Welcome
David Lowry: Welcome to The Fifth Season Podcast, Conversations on Successful Aging. I’m David Lowry, and I’m joined by my friend and colleague, Don Drew. We believe aging is a privilege and we want to have conversations on how to do it well. Don, it’s good to have you on the show today.
Don Drew: Thanks David. Christie and I just got back from Santa Fe and we had a great little mini vacation. And you know what? I had some time to think. That’s one of the things I love about my vacations. It gives me a little time to think when I frequently don’t have it. And I’ve been thinking about today’s conversation a lot. I really have. Because as we’ve been working through all these themes we’ve talked about here in the past few weeks, we’ve talked about identity shifts that come with aging. We’ve discussed mental quieting and the whole question of what it means to attend to yourself rather than just pushing through. And I keep coming back to something that feels almost too simple to say out loud.
David Lowry: Then you should say it anyway.
Don Drew: I think I will.
Why Relationships Matter
Don Drew: David, the people around us are either making aging easier or harder, and I’m betting most of us never really stopped to examine that with any kind of intentionality.
David Lowry: That’s true, and it’s, a double-edged sword, Don, because I was just reading a study today that says people in the Fifth Season that we’re talking to who don’t have a good social structure are 50% more likely to develop dementia than those who don’t. And yet at the same time, you’ve gotta be careful about the people in your life. Because here’s the thing we, can spend hours researching on the right magnesium supplement or something like that, but we almost never sit down and ask, Who am I really investing my relational energy in? And is that investment actually serving me and the person I want to become?
Don Drew: Great news is we’re going to be getting into that question with some real depth today, and we’re going to look at what the science actually says about relationships and aging. And the data here is pretty remarkable. We’re going to be talking about the difference between relationships that sustain us and relationships that quietly cost us. And we’re also going to get in practical about what it looks like to make deliberate wise relational investments in the second half of life.
David Lowry: This is a huge topic and it’s so worthy of talking about it, and for those of us who are trying to become wise in the second half of life in this Fifth Season, this is something we’re really going to want to know more about.
Loneliness as Health Risk
David Lowry: Let me start with a number that stopped me cold. According to research published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, more than one third of adults over the age of 45 in the United States report feeling chronically lonely. One third, just count ’em down. One out of every three people you meet over 45 feel lonely. I’ve been there. I bet you have been too at some time. And former surgeon General Vivic. Murthy has actually used the word epidemic to describe the state of social connection in America. In 2023, he issued a formal advisory calling, loneliness, one of the most pressing public health concerns of our time. Think about that, not opioids or obesity, which I might’ve thought it’s loneliness.
Don Drew: Yeah, and I think what makes that so striking is that we live in what is supposed to be the most connected error in human history. We have more ways to communicate with more people than at any point in civilization, and yet people are profoundly achingly lonely.
David Lowry: I know it, and here’s where it gets really interesting for our conversation, because the research doesn’t just show that loneliness feels bad. It shows that loneliness functions biologically, like a chronic illness. Persistent loneliness is associated with a 29% increase of heart disease and a 32% increase of risk stroke. Whoa. And this one really gets me. It’s associated with a 50% increased risk of developing dementia.
Don Drew: 50%. Not a marginal finding at all. That’s the number that, really should change how we think and talk about our relationships as a health practice.
David Lowry: Relationships is health practice. I’ve never thought of it that way. I, knew about my mental health, but I never thought about my physical health. And yet when most of us think about health practices we think about diet and exercise and that sort of thing. Very rarely are we sitting down and saying, How’s my relational life going? Is it in good shape? Am I lonely? And if I am, what am I going to do about it?
Don Drew: Yeah. David, I think part of what makes this hard, especially for men of our generation, is that admitting this kind of relational poverty, feels like a admitting weakness. And we’re not particularly good at that. We’re raised to be self-sufficient, to not necessarily need other people, to be able to handle our own business. This is classic first half of life stuff.
David Lowry: It really is. And Don, I think another thing could be at play. Our society is, let’s just say, It’s a little crazy these days, and maybe so many of us have just gotten used to living the way we do by keeping our mouth shut, avoiding people not talking about things, walking on eggshells around people. And that cultural script is probably killing people. Slowly, quietly. But according to these studies. It’s actually a biological thing.
Don Drew: Really maybe the first shift. We need to make, even before we talk, about which relationships to invest in, is recognizing that investing in relationships actually is a health practice. It’s not separate from the conversation we have about aging well. It is the conversation.
David Lowry: That’s a really important reframe because when you understand that your relationships are part of your health infrastructure, it changes how you allocate your time, energy, and your attention. So, let’s say that someone hears what we just said and they think, Okay. I wanna prioritize my relationships. I know I need to be more connected. That’s a good start.
Quality Over Quantity
David Lowry: But here’s where I want to push a little deeper, because connection is not enough. It’s the quality of the connection we’re talking about.
Don Drew: This is where I think the conversation gets really nuanced because not all relationships nourish us, right? We have many relationships in our lives, but some relationships are actually net withdrawals on our energy, our peace of mind and sometimes even our health.
David Lowry: So these studies that say that you need connection in order to survive and need connection to, to risk the cognitive decline and that sort of thing, lower your cognitive decline, need to be nuanced. A little bit about the quality of relationships. There are people listening right now who have relationships in their lives and maybe longstanding ones like family relationships or longtime friends, but there’s this persistent sense of depletion, a kind of low grade exhaustion that comes from the ongoing management of that relationship.
Don Drew: I’ve been there, David, and I bet you have too. And I think what I’ve come to understand is that there’s a category of relationship that I would call high drama, low trust, right? And, this is the kind of relationship that as we age, we simply cannot afford to keep paying the same price for. It may have worked in the past, but the price just keeps going up.
Drama and Allostatic Load
David Lowry: We might ought to define drama. That’s a term we should look at, because I don’t mean it in a dismissive way. Drama isn’t just conflict. It’s the way you relate with this pattern of instability. It’s the relationship where there’s always something happening. Some crisis. Some grievance. Some need for you to manage someone else’s emotional wellbeing. It’s the person where you feel a low hum of anxiety. You go around and say, How you doing? It’s uh, it’s not so great. Right? And when you find yourself rehearsing conversations in advance where you leave the interaction feeling worse than when you, that’s telling you something.
Don Drew: There’s this fascinating concept called allostatic load. And it’s basically the, the cumulative wear and tear on the body from chronic stress. And the research tells us that high drama relationships are a significant source of that load.
David Lowry: Allostatic load. I don’t think I’ve heard that before. Tell me more about this concept.
Don Drew: So our bodies are designed to handle stress. Okay? I mean, it’s everywhere. And in fact, some stress is good. There’s a term called eustress and may not have heard of it before, but it’s essentially good stress, E-U stress, That’s the kind of stress that we have or that we need to get us up in the morning and get us going, right? So we have to have stress. Our bodies are. Are designed to handle stress. But when we face a stressor, a genuine threat, a difficult situation, or a difficult relationship, our response system, or our stress response system, kicks in. Our cortisol goes up, our heart rate goes up, we go into a kind of alert mode and all that’s fine. That’s adaptive stuff. This system is designed to help us recover.
David Lowry: But some people are in this fight or flight mode and it’s like a system that never turns off. They’re always on alert.
Don Drew: Yeah, and when it never turns off, the system starts to break down, frankly, it’s wear and tear. Chronically elevated cortisol, suppresses immune function, disrupts sleep architecture, promotes an inflammation, accelerates cognitive decline, and so on. So, allostatic load is essentially what happens when your stress response system has been on for too long without adequate recovery.
David Lowry: Right. It’s that feeling of exhaustion that you have sometimes, or maybe that feeling of overwhelm, like, Here I am again. There’s nothing I can do. I can’t get out of this situation. It’s that system that’s always switched on.
Don Drew: And maybe that’s the part that people don’t fully appreciate. You don’t have to be in the presence of a stressful relationship for it to cost you, just anticipating it, ruminating about it, dreading the next interaction. Think about the times that you’ve had been in a relationship where just the thought of interacting with them, stresses you. All of that activates the same stress response systems.
David Lowry: A cognitive load always in the top of your mind some way. It’s like, Oh no! Even when you’re not around them, you are around them. So when we’re talking about drama-free relationships as an investment, we’re not just talking about enjoying your time more, we’re talking about reducing this chronic biological stress you’re feeling.
Don Drew: And then of course, the flip side of all that we’re talking about right now is that relationships characterized by ease, warmth, and predictability actually activate the body’s parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest and digest. Counterpart to the stress response. So this helps regulate us. It lowers cortisol. It promotes a release of oxytocin, which has remarkable effects on cardiovascular health and immune function. All these things are good. So in other words, what we’re saying here is this kind of negative stress created by negative relationships is one side of the coin. The other side of that is positive relationships bring a number of good things for us.
David Lowry: Relationships, the right relationships we mean, are medicinal.
Trust Rich Connections
David Lowry: Let’s talk about the other side of this equation, because I think we’ve established pretty clearly why we need to be thoughtful about reducing investment in relationships that are draining, chaotic, or chronically stressful. But, we need to be building towards something, right? And so we need to ask the question, What does a truly nourishing trust rich relationship actually look like and how can we cultivate more of them?
Don Drew: This is my favorite part of the conversation because I think we’ve all had moments with certain people where we walk away feeling more like ourselves than when we arrived, where something gets clarified or settled in just by being in their presence. I think most of us know what it feels like, even though we may not have a language for it. David, what does trust actually look like in relationship to you? Because I think the word gets used a lot without precision.
David Lowry: I think trust in the deepest sense means that I know who you are, I know how you’re going to show up. There’s some predictability, and that I’m going to be okay with it. I think that you, or the people around me, accept me for who I am and know me warts and all, and they’re okay with me. And it’s not that we always have the best relationship without any drama or conflict, but it’s like you feel comfortable around them and you have a history around them and maybe decades of history.
The, other thing is true. You can have endured relationships for decades and still not have deep trust. And I’m sad to say, but there’s some people I’ve known Don, and you and I both know some of the same people, that sometimes you just don’t have that sense of deep trust when you’re around them, even though you’ve known them for a long times. On the other hand, you can meet some people and known for a short time, and that trust feels really great. It feels really solid.
Don Drew: Okay, so let’s talk about our relationship. We’ve known each other for, gosh, it’s been, I haven’t really, counted all the years, but it’s probably pretty close to 20 years now.
David Lowry: Since 2005, 21 years.
Don Drew: And for our listeners, David and I both were deans at a liberal arts university and David was the dean of liberal arts, and I was the graduate dean and of course we had the need to, I hate to use the term fight, but we had to fight for resources and so forth sometimes. So David and I oftentimes found ourselves where we were in situations where we would fundamentally disagree and sometimes pretty seriously about some things. And yet we’ve been friends since the beginning. And, we may have had days where, like we used to tell our kids, you know, I love you, but I don’t particularly like you right now.
David Lowry: I dunno. I dunno, Don, I always knew that outside of the relationship of being serious about advocating for what our colleges needed and the resources that we were both having to vye for, always knew that you were a good person.
Don Drew: And I felt the same way. I think the way I would describe it is even when we were disagreeing, I never felt that you weren’t trying to do the very best that you could do. I always gave you, if you will, the benefit of, believing that you had both my best interest and the needs that you had as well. So I really always appreciated that. And over time, trust was built between us. And we’ve got 21 years of that now. And that trust is built through what Brene Brown sometimes calls small moments of reliability over time, which I actually like that concept of small moments of reliability over time. And that’s what I found in our friendship and with other friendships I have that are really worthwhile. It’s not built in grand gestures. It’s been built in whether someone shows up when they say they would, or whether they tell you the truth, even when it’s uncomfortable or when they disagree with you, whether they keep your confidence, whether they remember the things that matter to you. All these things are important.
David Lowry: I always knew you were a great guy.
Don Drew: Well, we argue less, let’s put it that way.
David Lowry: Now, to be honest, Don, I like you a lot better since we don’t have to compete! We argue less. And actually deep down, Don and I have a lot of similarities. We, think alike on a lot of things and we believe alike on some things. And, we both have some ideas where we think the other person’s ideas are nonsense. But, at the same time, we always enjoy hearing the other person’s point of view because I don’t actually have to have Don be on the same page with me. Sometimes we just wanna bounce things off the wall.
But here’s what I want to add to all of that. We don’t have to pretend with each other anymore. I can be who I need to be and it’s okay around Don. And Don can say what he needs to say and it’s okay with me.
Authenticity and Safety
David Lowry: And there’s something about getting older that makes authenticity non-negotiable. I ran outta patience a long time ago of trying to pretend I was something that I am not. So, I can’t be in relationships where where that has to happen. So relationships that survive and thrive in this Fifth Season tend to be the ones where you can be yourself genuinely. Just be who you are, be authentic.
Don Drew: The relationships that I treasure most now and the ones that feel the most health-giving, or life-giving, if I can use that phrase, are the ones where there’s nothing really to manage, no persona to maintain no careful navigation of what I can and can’t say, just presence.
David Lowry: Presence is a really great word. A comforting presence. Researchers actually study this. There’s a concept called psychological safety in relationship research. It’s been studied extensively in organizational psychology, but it, applies in your everyday life just as well. Psychological safety is the sense that you can show up authentically. You can be who you are, take interpersonal risks, share what’s actually true for you without fear of judgment, punishment, or rejection.
There’s a concept you and I have dealt with over time. One called fusion and differentiation. And fusion is when you’re so enmeshed with people around you that you, sometimes have to subvert your thinking and ideas just to make the relationship work. You have to censor what you say or you have to agree with the other person and you do it because it’s just easier that way. But differentiation is the ability to be yourself with another person and not have to go through all of this trouble and drama. You can be comfortable with who you are, and it really helps though to be differentiated if the other people in your relationship or differentiated too. And it’s like, Hey, I’m interested in what you have to say and just be who you are. And you need relationships that can hold all of that.
Harvard Study Takeaways
David Lowry: I, think we should talk about the research that is probably the most compelling long-term study on human wellbeing that was ever conducted. It’s the Harvard Study of Adult development.
Don Drew: David, I’ve been reading about this study for years now. There’s been TV specials and so forth done on it. It’s one of the longest running studies in the history of social science, and it’s absolutely fascinating.
David Lowry: Yeah, they began tracking the lives, listen to this, of 724 men back in 1938. So, that goes back a ways, right? Some were Harvard sophomores. Some were boys from Boston’s most disadvantaged inner city neighborhoods, and for over 80 years wow, 80 years researchers followed these men and eventually their families tracking every measurable dimension of their lives, such as health, career, relationships, happiness, cognitive function, and longevity.
Don Drew: All right, so you queued this up. What did they find?
David Lowry: The fourth director of the study, Dr. Robert Waldinger, has presented this research to some of the largest audiences in the world, and the conclusion is this, The single most consistent predictor of health, happiness, and longevity across the entire lifespan was the quality of people’s relationships.
Don Drew: So it’s not their income, not their fame or their professional accomplishments.
David Lowry: Yeah, not even their prestige of their careers or their cholesterol at age 50 or their physical fitness. All of those things matter, right? But the big variable, the one that kept showing up decade after decade, across every measure of wellbeing, was the warmth and quality of their close relationships.
Don Drew: I think what’s remarkable about that is that it holds across time. This isn’t just a snapshot or a very simple study. This is a lifelong tracking of how relationship quality, predicted outcomes at every stage.
David Lowry: Man, as we were describing this Harvard study, I was thinking about my dad in his eighties and his group of friends that would hang around and drink coffee every day. These men were so comfortable around each other. They knew each other and they knew their families and lives and children and a grown up together. That’s almost idyllic and so many people don’t have that. And Waldinger said it most simply, he just said that good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Story full stop. The men who reported being most satisfied in their relationships at age 50 were also the healthiest at age 80. And the men who were lonely in midlife, believe it or not, had earlier cognitive decline, more physical illness, and they didn’t live as long.
Don Drew: And I imagine, or at least I hope that’s not a fatalistic finding, that it’s actually a motivating one because relationships are something we can actually do something about.
David Lowry: Sure. There’s so many things we don’t have control over. We don’t have our genetic profiles under our control. Whatever you inherited from your mom and your dad and your genetic background, that’s nothing you could do anything about really. But relationships are active choices and it’s time, I think in this Fifth Season, to take seriously, the ongoing investments you’re willing to make. And it’s never too late to start making better ones.
Pruning and Boundaries
David Lowry: So this gets a little tricky, but I think we ought to talk about that because. We’ve been talking about building and investing in relationships and why it’s important, but there’s another side of this and it’s equally important, and maybe certain relationships need to be reduced in one way or another.
Don Drew: I think we’re at the point where we need to have the pruning conversation.
David Lowry: The pruning conversation. We’re not talking about prunes, but pruning. And I wanna be careful here. I haven’t been careful enough, obviously. I’m not talking about being callous or indifferent or abandoning people that you know carelessly, but there is something that happens to many of us as we age, where we’re still carrying some relational obligations and investing energy and connections maybe out of guilt or history or social expectations, but not because the connections are really nourishing us.
Don Drew: I think it’s worth giving some reconsideration here because the energy you spend maintaining a relationship that is chronically difficult, consistently one-sided or pervasively drama laden, that’s energy that is not going into the relationships that could be sustaining you.
David Lowry: if we were to use a business term, we might say it’s an opportunity cost.
Don Drew: Yes, that’s exactly what it is.
David Lowry: Our energy budgets are finite and they are increasingly, as we age, opportunity, cost matters more.
Don Drew: I’ve had this experience of gradually, intentionally stepping back from relationships that had been part of my life for a very long time. David and I may have some feelings of guilt that came with it because there’s a narrative that says loyalty means staying. That real friendship means sticking it out no matter what. And, what I found is that guilt can be a motivator to stay in negative relationships when really we need to think differently about that.
David Lowry: Sure. And we don’t have to think in absolute terms, Don, of I’m in it or I’m out of it, but we may have to put up some boundaries and walls. I think there’s a version where we do require commitment and navigation of those difficult seasons. I wanna be a good friend. And walk through the fire with some of my friends when they’re in their moment of need. Absolutely. But there’s a difference between the hard work of a real trust rich relationship with people that have been there for you all these years and you wanna be there for them and so forth. Reciprocity, right? Then there’s the relentless maintenance of a relationship that has never really given you much trust or mutual care to begin with, and somehow you’re still in the same sphere of influence or something like that, and you just keep it going.
Don Drew: One question I’ve started asking myself, and I think it’s a relatively useful one. Does this person know me right? And do I know them? Not just our histories, not just our shared context, but the actual person, each of us is now. Because sometimes we hold on to relationships we’ve had for a long time, and not the relationship that actually exists today.
David Lowry: I have another little test that I use and that is, What happens if I don’t reach out? If it’s all one sided and you’re keeping it going. Another small test is, When we get together is there any sign on the part of the other person that they care about what’s happening in my life and what’s going on, or is it always going to center back on what’s going on in their life and an expectation that I’ll just sit and listen to them without getting anything in return? So this idea of pruning is, something we have to think about.
Building New Friendships
Don Drew: David, let’s address something that I think is a real obstacle for people for a lot of the people listening to us today, because everything we’ve said makes sense in theory. Invest in trust, rich drama-free relationships step back from draining ones. But for many people, and I think especially men, especially people who are in a post-career or a post-primary identity transition, there’s a really honest question we should ask ourselves. How do I even build new, meaningful relationships at this stage of life?
David Lowry: That’s a fair question. Don and I believe that it’s never too late, and that you can learn how to do this. It is a harder problem if this has been a problem for you all along because the infrastructure for building friendships that exist when you’re younger, school, early career, young families, all that’s disappeared at a certain point in life, and we don’t replace it with anything else. So we, may be at a a zero base.
Don Drew: Right. We’re not handed a social context that automatically creates closeness. We have to be intentional about it in the way the younger adults, simply don’t have to be. And this isn’t easy to do always, especially if we haven’t been used to doing it.
David Lowry: Making a new friend as an adult requires a little initiative and openness that might make you feel a little uncomfortable if you haven’t been used to being a little vulnerable, especially if you spent decades in roles where you had a status and it wasn’t cool to let people know that there was turmoil going on inside. But you’re in a different stage of life now. You can count on yourself to show up, and you don’t have to have approval from other people. You’re just looking for people of a like mind like you.
Don Drew: I don’t know if this is a great analogy or not, but somebody said to me one time that making new friends after 50 is a little like dating again after a long relationship, right? There’s a certain awkwardness to it. A certain willingness to be the one who reaches out first, who initiates, who shows genuine interest without any guarantee of reciprocity. And, anything like that is a little bit scary. It’s new and when we get older, sometimes the new is a little frightening.
David Lowry: Yeah, but the research tells us that there are predictable ways that friendships are actually formed, and so we can be wise about how we do it. Dr. Jeffrey Hall at the University of Kansas has studied friendship formation extensively, and one of his key findings is that time is the primary currency of a close friendship. His research says that it takes roughly 50 hours of time together to move from an acquaintance to casual friend, and somewhere between 200 and 300 hours to move into a genuinely close friendship. But I do wanna say, Don, that there are, there is a need for us to have close friendships, and it’s also okay to have some friendships that are friendly, but not necessarily deep, you know, casual acquaintances. I don’t know that any of us have room for 500 super close friendships. I dunno if anybody could possibly manage more than a couple of them. So that’s the good news. You don’t have to have tons of them, you just need a few.
Don Drew: Casual friendships can be very valuable. As long as they’re not toxic, but to develop a close friend, that’s actually a pretty significant investment of time and it has to be somewhat intentional or it just doesn’t happen. Okay. And so sometimes we have to be pretty intentional. We may go a while between seeing each other physically, and I think we have to be intentional about that happening on a regular basis or people just drift away.
David Lowry: People do drift away if you’re not careful, and you do have to be intentional. But there are some of those friendships, Don, and I think of you and Christy in this category, that even though we may not see each other as much as we’d like to, we pick up where we left off. That might be a clue for some of your friendships.
Don’t be afraid to reach out and rekindle, even if it’s just picking up the phone and just saying, Hey, I was thinking about you. I thought I would give you a call. I remember when a friend did that with me one time, and it was really wonderful and I thought to myself, I need to do that too.
Repeat Context and Follow Up
David Lowry: Here’s something really practical. One of the most powerful things any of us can do is to repeat context. Not just one off gatherings, not just occasional meetups, but find a recurring context where you can meet the same people consistently over time.
I am thinking of my mom at her later years. My mom passed at 91 years of age. At her funeral was two rows of women called the Ya Yas, and they made time for each other every week for years and years and years. This was a group of women that just got together and, that’s a repeating context. All of us could probably find some repeating context. It could be built on faith, or it could be built on playing bridge. It could be built on a lot of things.
Don Drew: I am glad you mentioned Yaya’s David. Christie actually has a group that she meets with once a month. They call themselves the ya yas, and they have been together since elementary school. And it’s really something to watch them together. And then I’ve mentioned on previous podcasts that I am a part of what we call the round the world lunch group. And there’s just three of us. But we represent three different generations and, we just have a wonderful time once a month. Meeting with each other and having lunch, catching up on, on our lives and so forth. It could be anything. It could be a regular walking group or a book club, or a group of people that you play golf with, okay? Anything that you do, with others that you either are close to or want to be close to will build the kind of trust and positive relationships we’ve talked about over time.
David Lowry: I think it’s really clear. Proximity, plus repetition over time, is the engine of your friendship. So you don’t build a deep friendship in one meaningful conversation, but you can build a friendship. And you can build it deeper if you’ll just make the time and the accumulation of time adds up, it accumulates. And next thing you know, you’ve built a really great friendship.
Don Drew: You mentioned proximity plus repetition over time. And I want to add one other thing. Be the person who follows up because most people are waiting for someone else to make the move. If you’ve had a good conversation with someone, if you feel a genuine spark of connection, don’t leave it to chance. You know, Send them a text, make a call, suggest you meet for coffee. That’s something I like to do a lot with my friends to make sure that I meet with them periodically.
Intergenerational Bonds
David Lowry: I wanna introduce one more dimension to this conversation that I don’t think gets nearly enough attention, and that’s the power of intergenerational relationships in healthy aging. I really enjoy a few of those myself and most of us as we move into the second half of life, naturally gravitate towards people in the same stage, people our age, who are going through the similar things that we’re going through, and that’s really valuable because peer relationships matter a lot.
Don Drew: It keeps you engaged with the world as it actually is, not as it was back in the day.
David Lowry: They call it generativity, a sense of meaning and purpose that comes when you contribute to the lives of those who come after us. So Eric Erickson, who was an amazing psychologist and one of the foundational thinkers in developmental psychology said that generativity is one of the central task of being in the midlife and beyond. And we call it the Fifth Season now. The sense of your experience, your wisdom, and your care is being passed forward, and that’s profoundly meaningful.
Don Drew: What about relationships with older people with mentors and elders and people who are even further down the road than they are?
David Lowry: I don’t know about you, Don, but I can remember, all throughout my career really wishing for some people older than me that I could talk and relate with. They provide us with a sense of continuity and perspective. And when you’re close to someone who’s already been through the things you’ve been through and they’ve done it well, done it with grace and integrity, it changes your relationship with your own future. It reduces your anxiety. And we all need a North Star, don’t we? We all need someone who’s a compass for us and says when I get older, I wanna be like that person.
Don Drew: I’m glad you described that ’cause I’ve had numerous relationships. I actually like that in my life with, in particular men who are 15 or 20 years ahead of me and the gift they gave me just by being visible examples of aging well was, is really incalculable to me today.
David Lowry: That’s really important. We can consciously create it ourselves. We can seek out people who model what we want to grow into and we can make ourselves available to be that person for other people. And honestly, Don and I talk about our ages, but there’s still people older than us that we look to and I’m fortunate enough to know some of these people in my church that I admire so greatly, and they’re like real life superheroes to me ’cause I know some of the things that they’ve been through. And, now even though they’re maybe 10 or 15 years older than me, I watch them as they go through this part of their life and I think they’re doing this so well, and I wanna take notes because I know I’m not that far behind.
Relational Audit and Action
Don Drew: David, let’s bring this home. We’ve covered a lot of ground today and I wanna make sure people leave with something they can actually do. What does it look like to take this conversation and turn it into real practice? Let’s talk about the audit first. How does someone take stock of where their relational investments currently stand?
David Lowry: That is a really good question and so let’s put it this way ’cause I want people to think about their relationships the way they might think about a financial portfolio, let’s say. You wanna put all of your energy where it’s going to grow. You want to diversify intelligently. You want to periodically audit what’s in there and make sure it still reflects your values and your goals.
There’s a simple exercise you can do if you have a moment and you’re willing to get a piece of paper. If you’re a journaling type of person, make two lists. On the first list, there’s the people in your life who consistently leave you feeling more of yourself, more energized, more grounded, and more satisfied.
And then there’s a second list, the relationships that consistently seem to cost you something. And maybe a clue for you is, when the phone rings and you see it’s them calling, you maybe say, I’ll get that later, or you feel drained or anxious or worse about yourself.
Don Drew: Yeah, and just seeing this on paper actually can be pretty clarifying. Can it?
David Lowry: It sure can be, and we know it intuitively, but maybe we’ve never really taken the time just to make it explicit. And once we have seen it with our own eyes, the question becomes, Is my actual time and energy allocation matching what I’m seeing on this piece of paper?
Don Drew: And you know, David, that what we’re asking people to do isn’t necessarily to dramatically cut people out of your life, though sometimes that may be the right answer, but to be more deliberate about where you put your best relational energy.
David Lowry: So are you spending most of your relational energy in column one or column two? And that’s the question we ask for all of our listeners. And even if you don’t make that list in your mind when you see somebody go one or two, one is good and two is draining.
Don Drew: That’s a signal that building new connections needs to become a genuine priority in your life. Be the person who chooses wisely. Relationships are ultimately a choice. We don’t have to accept the relational landscape of our lives, as fixed and given. We have more agency than often we feel like we do. And what we’re suggesting is that you should take charge of the relationships in your life and choose the ones that are life giving and, do something about those that are taking away.
David Lowry: Exactly, so! This is your life. This isn’t a dress rehearsal. We want you to deliberately invest wisely. Tend the garden of your connections with real intentionality. It’s the most health giving thing that any of us can do in the second half of life. Remember that Harvard study.
Closing and Invitation
Don Drew: David, I wanna close with something because what we’ve been circling around the whole conversation is something very fundamental, which is that we are not built for isolation. And we are not designed to navigate this season alone. And the wisdom of aging well, when you really look at it, is largely a wisdom about togetherness, about knowing who to walk with, about building bonds that can bear real weight. It really is that simple and that profound.
David Lowry: Thank you all for spending time with us today on the Fifth Season. If this conversation stirred something for you or brought someone to mind or someone you want to reach out to or something you wanna change about how you’re investing your relational energy, Don and I would love to hear about it. You can find us at our website, Fifth Season Podcast.com. And if this episode was meaningful to you in some way, please share it and tell other people about it. Take care everyone.