It can’t be just chance that the two best climbing films ever made were released this summer within a couple months of each other.

Both featured world-beating young American climbers achieving never-been-done things on the storied rock El Capitan, in Yosemite. Together — if you want them to – the two films say something about competing paradigms in the world right now.

The first film, The Dawn Wall, features two climbers, Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson, who aim to spider up what’s long been considered an unclimbable face — a smooth, 3200-foot granite table tipped upright. With finger-shredding holds no bigger than the width of a credit card. Caldwell’s the superior climber, and at one point Jorgeson encounters a pitch he just can’t solve. He tries and fails for literally days. Eventually he decides to just give up and belay his friend to the top. But Caldwell refuses the gesture. They’re in this together — either they both make it or neither of them does. The film is a hymn to bro love, but more than that to the power of teamwork.

The second movie, Free Solo, involves Alex Honnold’s attempt to conquer El Cap all by himself, via a slightly easier route but without protection. This one’s about what one ubermensch — albeit one not quite right in the head — can do alone. Unfettered by gear, or rope, or other people. With the stakes as high as stakes go.

It wasn’t either filmmaker’s intention to make a political statement. But they accidentally did just that.

“We’re almost talking about two rival spiritual orientations in America right now,” the journalist Anand Giridharadas said on a recent episode of the podcast On Being.

“There’s a spiritual orientation that celebrates what we each do alone. And there’s a rival orientation that celebrates what we do together. These are both very strong parts of our culture. And they map onto this idea of the celebration of a heroic, capitalist, pull yourself up by your bootstraps story.

“But that’s never been the only story. We’ve also always had this story of movements – it wasn’t individuals who got rid of the King of England. The most important things we’ve done in this culture have also been together.

“And I think these two tendencies – what we do together and what we do alone – have always vied for primacy in American life. At different moments, and for much of the twentieth century, they had a certain healthy tension. But now the relationship between them is very unhealthy. The relationship is one of mutual annihilation instead of adversarial co-operation.”

Any other year, The Dawn Wall would have been a roaring success, the water-cooler subject of every outdoor enthusiast.

But Free Solo is crushing it. The story of the daredevil individual risking everything for glory is simply burying the story of the friendship and teamwork.

“Americans at our best,” said Giridharadas, “we do things together in a way that allows people to do things alone. And we also do things alone that creates the opportunity to do them together. These things don’t have to be at war with each other. But they are absolutely at war today.”

The Dalai Lama came to Vancouver some years ago to speak. Victor Chan, the head of the Dalai Lama Centre here, brought him in.

During one of Victor’s visits with His Holiness, he noticed the Dalai Lama starting to yawn. The Dalai Lama ordered an aide to bring him some coffee.

When the coffee arrived, Victor reached to pour it for the Dalai Lama, but was stopped. No, no, His Holiness clarified. “The coffee is not for me. It’s for you. So you’ll ask better questions.”

Ask. Better. Questions.

That should be a bumper sticker on the year 2018.

We live in a culture that overvalues answers, and so undervalues questions that asking good ones has become kind of a lost art.

Look at our media. Dick Cavett and Charlie Rose have left the building. The probing interview is dead. Now it’s all dueling answers: mine against yours, the Left’s against the Right’s.

In the Google era, answers are cheap and everywhere. There’s not much we don’t know — or at least, not much we can’t know in about two seconds. Boom, the collected wisdom of humanity right at our fingertips.

But Google, the great and powerful Oz, isn’t what it seems. Google is just a thin beam of light in the darkness. What’s revealed depends on where we point it. And mostly we just point it where other people have pointed it. So we all keep going over the same ground. We don’t know what we’re missing, because we don’t know what we don’t know.

That’s why it matters what questions you ask. Skillful questioning is a tool to help us organize our thinking around our own ignorance, as writer Warren Berger points out in his book A More Beautiful Question. It’s like a navigation App. It helps us see in the dark.

So what is a beautiful question? Often it’s the kind of question a kid would ask, if you dropped him into the middle of a dinner party of experts who thought they knew everything there was to know about their field. The kid, knowing nothing, goes right to the overlooked heart of things.

“Why is it,” a high school student in Tanzania named Erasto Mpemba asked his science teacher one day, “that when I put hot water and cold water in the freezer together, the hot water freezes first?”

This sounded so stupid that some of the students laughed. Even the teacher was pretty sure that wasn’t what happened when you put hot and cold water in the freezer. But he decided to run a test, just to be sure he was right. Lo and behold, he wasn’t right. The kid was right. So the teacher and the student published a paper on it together. The phenomenon — warm things freeze faster than cool things — was not unknown. But this student got his name attached to it. It’s now known as the Mpemba Effect. Because Erasto Mpemba was the one who asked the more beautiful question.

The world’s best questioners may be four-year-old girls. They ask, on average, 390 questions a day. “Why” upon “Why” upon “Why,” until you reach the atomic level of existence. Being a parent of a four-year-old girl is internationally recognized as the same as having a Ph.D in philosophy. It’ll drive you crazy following those turtles all the way down.

(It’s a mixed blessing that my two girls are no longer in the “Why” stage The questions have stopped. They’re no longer interested in our answers. So it’s a lot easier now. But kind of sadder.)

It turns out that the questioning drops off sharply starting the very next year . That’s because those kids are now in the school system. And now they can’t just blurt out everything you’re wondering. They have to sit on their questions until they’re called on. A lot of those questions die on the vine. And the wondering itself tapers off.

By adulthood, out in the real workaday world, people don’t ask questions much at all. Because questions are inefficient. They put the brakes on getting stuff done. We’d rather be charging off and doing things, even if we’re doing them wrong, rather than stopping to ask questions to figure out what we’re doing.

“A Nobel Prize -winning physicist was asked, ‘Is there a difference between the way you were raised that enabled you to win a Nobel Prize?” Cal Fussman, the virtuoso interviewer, told this story on a podcast recently. 

“The scientist thought about this. ‘I think so,’ he said. ‘When I was a kid going to school, the other kids would come home and their parents would ask them, ‘What’d you learn in school today?’

‘Nuthin,’ those kids would say. End of conversation.

“But when I got home, my parents asked me, ‘What good question did you ask in school today?’”

“So just by changing the question, you can change somebody’s life,” Fussman said. “Because now the kid’s gotta be thinking when he goes to school, what is my question of the day?”

There are lots of reasons to try to rekindle that spirit of promiscuous questioning we all had when we were four. But here’s one I hadn’t thought of till I heard Wired magazine founder Kevin Kelly bring it up: 

Come the robot uprising, it’s our questions that will save us.

See, machines are already better than us at generating answers. They can crunch patterns and come up with brilliant solutions. We can’t really compete with them.

But they’re lousy at questions. Because asking great questions takes wisdom, which is different from intelligence. Wisdom isn’t about brute mental horsepower. It’s about judgment.

That’s our speciality. And our advantage. We’re experts at saying, “I wonder if” or “How might we…?” These are questions born of hunches. And hunches come from being alive in the world, just kicking the can down the road.

Not long ago, an American rocket engineer named Destin Sandlin hopped on a bicycle in a public square in Amsterdam. It looked like he might be zipping off to do an errand. But something was wrong. When he tried to pedal away he couldn’t balance. For twenty minutes he tried and failed. He just couldn’t keep the bike upright for more than half a second. It got a little embarrassing. People watching thought he had some sort of disability. How else to explain why a healthy-looking guy can’t ride a bicycle?

Turns out, Destin Sandlin can ride a bicycle. Or at least he could. Sandlin learned to ride a bike when he was three years old – way earlier than most of us. But recently he’d tried a radical experiment: he painstakingly unlearned how to ride a bike. (The full version of the story is brilliantly told here. The short of it is, Sandlin taught himself to ride a specially designed “reverse” bike — which turns right when you steer it left and vice-versa — thereby effectively re-wiring his brain.)

And now, here in this Dutch square, he was trying to unlearn that unlearning. Trying to resurrect a skill that was second-nature for so long before he monkeyed with it.

“You think I’m kidding, don’t you?” Sandlin told one bemused onlooker who figured this display of ineptitude must be a put-on. “I’m not.”

This is a funny way to start a story about ageism. But stay with me, it’ll make sense.

Those Dutch bystanders weren’t quite seeing what they thought they were seeing. The thirtysomething cyclist they were watching botch this kindergarten-level skill seemed a step behind most everyone else. But in fact he was a step ahead. Sandlin had long passed through let’s call it “level 1” learning about bicycle riding. Then, after eight months of practice, he learned to ride the reverse bicycle, which took him to level 2. Unlearning that learning, which he finally managed after 20 minutes of furious concentration, took him to Level 3. Which looked to all the world like Level 1, but secretly contained layers of effort and experience — of bodily wisdom, if you like.

Sandlin’s experiment popped to mind recently as I was catching up with my friend Ellen Langer, the Harvard psychologist. Ellen has a theory about stages of growth and the judgments we make about them.

“Think about people who read the New Yorker (magazine), she says. “Level 1 is people who don’t read the New Yorker — never have. Level 2 is people who do read it. Level 3 is people who used to read it but for whatever reason” — maybe their life is so chockablock interesting that they don’t have time; or maybe cheap tramadol by cod they are novelists trying to distance themselves from other literary voices till they finish writing their book — “they’ve stopped.” Level 3 looks just like Level 1. To the folks on the subway with their noses buried in the New Yorker, the Level 3s look a step behind. But in fact they’re a step ahead.

Langer says she sees this particular attribution error all the time.

The four-year-old kid has no answers, just questions: Why why why? Likewise, the 80-year-old Tibetan monk has no answers, just questions. The m.o of these two individuals is the same. The difference is, they are on opposite sides of level 2 — where the rest of us are stuck, blurting out answers all the livelong day.

The thought-check “Could I be making an attribution error here?” is a worthwhile habit to cultivate before you rush to judgment of every display of apparent incompetence you see. Is this person actually a step behind, or maybe a step ahead?

Think of three caregivers. Caregiver A fails to come to the aid of a little kid or a senior who’s struggling with some problem; she’s operating at Level 1. Caregiver B notices the struggle and swans in to help; she’s at Level 2. Caregiver C also notices but refrains from helping because she knows it’s better for the person to do it him- or herself. Caregiver C’s at Level 3. Informed neglect, let’s call it. “It looks the same as level 1,” Langer says, “but it’s got more wisdom.”

Ageism happens when young people mistake Level 3 for Level 1.

Consider an 18-year-old in a Camaro, caught on the freeway behind a grey-haired woman in a Nissan Leaf. The Leaf-driver’s going pretty slow. In the head of the teenage driver all sorts of negative stereotypes bloom: This woman’s inept. Her eyesight is poor. Her reflexes are shot. “But the truth is, you can get killed behind the wheel — so it’s actually a smart thing to drive carefully,” Langer says. The tailgater muttering under his breath about this out-to-lunch driver “is assuming Level 1 but he’s actually looking at Level 3.” The kid will understand when he crashes. Or when he gets soaked paying his larcenously high auto insurance. Or when he realizes the Camaro is not actually all that cool. The senior seemed a step behind. But she was actually a step ahead.

“Some of the things that we disparage in older people are in fact things that we should admire and learn from,” Langer says.

Older people have figured a lot of things out. The solutions tend to be simple, analog, elegant, boring. A sage can look like a fool to someone who is only halfway through the trip.

There’s an old African saying: When the water hole shrinks, the animals start looking at each other funny.

As a metaphor it certainly describes my own profession of journalism. The water hole is shrinking fast. The animals are uneasy.

See, nobody wants to pay for stories anymore. Because everything’s free on the Internet. So newspapers and magazine are folding in droves. It’s desperate times for people who make their living from the written word.

I was at a party recently and a lot of my old writer pals were there, people I hadn’t seen in many years. There was a lot of commiserating about how things have changed, and how a lot of us are hanging on by our fingernails. But not all of us. A couple of us have scored. One signed a million-dollar deal for his first novel, the other has become a sought-after keynote speaker after his book nonfiction plucked the strings of the zeitgeist; he couldn’t be here tonight because he was in Florida at a lucrative gig. These two gentlemen weren’t here at the water hole because they’re not thirsty anymore. They’re set for life.

So, as these two success stories made the rounds, an emotion sort of crept up on everybody. No one needed to name it but everybody felt it. It was complicated, because these are very good guys – talented, hard-working, standup humans; nobody would say they hadn’t earned their good fortune. But still, the fact was, they had made it and the rest of us were still struggling. And the emotion we all felt was … envy.

Envy is toxic. It’s toxic but it’s understandable. Our culture offgasses it.

We say we want other people to succeed, but do we really mean it? Because when they do, it makes us feel crappy about ourselves. The lovable loser in our life stops being so lovable when he succeeds. Now we’re the loser, right? Somebody has to be. He just handed us that script.

But I’m here to tell you, there is an antidote to envy. And this antidote has a name:

Mudita.

It’s a Sanskrit word that has no direct English translation. People sometimes define it by what it isn’t. Mudita is the opposite of envy.

If envy means, “When you win, I lose,” and schadenfreude means, When you lose, I win,”

mudita means, “When you win, I win.”

Buddhists sometimes define mudita as “sympathetic joy.” It’s one of the highest emotional states order propecia uk anyone can aspire to. It says: We’re all in this together. When you rise, I rise. Your happiness is my happiness.

Anyone who’s a parent has experienced mudita. The small triumphs of your children spark sympathetic joy inside your own heart. (Although it’s also not unheard of for parents to be jealous of their own kids.)

But a Buddhist might say, that’s kindergarten class. It’s easy to feel mudita for your own flesh and blood. The real test is, can you cultivate mudita for everybody else? Can you enlarge the circle of mudita until not a single living person is omitted? That’s the endgame for a truly enlightened human.

I’ve never met anybody like that; surely she exists somewhere. The question is, is this a skill that the rest of us, in our warty imperfection, can get a little better at? I believe so. Here’s a very practical way I just learned about. A simple exercise. It works like this:

Start by thinking of some thing that is really flourishing. Not some person, some thing. Say, a bush in your yard that’s in flower. Or the healthy pine tree next to it. You can’t be envious of a pine tree — it’s just … a pine tree. But it makes us feel good, right? The pine tree in my yard is alive, all’s right with the world. So feel that feeling, sympathetic joy for the pine tree.

Now, very gently, take that feeling and transfer it on to a friend. Someone you like but don’t love. Except now you kind of do love them, because you’ve ginned up a little mudita. Their win is your win. Their success if your joy.

Here comes the bigger leap. The Ropes Course. Take that mudita and, very carefully, transfer it to someone you don’t like very much at all.

This could take awhile. To feel mudita for, say, Donald Trump might be a life’s work.

But one way to approach the task — and this was suggested recently by the great Buddhist teacher Sharon Salzberg — is to think about this person not in terms of their recent success but rather their ongoing vulnerability. They are fragile and fighting a great battle, just as you are. Their days are numbered, just as yours are.

There you go. Feel it. In their world, and in your world now, the stump of misery just put out a radiant sprig.

And that is cause for celebration.

Americans knew they were in for a hell of a speech that November day in 1863.

The place: a cemetery in Virginia. The occasion: twenty-five thousand soldiers, killed in a single day in the bloodiest battle of the Civil War, buried right there beneath the ground where the podium had been set up. So horrible was the event that people had no words to make sense of it. They needed a great speaker to give them those words.

And up stepped Edward Everett, a popular statesman, to ease their pain, to deliver the speech of his life. He’d prepared mightily and memorized the whole thing. He spoke for two hours.

What did he say? Nobody remembers. Because the guy who came up after him on that day stole the show.

The guy who came up after him spoke for two minutes. He did in two minutes what Edward Everett couldn’t do in two hours: he captured that historic moment and put it under glass forever. The second guy’s speech didn’t blow the first guy’s speech away in spite of its brevity. It blew the first guy’s speech away because of its brevity.

The second guy was Abraham Lincoln. And his two-minute speech was the Gettysburg Address.

**

Historians have made a lot of this juxtaposition of speakers, the crazy vaudeville act of these two gentlemen who couldn’t have been more different. Their speeches, too, couldn’t have been more different.

Unlike Edward Everett, Lincoln didn’t drop a lot of allusions to the ancient Greeks. He didn’t broadcast his knowledge of every detail of the battle. He didn’t name-drop every historic figure from Adam who might have had a hand in bringing the United States to that moment in time.

He just … exhaled. Two hundred seventy words. Everett’s first sentence was fifty-three words.

Historians credit Lincoln, in that speech, with summing up not just the meaning of the war but the meaning of the country. But he did more than that. He changed the way people talk. (1)

Lincoln used simple language (short words with Anglo-Saxon and Norman roots), and in so doing, he gave people who have deliver a speech even today permission to speak … like themselves.

Since that day in Gettysburg, the way we communicate has increasingly been about hacking away the ornament that Edward Everett trowelled on so liberally. Getting rid of pretention. Finding the cleanest line between your heart and the heart you’re trying to reach.

We gas on because we think we have to. The bigger the occasion, the more we think we need to say.

But speaking isn’t about telling people all you know. It’s about telling people all they need to know. And these days, most folks don’t need to know much — at least not from you or me. They can’t manage a big stemwinder. They’re busy. They don’t have the attention. They don’t have the RAM. They can handle one big idea, a little sketch portrait done while they wait. That’s it.

To me that’s the genius of the five-to-seven minute speech format of Toastmasters — a club I think everyone who has to talk in public could benefit from. At Toastmasters, the clock starts the moment you open your mouth. A traffic-light gizmo sitting on the table lights up green, then orange, then red as you approach your time limit.

At five minutes, you’d better be putting the landing gear down. At six minutes you’re preparing your close. Beyond seven minutes you’ve gone on too long, and even a polite club will “clap you down.”

Even if you fancy yourself an aspiring keynote speaker – Hey, I need to learn how to give a long speech without notes, just as Edward Everett did — the real skill is in shaving your message to its nut. A fifty-minute keynote speech is really just a bunch of five-to-seven minutes speeches strung together.

Edward Everett would have been clapped down at Gettysburg before he’d even finished clearing his throat.

1) Ted Widmer, “The Other Gettysburg Address,” New York Times, Nov. 19, 2013

The other day I was on a stationary bike at the gym — part of the noontime spin crowd, all of us sweating it out. The guy next to me was really bearing down. He inspired me to give the tension knob another half-turn. By the end I was knackered.

I got off the bike, patted down with a towel, put on my glasses and took a few steps.

Whoa. This did not feel right.

The room was pitching and heaving. I had trouble getting my bearings. I thought: something’s seriously wrong. A stroke? If you can put your arms overhead — all I could remember from the checklist of red flags — you can rule out a stroke, and I could put my arms overhead. My perception was wonky, so maybe a brain injury. Possibly a tumour on the visual cortex. If that’s what it was, it occurred to me, then at my age the prognosis is not that good.

Then I realized:

I had put on the glasses of the guy on the next bike.

We got it straightened out before he put on mine. (Although it would have been interesting to see if he lapsed into the same desperate Woody Allen routine.)

Two takeaways from this:

Number one: Don’t reach for a complicated explanation when there might be a simpler one.

Number two: Don’t catastrophize. It only creates anxiety and there’s absolutely no upside, because if turns out you’re wrong, you’ve been tormenting yourself needlessly, and if it turns out you’re right, you’ve been extending the suffering unnecessarily.

Feels good to be back from the brink. Near-sighted, absent-minded, but still among the quick.

After my dad died, and we were sorting through his things, I found in his office a small filing cabinet. It was jammed full of index cards. And on each index card was a story — or at least an anecdote or an extended joke. He must have been collecting them for many years. Some were good, some corny, and some seemed designed to be deployed in very specific circumstances.

Dad, apparently, was developing an arsenal of stories for all occasions. He wanted, ideally, to be able to answer a question, any question, with a story. This strikes me now as pure parenting genius. It’s a surefire way to dispense wisdom lightly. You can impart a lesson without being preachy, be directive without inviting pushback. Because, hey, you’re just telling a story.

The funny thing is, I don’t remember my dad being particularly good at this skill of dialing up a story on demand. He was a surpassingly great guy, but not exactly a spellbinding raconteur. I think it was something he aspired to get good at after he retired and had more time to commit to the effort. Turned out he didn’t live long enough to see the plan through.

But I applaud the idea. I think he was absolutely on to something.  The best answer to any question is a story.

Now, some people are super-adept at this.

The business titans Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger — the Berkshire Hathaway founders and two of the greatest investors who ever lived — are textbook. Buffett was approached by a reporter after the financial meltdown of 2008. “So many people suffered terrible losses, Mr. Buffett, but not you two gentlemen so much. Do you care to comment?”

Buffett replied: “Well, you never know who’s swimming naked till the tide goes out.”

(Okay, that’s not really a story, just an aphorism; but I bet you don’t forget it anytime soon.)

For elected officials, it’s an indispensable skill. Because if your story is entertaining enough, you make everything forget that you didn’t really answer the question. (Abraham Lincoln was the master at this—at least if the movie version of his life is to be believed.)

Who else? Religious leaders. Rabbis, especially. Because answering questions with stories is part of the Jewish oral tradition.

It was a rabbi who, for me, pulled the curtain away on how this is done. So the story goes, there was once a wise old rabbi who seemed to have no end of stories that were right on point. One day a student said:

“Rabbi, I have noticed that you always answer a question with a story. How do you know so many stories? And how do you choose the stories to tell that are so perfect for the subject?”

“Your question,” the rabbi said, “reminds me of a story….

Once, long ago, a nobleman sent his son to the military academy in a nearby village to learn to shoot. Five years later, as the young man was returning home, he passed an old barn with chalk circles drawn all over its side. In the centre of every circle was a bullet hole.

He got off his horse. ‘Who is this marksman who can shoot a hundred perfect bullseyes?’ he said. ‘I must meet him!’

A young boy heard the question. ‘Oh, yes, I know that man,” the boy said. ‘He’s the town fool.’ The boy elaborated. ‘See, you think he shoots bullets in circles. But actually, he shoots first, then he draws the circle.’

“And that’s the way it is for me, the rabbi told his student. “I don’t just happen to have these perfect stories that fit the subject we’re discussing. Instead, when I find a story I  like, I steer the conversation that way so I can then introduce the story.”

That’s pretty canny. I might just give this a shot.

I think my Dad would approve.

Not long ago I had lunch with my old pal James. It had been awhile.

“So whatcha been up to?” he said.

“Let’s see,” I replied. “Read a couple of books I enjoyed. Got some good runs in. Made a spaghetti sauce I was pleased with. You?”

“Well, this and that. Oh yeah: I climbed El Cap.”

That would be El Capitan.

For those of you who aren’t climbers, let me put this in perspective. El Capitan is a vertical wall of rock. It is 3,000 feet high.

When you think about climbing El Cap,  imagine it as a sequence of steps. You put on a climbing harness. You walk up to the bottom of the thing. You step up onto the rock face. And then, sometime later, you hoist yourself over the top. By sometime, I mean days later.

In James’s case, it was three days. Eighty hours on the cliff face.

I hit him, I’m afraid, with the usual questions:

How do you go to the bathroom? (answer: adult diapers.)

How do you sleep? (answer: you either carry a portable hammock with you that you drive into the rock, or you look for a little ledge, sometimes as small in area as a casket or a toboggan. That’s what James did.

I asked him how hard it was.

He was silent for a moment. “I had prepared myself that it was going to be really, really hard,” he said. “And it was harder. Not so much physically – I’d trained for it. But psychologically. Just spending whole days with nothing underneath you. You wouldn’t think that would be so hard, but it totally gets to you. You feel undermined. I don’t know how you’d train for that except maybe being dangled below an airplane for ten or twelve hours.”

There were many times when he didn’t think he and his climbing partner would make it, he said. They hung in there. They made it.

But that wasn’t even the inspirational part.

They had aimed to finish the morning of the third day, but the climb took longer than expected and they didn’t finish till dusk. The car was parked pretty far away. There was a path. They decided to go for it. Turned out the path didn’t go to the car but snaked over into the next valley. Soon it was dark, and they were lost.

That’s when one turned to the other and said:

“Look at where we are right now. If you just dropped us into these circumstances – lost in the wilderness in a foreign country in the middle of the night, hungry and exhausted, we’d be terrified. But because of what we just accomplished, this is nothing. This is not stressful. The sun’ll be up soon and we’ll get our bearings and we’ll be fine.”

If ever there were a case for making a habit of nosing out of your comfort zone, this is it. The more you do, the more you can do. Whenever you do the more difficult thing instead of the easy thing, you’re making tomorrow more interesting. Make a habit of this and you’re liable to become dangerously impressive, like James.

He and I said goodbye to each other.

And then I went home to make a really dangerous spaghetti sauce

As many of you now know, Olga died suddenly in the early morning of June 24. She got up to use the bathroom and a blood vessel feeding her brain burst. Doctors say she likely went unconscious in about a second – like the flip of a light switch.

I’ve spent a lot of time since then thinking about what it means that she died. “I thought she was going to live forever!” people said, only half-joking. A couple of weeks before her death she taped a segment for the Dr. Oz show. The episode was called, “How to Live to 100.” It aired a few days after she died. “I guess it was too late to pull her spot,” a friend said.

Too late to pull her spot. As if her death had shattered the magic, and sort of undermined the example of her life.

I don’t see it that way. On the contrary.

I think Olga dying when she did, the way she did, reframes the conversation around her. Her story’s no longer just about longevity, but also quality of life.

In a lot of ways, crazy as it sounds, she was peaking. She’d just smashed the world records in eight events at the world outdoor championships in Budapest. She came home to be love-bombed by her friends, and congratulated on the new memoir she’d just published. Then for good measure she set seven new outdoor world records. Then she tackled the garden.

If you think of life as a poker game – and figure that the currency isn’t money, it’s health and energy and purpose — then by those terms, over 90 years Olga amassed just about the biggest pile of chips anybody ever has. And then she walked away from the table. On this incredible winning streak she bowed out.

Now it could be she’d have kept on winning, in this poker game, for months or years or a decade or more. But the odds are against it. Beyond a certain point can i buy ambien online there are trade-offs in length of life vs. quality of life – for everybody. So for Olga, was that tipping point a year away? A day away? All I know is, she thought of her life as a miracle. It was beyond her wildest imagining.

Gerontologists have a term: “squaring the curve.” It just means, if you think of your physical and mental health plotted as a line on a graph, what you want is for that line not to be one slow long decline. You want it to stay high for as long as possible, until it plunges sharply at the very end of your life, as illness or something else takes you out quickly.

Olga squared the curve with a ruler. It’s hard to imagine a more perfect example. You blaze for 95 years and then die instantaneously with no pain and no regrets no burden on anybody else. I think this is what we all aspire to – to live right up to that tipping-point moment. Whether it comes at age 75 or 85 or 95. I think that’s a way better goal than living as long as humanly possible. We make a fetish out of this quest for super-longevity; we try to concoct ways to “solve” aging, as if it’s a disease. But squaring the curve: that’s what we should be thinking about.

In some ways our whole culture and economy depends on us embracing that idea – that it’s the “life in your years,” as Olga liked to say, rather than the “years in your life.” Because otherwise the so-called grey tsunami is going to be real, and it’s going to swamp us. Most people cost the health-care system as much in the last six weeks of their life as they do in the entire rest of their life. It’s the decline into decrepitude that does us in. Gotta square the curve. Live well and live long enough and then kick the bucket – boom.

The 19^th century novelist Ford Madox Ford, beloved of literary types for his perfect gem of a novel The Good Soldier, has lately seen his name appear more widely, attached to this quote:

“Open a book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you.”

Ford never explained why he picked that particular page at the litmus, but his “Page 99 Test” is quickly becoming better known than Ford himself — thanks partly to an American playwright and screenwriter named Marshal Zeringue, who founded a blog devoted to the idea. Since starting it in 2007, Marshal has run more than a thousand of these mini-reviews, which together serve as both an informal test of Ford’s theory and welcome press for the authors of deserving books that are underexposed because they don’t, you know, involve vampires.

My own stab at the Page 99 Test can be found here.

The Page 99 Test is an idea for our age. Everybody’s falling-down-busy and desperate for cheats and life hacks that will let them do stuff and learn stuff in a fraction of the time, in the cracks and margins. The only thing that scares us more than vampires is wasting time. Having a sneaky way to assess in 90 seconds whether a book is worth the effort? Priceless.

Unless there’s some sort of Masonic significance to the double-9s, it’s probably an arbitrary number. But it makes sense to pick a page around there, in the early middle. For sure it’s better than judging a book by page 1. Every author spends inordinate time shining up those first few paragraphs to lure you in, and often as not there follows a dropoff in quality. (Because, hey, you’ve already bought the book!) By page 99, the scene is set, the characters are established, the narrative engine is starting to rev. The story is going somewhere — or not. Philip Larkin once famously claimed that British novels are generally made up of “a beginning, a muddle, and an end.” Most books are. Middles are hard; sustaining momentum is a feat of magic.

Something else page 99 has going for it? It’s a perfect place for the author to step back and reveal the whole landscape. Sometimes you will find the whole book in microcosm on page 99 or thereabouts. Sometimes there exactly. In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, page 99 “takes place at exactly the moment Waverly has started winning chess championships and the community is rallying around her,” one critic found. In Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club, page 99 is the moment the hero’s dual identity is revealed. I flipped to page 99 of Fifty Shades of Gray the other day while waiting in the grocery line. (I didn’t pull my own dog-eared copy from under the mattress, honest.) It was a bit shocking. That page so perfectly aces the Page 99 test that you almost suspect the author knew that browsers would be kicking the tires there, and so built the page to contain the nut of the story, plus a tantalizing hint of what’s to come. Even the writing wasn’t terrible. I almost jettisoned my avocados to buy the book. At the very least, it made me think of other uses for avocados.

Marshal runs his Page 99 Test blog out of a mothership called the Campaign for the American Reader, “an independent initiative to encourage more people to read more books.” Marshal himself is a bit of a man of mystery. He appears to be among those rare folk who are genuinely here to help. He has created this great vehicle for other writers to advertise themselves, but he is himself “internet-shy.” This of course makes you want to know more about him. He trained to be a political scientist (at Tulane and UVA) but stopped just short of getting his Ph.D. to pursue the creative-writing dodge. You can see the depth/breadth of his tastes in his book selection. There are a lot of smart and worthwhile titles here you’ve never heard of – just as you’ve never heard of Marshal.

“I suppose getting out front and pimping my blog would be good PR,” he said in an email, “but I feel like the work I do on the site already sucks up too much of my reading, writing & movie-viewing time, and have resisted (the relatively few) invitations to promote my sites.”

The other site of Marshal’s worth noting – and I won’t note it at length cause I plan to do another whole blog post on it – is called My Book, The Movie.

I think of Marshal as a kind of literary superhero, moving incognito among us. Maybe someone should write a book, or make a movie, about him.

Olga’s often asked how big a part attitude plays in the story of her crazily youthful vigor. Her answer is always the same: it’s huge. HUGE. Staying relentlessly focused on the positive keeps any doubts or criticisms from pulling her down.

On one hand, her faith in positive thinking is unsurprising. Plenty of research – including Yale psychologist Becca Levy’s work on aging stereotypes —suggests that optimism correlates strongly with health and longevity.

But I have sometimes heard grumbling from skeptics that the Don’t Worry Be Happy rule for living is too pat, too simplistic, and too specifically tailored to the lucky and the blessed.

“I’d be optimistic too if I were in Olga’s shoes!” goes the refrain. It’s easy to look on the bright side when you have no real aches and pains or health issues, you’re not radioactively lonely, not depressed, not burdened by money woes. The luxury of optimism, by this way of thinking, falls to those who have led charmed lives.

But here’s the thing: Olga’s life has been anything but charmed. She grew up on the hardscrabble Saskatchewan prairie and her early years were full of struggle (she fled a terrifying marriage and raised two daughters as a single mom; one of those daughters she lost to cancer.) She earned a teaching degree at night buy 100 mg tramadol school while working days. She spent a lot of time trudging into a headwind. Clearly, optimism isn’t some default position she arrived at because she realized, like Dr. Pangloss, that “everything is for the best in this the best of all possible worlds.” Optimism, for Olga, is a choice.

She chooses it for a lot of reasons. Because it’s how her parents raised her. Because gratitude sits better with her strong faith than grumbling does. Because it’s more fun. And, maybe mostly, because it works. Optimism helps us take a wide perspective and feel connected to others (as the University of North Carolina psychologist Barbara Fredrickson has noted.) There’s plenty of evidence now that where our minds go, our bodies tend to follow. And since Olga intends to keep competing at a high level until age 100 or beyond, she figures she might as well run the software that will help, not hinder, her movement along that trajectory.

This week she’s in Budapest competing in the world outdoor championships in a new category: women 95-99. She has already bagged a new world record in the high jump and it would surprise no one if she walked away with eleven new entries in the record books. “Why not?” she says.

THIS BLOG POST ALSO APPEARS HERE:

http://www.ageismore.com/Ageismore/Blogs/2014/March/Optimistic-Like-Olga-.aspx