Sermon: 7/30/23

Holly Tanguay

Last week from this pulpit our own Dick Prouty explored tears, his and our own. Dick told us he grows increasingly comfortable with tears as he ages and encourages us to do the same. This week I will explore a different, but occasionally overlapping, emotional state, happiness.  I grow increasingly comfortable with happiness as I age and, as hard as it may be at times, I encourage you to do the same. I say this with just a little bit of irony. Of course, feeling the emotion of happiness isn’t hard, but we all know that finding the well of happiness is sometimes a challenge.

Let me be clear here. Bette Davis was right, “Old age ain’t no place for sissies.”  Like it or not those of us 65 or older are deemed elderly and like it or not the territory comes with plenty of challenges. Challenges including but not limited to decreasing hearing, vision, balance, strength and memory; increasing aches and pains, medical conditions and appointments and, of course, increasing proximity to death. There are plenty of losses too – of expectations, work networks, youth and beauty, and most importantly of friends and loved ones.

Yikes. Viewed through this lens, life in old age looks grim. For many years psychologists agreed and viewed old age as a time of inevitable emotional decline. A standard undergraduate psychology textbook had a chapter on old age right along with the chapters on anxiety, depression and other maladies of the mind.

Then in the 1980’s the National Institute of Mental Health conducted a large epidemiological study to measure the prevalence of various mental illnesses in the adult population of the United States. They sent trained clinicians into a several catchment areas across the country and had them interview a cross section of the general population. The interviewers used established diagnostic criteria to determine how many people suffered from each mental illness. When analyzed by age the data indicated something remarkable. With the exception of the dementias, older people had a lower incidence of every single mental health diagnosis. That’s less, addiction, less psychosis, less mania, less phobias, less anxiety, less depression, etc., etc.

The entire field of psychology was skeptical. How could this be true? How could the elderly be less depressed than every other age group? There must be an explanation other than their just having better mental health. So the findings were challenged over and over. Maybe the elderly were suffering from depression; they were just masking it because they wanted to hide it from themselves or others. That was disproved by brain imaging revealing activation patterns incompatible with masked depression. Maybe they were not depressed because they had so much dementia they weren’t able to experience depression – the “village idiot” hypothesis. That was disproved because cognitively higher functioning individuals consistently had less depression, not more. The findings held up to challenge after challenge until, now they are finally accepted.

I learned all this from an episode of the National Public Radio podcast, “Hidden Brain,” produced and narrated by the award winning social science journalist Shankar Vedantam.  If you don’t follow Hidden Brain I strongly recommend you check it out. An episode of Hidden Brain called “The Best Years of Your Life,” inspired this sermon. In it Shankar interviewed psychologist Laura Carstensen, founding director of the Stanford Center on Longevity.

Carstensen’s research into the day to day emotions experienced by adults is also fascinating. She and her colleagues gave pagers to a cross section of adults, and several times a day prompted them to rate the degree to which they were experiencing a list of specific emotions both positive and negative. Older subjects consistently reported fewer and less intense negative emotions than younger ones. Yet older adults experienced positive emotions as frequently and as intensely as their younger counterparts.

Contrary to popular belief, older subjects spent the same amount of time thinking about the past as younger ones. However they spent less time thinking about the future than their younger counterparts and more time thinking about the present.

In 2012 a Gallop World Poll of adults from ages 18 to 98 conducted by the Brookings Institute produced a remarkable graph. The graph of world happiness from 18 to 98 looks like a lopsided grin, with younger people slightly happier than middle age folks, and older people growing steadily and remarkably happier than all the rest.

Even loneliness follows this pattern. As measured in 2021, during the era of Covid, which caused increases in loneliness across the world, the experience of loneliness still occurred less frequently in older people, only trending slightly back upward in those over the age of 85. Yet even those over 85 reported feeling less lonely than any age group younger than 76.

Of course lower incidence of mental illness and negative emotions doesn’t mean their absence. Though fewer individuals in old age have diagnosable mental illness and older people experience negative emotions less often than younger, statistical trends are just that, trends. Individuals, perhaps including you, may not fit the trend. If your experience is one of decreasing happiness over time and increasing negative emotions I ask your forgiveness in dwelling on happiness today. May you take comfort from this community and from your own wisdom in choosing to be here.

Since hearing that podcast I have been reflecting on the reasons for the upward trend in happiness over time and looking to my own life experience to understand it. I will be 75 this year. To what should I attribute my current happiness?

Of course I have many blessings which contribute hugely to my happiness.  I live downstairs from my daughter Laura, her husband Filip, my granddaughter Ava, and soon to be grandson Rowan. I share dinner with them nearly every day and have a front row seat to the magic show of family life.

I have a group of women friends, found through a Zumba class at the YMCA, which has met weekly since before the pandemic, even outdoors in the cold when preventing infection made it necessary, to celebrate each other and the joys of friendship.

I have walking friends who keep me company during long rambles in the woods or along the shore. During the pandemic we called these walks our “threefer.” Exercise, nature and companionship all wrapped into one package.

I have this church community providing rich, deep connections through Sunday services, book groups, garden visits, and committee meetings.  We worship, work, mourn, and celebrate together. Thank you.

I also have good health and vigor for my age. Fate has been kind to me in many ways. However I believe my blessings only partly account for the degree of my happiness for blessings like good health cannot possible account for that worldwide curve upward. Reflecting on our own lives may shed light on that upward curve.

There are physical and socio-economic changes that have eased my stress as I aged. Because of retirement income and the privilege of generational wealth the necessity of earning a living is gone.  Striving for success, fame, power or status has become a matter of choice rather than societal expectation. Because I am not the substitute parent for grandchildren or the primary caregiver for a loved one with significant needs, the demands of supporting dependents have eased. Hormone levels have diminished and become more stable. (I am fond of saying that menopause is highly underrated.)  Finally the confusion of trying to figure out who I am has faded into distant memory. Now my task is to accept the person I turned out to be.

For years I had on my refrigerator a slip of paper that read “A great mistake in the pursuit of happiness is not knowing when you have it.” I wish I had written that but I found it somewhere. Now even Google can’t find it, so I can’t give credit where credit is due.

That saying, “A great mistake in the pursuit of happiness is not knowing when you have it,” helped me remember to think of, cherish and savor the many blessings in my life. Indeed present orientation, gratitude, and savoring are major components of Buddhist wisdom.  Maybe we all tend a little more toward Buddhist wisdom over our lifetimes.

As we age we also find ways to cope with our own demons. For me these coping mechanisms include years of very helpful therapy, medication, and walking in nature. Note the absence of meditation. Someday I hope to sit comfortably with myself but not yet. My sources of comfort also include dark chocolate, reading, crossword puzzles, Wordle and the New York Times mini games. I have learned to abstain from the more addictive games of on line Solitaire, FreeBee and Words with Friends.

As we age we find our people. During adolescence many of us feel we don’t fit anywhere. With a long life come opportunities to resolve family conflicts, discover true friends and settle into accepting communities.  My family, this congregation my Zumba and walking friends are my people. In a couple of weeks I will travel to an island in Lake Winnipesauke owned by the Appalachian Mountain Club where I will enjoy the company of other lovers of freshwater and simple living. They are my people too.

As we age, if we have looked for it, we find meaning. Love and care for our families and for the natural world, self-expression through art, dance, music and writing, action in support of worthy causes, contemplation and appreciation all give meaning to our lives.

Finally as we age we learn from experience.  In 1994 when Bob and I were happily raising Laura, who was then age five, my younger brother Andy, to whom I had been close, died suddenly.  In the midst of my grief, surrounded by the rest of my family I clearly remember thinking, “Oh. Now I get it. Life is made up of great joys and great sorrows and neither undoes the other.”  That might have been the beginning of wisdom, the beginning of the capacity to hold sadness without losing happiness.  It was also the beginning of my desire for a spiritual life and my arrival here among you.

Sometimes our most difficult experiences guide us toward that ascending curve of happiness, one step at a time, over a lifetime.