. As opposed to, I got a group of guys I hang out with every day, and we talk about this, my book club, or my passion for painting.
All the little things that make up a day, when you’re younger, your life isn’t as focused on the little things that make up my day, and how engaged you are in each one of those things. You may be forced to do them. They may get you results and move you towards your goal, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you’re present for them. As you get a little older, you say, “There’s not a lot of time left. I’d better show up for the time I got.”
How Embracing Mortality Can Lead To Freedom
You talk about negotiating mortality or embracing mortality can bring us more freedom and joy. Can you share a little bit about that?
One of the biggest issues that you’ve got to face at some point is that there’s an expiration date on this body, on this brain, or on this life. Everybody knows that they’re going to die, but all of us live as though we’re not. We’re even asking the question, “What can I do at 20, 30, or 40 to age more consciously?” Even in the realm of aging, all of these guys that are selling longevity, the unspoken promise in longevity is that you’re somehow going to cheat death.
We’re all cognizant enough to go, “That’s not what I think,” but there’s a part of all of us that wants to move that aside. I think to get on with your life, you’ve got to face the fact that you’ve got a limited time on this planet. You’re the one at this point in your life who can choose how to be present for that limited time. You may not have been able to choose it when you had to earn an income, when you had to put your kids to school, when you had to pay the mortgage, all the had-tos of earlier life.
Face the fact that you only have a limited time on this planet. Choose to be present for that limited time.
Until you face the fact that you’re not immortal, there’s going to be a finishing date. You don’t have real control over that, other than making the best possible choices you can make now. Knowing that helps you make the decision to make the best possible choices you can make now. I believe it’s never too late to negotiate with your mortality by making the healthiest choices you can make today.
It’s not only are the things of how to eat, sleep, and take care of myself, but where I put my attention. Who do I have relationships with? Can I afford to waste an hour with a person whom I walk away from those interactions with feeling bad? We all have a person in our life, or multiple people, with after an hour with them, you feel toxic. Maybe they become 10-minute friends when you’re 60, and they were 40-minute friends when you’re 40.
Why Creativity Is A Vital Element Of Conscious Aging
You’ve talked about how creativity shouldn’t be replaced. I love the re-years, the rebirth, the renewal, the rediscover, the reimagine. Creativity shouldn’t be replaced, but rediscovered later in life. Why is creativity such a vital element of conscious aging?
That’s a perceptive and good question, Zach. One of the few things we know about God is that God is the creator. When we’re the most connected to our higher selves or our God, self, or whatever, it’s when we’re creating. It’s when we’re bringing something into the world or into fruition. There was a recent book written on flow. It’s considered one of the highest states. On the scale of authentic happiness, it’s right up there. There are only a couple of things above it in terms of what generates authentic happiness.
Getting into that flow state is the greatest byproduct of being in a creative mode. I know people talk about how hard writing is. For me, because it’s all about creativity, I never find writing hard. That’s just for me, but that’s because that’s one of my forms of creative expression. I’m a sculptor, and six hours can go by doing that. That’s one aspect of it. When we’re creating, our minds and bodies are in the same place at the same time, engaged in the same activity, and I believe the most connected to the source that we ever get.
The other thing is that if you look at young versus old, when you’re young, you’re always creating something new. You’re always inventing a way to do something. When you’re old, it’s been there, done that. “I don’t like that anymore. I don’t want that.” You start limiting your experience. One of the most defining elements of an older person is that their world is shrinking. You’re either expanding, which is youth, or you’re contracting, which is old age. They have nothing to do with the age you actually are.
If you’re a creator, you’re youthful. When you think about the people in your life that you say is the youngest 80-year-old you’ve ever met, what you’re saying is that person is engaged in creating all the time. They’re engaged in doing new things, discovering new paces, new arenas, new skill sets. It is synonymous with healthy aging and conscious aging, but it’s also synonymous with that feeling of being young. I don’t care what your age is. I’ve got a 47-year-old son. He’s such a workaholic. He’s much older than I am at times. It reminds life, “What else can I do?”
I love that idea of expanding versus contracting. I learned about a woman who started a graduate program at age 97. Think about the optimism that took. She graduated at 101, four years later, on the same day as her great-grandchild graduated from that same program. I love that. They keep learning new stuff. By the way, that’s good for your brain and keeps you young, as you said.
There’s this thing called BDNF, brain-derived neurotrophic factor. They say that when you do challenging things, which is also a code word for new, or pushing yourself beyond your old parameters, you generate the most of this brain-derived neurotrophic factor, which helps build new synapses and re-energizes the brain. Creative is scientifically good for you.
How To Get Started With Your Third Act
There you go. Besides reading the book, which is obvious, if someone is maybe entering into their own third act right now, what’s one small but powerful step they could take today to move towards that? How do people get started? Obviously, read the book. That would be very helpful.
It’s so simple because, at the end of every chapter, I have a couple of questions. Along with the book, I created a workbook as well, where there are questions with places for response. There are ways to deal with and look at each of those issues. The one thing you can do. I’m going to pick one randomly. One of the best things you can do is start listening to the way you talk about your life. As I said, the story we’re telling is the life we’re living. That’s not a cute little slogan. That’s literal.
If I’m telling you a story of being tired, full of regret, what used to happen, and what’s not happening anymore, all of those things are wearing me down. I want to know I was doing that. I want to know that I’m smoking up my own you know what. I can’t afford to do that any longer. You’ve got to get contemporary. You’ve got to get here. The best way to get here is to see what here looks like today. Start to examine your decisions. Start paying attention. How do I feel when I go to sleep after 11:00? How much time do I actually need? How do I feel when I eat that food?
Start paying attention. Start using your life as a feedback system, listen to it, and grow from it. The rat that goes down the same maze time and time again because the cheese was in one location five weeks ago, that rat is dying every time it’s going down that thing because it’s not getting nutrients. I want to go down and get more nutrients every time I go down the new thing. That’s what I feel like now. I can only do that if I’m paying attention to the ways I’m going and old the habituated patterns that no longer serve me. That was more than one answer, but I think the two. First, get contemporary with where you are. Second, start paying attention to what it is you’re doing where you are and the payoff for those actions.
That goes back to that question you mentioned before, “What’s the price of admission here?”
I love that. It’s so simple. If that’s all you did before you hang out with Sally because she’s your oldest friend in the world, think what’s the price of admission? “Yeah. I have to listen to that freaking story about the day she dyed her blue hair. One more time and I’m going to kill myself.” I didn’t have a choice. I can lead the conversation in a new direction, which is what I have to choose to do with people whom I find stuck in their groove.
I make a conscious decision to people I love and who I want to be around, who can pull me down the rabbit hole to a place I don’t want to go. If I set the tone of the conversation, all of a sudden, they’re enlivened, and we’re meeting in that new place. You can’t do that with everybody. Some people are so stuck in their groove, they’re going to pull you right down into it with you. Pay attention to the price of admission.
There you go. Wayne, this has been packed with wisdom. I appreciate the great distillation that you’ve gone through, the discernment, the work that you’ve done, and putting all your wisdom together. As you said, you’ve been preparing for this your whole life. Thank you for being a pioneer in creating a road map for those of us who will come behind you. As you said, we can all start these things now, whether we’re in our 20s, 30s, 70s, 80s, or 90s. It’s never too late to start, and it’s never too early to start. Thank you so much for going through the creative process and generating this for us.
It’s amazing how resilient the human body, mind, and spirit are, no matter what your age. If we distill it back to the idea of contraction or expansion, as soon as you’re doing something new, you’re expanding. You can start moving back into an expansive life. Even if it’s a small increment, it feels way better than contracting. Contracting is arterial sclerosis, bad memory, and eventually, rigor mortis.
Get In Touch With Wayne And Get His Book
Wayne, where can people find you? Where can they find the book and the workbook? I know your earlier book is available as well, The Prodigy Within. Tell us about some of those links and how we can connect with you.
The Art of Conscious Aging is my new book. It’s available on Amazon. Along with it, you can get the workbook at a fraction of the cost. My previous book is about finding your life’s purpose. It’s called The Prodigy Within: The Quest to Discover Your Life’s Purpose for Late Bloomers and Other Seekers. The premise for that book was that it’s not until you’re in your 40s that you’ve garnered enough experience, explored enough sides of yourself, put together, and get clarity about your gifts that you can be in touch with what your purpose is. That could be at 40 or that could be at 70. That’s available on Amazon as well.
You can visit my website, which is WayneLehrer.com. If you do, please sign up. I do one-on-one coaching for people who are stuck in that third-act transition, if you’re lost. Also, twice a week, I send out what are called Fortune Cookies for an Enlightened Third Act. I write these 299-word ditties that are distillations of a chapter from the book, like walk in gratitude and live in grace, and those kinds of things. That’s available through my website, too.
I actually received those. As you said, they’re nice little diddies to get a couple of times a week. Thanks for sending those and putting that together as well.
I enjoy writing them.
Wayne, this has been a lot of fun. I appreciate who you are and the work that you’re doing and sharing this wisdom with us. Thank you so much for being with us. We’ll have to have you back at some point in the future to continue the conversation.
Thanks, Zach. It has been wonderful. I appreciate you offering the opportunity.
Thanks so much for being with us.
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Episode Takeaways And Closing Words
I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. What a fascinating person Wayne is. He has so much wisdom and experience to share with us. As we mentioned several times in the episode, he is helping to chart a course forward for all of those of us who will follow behind, and for those of us who are currently in that third act of life, there are more people alive today over the age of 65 than ever before in history. We need those pioneers to help create that roadmap to be role models.
I love how he breaks it down into these three acts of life, and how we can have a third act that is about community, collaboration, and becoming interdependent, as he mentioned. I like how he calls it the re-years, reimagining, redefining, and recreating ourselves. That whole idea of expanding versus contracting. We always want to be expanding in our lives in every facet, in every act, and in every stage. We have this whole new stage of life that’s available to us. For many people, that’s going to be 20, 30, 40 years, or even longer. For some of us, this third act can be a whole new stage of life that didn’t exist much before in human history.
We want to live those years with meaning, vitality, connection, purpose, and an expansive mindset. I think Wayne’s work can help us do that. Check out The Art of Conscious Aging and the Conscious Aging workbook that goes along with that. You can find those on Amazon, as well as his first book, The Prodigy Within, about discovering your life’s purpose. His website is WayneLehrer.com. That is where you can connect with him as well. You can sign up for his bi-weekly little nuggets that he sends out, 299 words. Check that out. Check out his book. Thanks so much for joining us here on Fully Alive. We’ll see you back here next time.
Important Links
- Wayne Lehrer’s website
- The Art of Conscious Aging
- The Prodigy Within
- The Art of Conscious Aging Workbook
- The Art of Conscious Aging