Summary: David Lowry and Don Drew launch The Fifth Season of Life, a new podcast focused on grounded, humanistic wisdom for aging well, inspired by the Chinese medicine idea of a “fifth season” of fullness, stability, and harvest. Reflecting on their earlier Peaceful Life Radio work, they introduce the theme of “kicking against the slats”—fighting the realities of aging—and argue that freedom comes from acceptance without surrender. They discuss physical changes, cultural ageism, and reframing “rage against the dying of the light” as a resistance to resignation and to the belief that older adults no longer matter. Using Sun Tzu’s “know yourself and your enemy,” they describe acceptance as strategic reconnaissance: understanding limits, staying awake and engaged, and finding new creative paths, hobbies, and contributions in later life.
Welcome to The Fifth Season
The fifth season is what happens when life stops asking for our strength and starts asking for a little more honesty. And so it’s not about staying young it’s more about staying awake and living well.
Welcome to the very first episode of The Fifth Season of Life, Conversations On Aging Successfully. I’m David Lowry, and I am with my good buddy today, Don Drew. Don, I think a lot of our listeners are going to remember our program, Peaceful Life Radio, but this show is a little bit. Different from that. It’s a different conversation where we focus on grounded, I’d call it maybe a humanistic type of wisdom on how to live successfully in the wisdom years, our aging years.
We believe that aging is a privilege and we want to have conversations on how we can do it well.
Why a New Podcast
I really appreciate that David. I know that during Peaceful Life Radio we were focused on a number of topics that were of interest to people over 50. But we learned during that time, we recorded something like 73 shows.
We learned that there’s a lot that people are doing that actually is resulting in very successful second half of life.
Meaning of the Fifth Season
And we decided to reload a little bit and chose the name The Fifth Season Podcast because of its roots in Chinese traditional medicine. While we normally think of four Seasons here in the west, in China, they consider a fifth season.
That is a golden time at the end of summer when the harvest is full, but the frost hasn’t yet arrived, and so in their system, this season is associated with the element of. Earth. It isn’t a time of frantic growth like we had when we were younger in spring, nor the deep sleep of winter. It’s a season of grounding, stability, and fullness.
When we learned about this notion of the fifth season, it just captured my imagination, and I think it did Yours too, Don. It did. We were looking and said, yep, that’s it. That’s what we’re talking about. This idea of experience in life where our experience is full of wisdom. It’s deeper than it used to be.
There’s a clarity that comes with aging and it. Becomes more valuable to us than the speed and getting things done, and effectiveness and efficiency. It’s like knowing the value of things more than the worth of things. And so now we’re. We’re going to look at this golden time from a very humane and human perspective, and to talk about all the changes that come with it.
Yeah. David I know that one of the things in our discussion is it just kept coming back time and time again, is we were talking to people who were doing just wonderful things in the latter parts of their life. They were creative. They were starting new non-profit organizations and new hobbies and having all this real success.
And we wanted to tap into that.
Kicking Against the Slats
So today is actually is the perfect time that our fifth season idea is going to address. One of the things that. Is a difficult thing for many of us to do, and that’s what I called anyway, kicking against the slats. That’s an old phrase about when a baby, would be upset and so forth, the kick against the slats of the crib and make a fuss and so forth.
We sometimes tend to go into the second half of our lives or the latter half of our lives kicking against slats. And in part we’re gonna talk about this, we’re gonna see that. That we’re somewhat encouraged to do that, but today we really wanna focus on what happens when we stop fighting the reality of our aging bodies and start discovering the freedom that only acceptance can provide.
When we’re young, our physical health is good and it’s the sort of a deciding factor for us. It sometimes it’s May makes a difference whether you’re chosen to do a particular job or sometimes they don’t even take into consideration our health. It’s so good and we just go do anything we want. I used to, we’ll stay up late till 1, 2, 3 o’clock in the morning, go to work and be there at eight 30 or nine.
Seemingly to, no Ill effect, but I can’t do that thing these days. So the fifth season is what happens when life stops asking for our strength and starts asking for a little more honesty. And so it’s not about staying young it’s more about staying awake and living well.
Aging Bodies Real Talk
Now what is that you’ve found a little bit harder to do physically as you’ve gotten older?
Oh my gosh. It’s not so much David that I’m finding. Yeah I’m 67 almost 68. It’s not so much that I’m finding things that I. Can’t do. There are some things, of course it’s that the price I pay for doing them sometimes is a little higher than I had to when I was younger. I was trying to pull out a root out of the backyard the other day and I was able to work on it for about 20 minutes and I had to give up give up.
I know that I’ll get it done, but I just couldn’t stay at it. Some things like when I get down on the ground, it’s just a little bit more difficult to get up off the ground. But this is just. Part of what’s going on. It’s part of the physical challenge that we have as our body’s age.
I was thinking about the, the cumulative effect on me physically. One of them was, had two cataract surgeries. I’ve had multiple tooth implants. I’ve lost an organ out of my body. I’m slowing down a bit. I’m still exercising, still doing yoga, and still walking every day. But it’s not the same as it used to be.
So the fifth season of life is not so concerned about that though. It’s like we honor our body, but we do it in a realistic way. And we don’t go around comparing ourselves to what we used to be like and see that as a better. Place to be than where we are today. And I think that’s one of the things that the fifth season teaches us is that it’s wonderful to have the body there.
We’re in right here, right now. A lot of the things that we used to be able to do, I, I used to be a runner back when I was in my twenties and thirties, and then I had some knee injuries and so forth and I had to give up running fairly early in my life. And so then I had to learn to do other things instead.
So I picked up more swimming and. And again, I’m talking 30 years ago now, but I started swimming and walking fast walking and doing a lot of other cycling and so on. Today I still ike and I still will get out and cycle, and I’ve talked about this previously in on our old icast Peaceful Life Radio.
And that’s still real important to me today, but now I have to consider modifications to what I’m doing. I still want to be active. I still want to not let the old man into my head, but I do also need to be realistic. If I just looked at my life and I said, okay, my body’s degrading. Anything I do now is just hard and it hurts more and I quit doing it.
I’m in a sense, setting myself up for failure. I also know that we have a cultural expectation where we feel like it’s an insult to us if we have a physical limitation on us and we live in an ageist society that doesn’t respect people who can’t run, jump and climb the stairs and things like that without some sort of assistance.
So we have to change our thinking a bit about the limitations.
Rage Reframed
There’s this poet, Dylan Thomas. Who wrote this idea about dying in the light says Rage. Rage against the dying of the light. And most, in most people will interpret this as, you gotta fight, decline in death directly. But maybe there’s a better reframing of that.
It’s a humanistic reframing. Yeah, you and Thomas was actually, that’s part of a larger poem He wrote his father and in it, yeah, that’s exactly what he is recommending his father do, is fight against his the, his death, prolong his life. And I think it was certainly meant in the end, that’s a fight called going to lose, right?
It’s not that we can deny that death is a reality, but the fact is that we are still alive if we’re here listening to this podcast, or David, you and I talking on the podcast as we are here, we are alive, we are still here, and there are still work to be done, things to be accomplished, things to that we can do that.
Might help others in the future once we’re gone. And so just to rage, upset by the fact that we do have an expiration date on us doesn’t help very much rage without direction. Really it can become bitterness and denial. And instead, maybe we should think about raging against resignation and the belief that we no longer matter.
Yes, maybe that’s really what we need to rage against. That’s the point. I think we should make rage against the idea that we don’t matter or the belief that if we’re not as full and strong and robust as we once were, we somehow are less than. The important thing is to realize. The limitations that we have, and I hope I live a lot longer, Don, to just to be honest, but I’m also facing the fact that’s probably not going to be that much longer.
And the other thing that I’m trying to get in my head is not to be so fearful to rage against the fear. I don’t want my fear to become so big that I lose sight of the importance of living every day fully because I’m so worried about whether or not my blood pressure is higher than it ought to be, or some other thing of my life isn’t exactly the way I’d want it to be.
Honesty Over Strength
Let me ask you a couple of questions here. I’m looking at two quotes that I’m particularly interested in, and I’d like to hear your thoughts on them. The first one is this and I honestly, I don’t know where they come from, but here they are. The fifth season is what happens when life stops asking for our strength and starts asking for our honesty.
What’s your ideas about that? For me it is the. Ability to quite honestly say that I can’t do all the things that I want to do and that I used to. And here’s a point of. Pride and ego for me. I used to be a yoga teacher and I would do yoga four times a week and I could do it, and I had great balance and I had amazing flexibility and I still have some really great.
Yoga moves, but I know that I’m not that person. I used to be, my balance is not what it used to be. And that worries me because they tell you that the balance is an important thing to maintain, but it’s just not. And so to me it’s more about being honest. And the thing of it is when I go to yoga class and I’m the oldest one in the room, sometimes I have to steady myself.
I don’t want to do that because nobody else is studying themselves. They’re all doing it, but I can’t, and I’m going to be honest and not see it as a deficiency, but to see it as that’s me doing yoga at 73 and celebrating the fact that I still can do it and maybe not as well as the 23-year-old person, 50 years younger than me.
God bless ’em, and I’m glad they can do it, but I’m doing what I can. So that’s how I would answer that question. Don, what do you think? Listening to you talk about that made me think that sometimes we are what we think is honest to about ourselves and we tend to write things off in that process if we’re not careful.
I I fully understand what you’re saying. I, about four or five months ago though, I decided to go to some classes in Watercoloring, and a good friend of mine was teaching the class, and I just. Fell in love with it immediately. If I was honest with myself up to that point, I would say I have always, and always thought that I just really didn’t have either the interest nor the talent to be a painter, and so my honest answer would be, I can’t do this.
But the reality was you’re going is because of where I was in life, I wanted to take on some new things and challenge myself in some new ways. And so I challenged my own honesty and I did not have necessarily, I did not perceive that I had the strength to do that before. And so once again, this is a case where if I was honest with myself about my athletic ability, I have to say no.
There’s no way I can perform like I did when I was younger. But there are things that I can do. That maybe are untested or that in the past I thought I could not do. So I appreciate your honesty in the answer that you gave there. And it surprises me that when we think about these things, we, there are definitely things we cannot do, but there may be things now that we have the time or the energy or the ideas or the creativity to do that.
In the past, we just honestly said we can’t.
Staying Awake as We Age
The second question I wanted to ask you, aging, this is another quote, aging Wisely isn’t about staying young, it’s about staying awake. Ooh. And I’m thinking that I’m going to link what I’m gonna say here to, to what we were talking about just a moment ago with you where you have honesty.
And to me, staying awake is, what is it that we can do? And what’s something that maybe we can do now that we couldn’t do when we were younger? And Don, maybe one of the reasons that you’re. Enjoying painting so much and maybe one of the reasons I enjoy writing so much is that. I used to be very impatient, and it’s just sitting down and slowing down and taking the time to puzzle all of that out.
Maybe I think I might’ve been working against myself, my impatience. I wanted to have faster results, but today I find myself not being in such a big hurry. Enjoying taking more time to study and look at something. So to me, staying awake is not going to sleep like some people accuse old, older people of doing, but it’s more about staying awake to what you can do and what are some of the things that you can actually do better?
I can listen better now, Don. I can listen to my grandchildren, to my children, to my wife, to other people sometimes. I was just so judgmental listening to the problems of other people. And today I find myself truly curious. I really wanna hear what they have to say, and I wanna try to understand where people are coming from.
And I sometimes make connections with earlier points in my life. And remember, yeah, I used to be that person too. And it’s a great feeling when you can be awake enough. To do that sort of thing that you couldn’t do many years ago. How does that sound? How’s that resonating with you?
Yeah, I, impatience was my Achilles heel when I was a young man, and I think it has gotten better. I’ve become much more patient. I actually would describe myself as a. Infinitely more patient person these days. That does not mean I’m a patient person. That’s how bad I was. Yeah. But yeah, that, that really created a lot of challenges for me.
Know Yourself Know the Enemy
I’ve had an interest for a long years ago. There’s a Chinese author, I probably don’t pronounce his name correctly, sun, who wrote a book called The Art of War. And if you are around 30 years ago, and in business, it went around as a very popular business book, even though it was really about, yeah, I remember that.
I don’t remember how long ago Sunsuit lived, but it was well before common area common era. But Sun Tzu wrote this book called The Art of War, and in it he describes just a collection, if you will of maxims on how to go about conducting war. And so he in one of these. Chapters or one of these metaphors that he gives, Sun T zu notes that you, it’s best that you know your enemy and yourself, and that you don’t need to fear the result of a hundred battles if you know both yourself and your enemy.
As we age, in part, our enemy is our, is both the failing of our body and perhaps our minds and an eventual death. That’s the enemy that’s out there. And we know that enemy. We know what can happen there, and that helps us prepare because we know ourselves and know how we can respond to that helps us to prepare for that, right?
Yes. If you apply this, if you understand it then knowing yourself means understanding your current capacities and your emotional patterns and so on, and it allows you to position yourself. Successfully in order to, in sense rage strategically against what’s coming rather than just blindly reacting to it.
Your thoughts. I like that a lot. And of course Sun Zu, I’m probably not saying his name right either Don, but perhaps he’ll forgive us. He was actually, besides being a wonderful military mastermind, he was also very smart about. The mind itself and about our consciousness and about what really holds us back.
He’s the one who causes us to think about most of our inability stem from within rather than from without. And the making of a warrior is what the skills of a warrior in his day was only part of. Only part of what made a warrior, it was what was in the warrior that matters. So this idea of getting rid of our illusions, such as what it means about our current capabilities and emotional patterns and things like this, society wants to dictate a lot of that.
Sometimes society talks about slowing down or maybe our memory not being as quick or there’s other things that it’s common in our society that about. Old people but our enemy isn’t really aging, is it Don? In fact, our enemy isn’t even the people who sometimes are ageist towards us. It’s our reactions to those people.
It’s our internal states about that. In fact, if it didn’t bother us. They could say whatever they wanna do, it’d be just fine. But once we have it clear in our head who we are and what we are, and can accept that, I think it’s good. But here’s a question. Yeah.
Acceptance Is Reconnaissance
If aging isn’t the enemy, then what is it? We’re actually fighting.
We’re fighting a lot of messages. For one thing we have heard from a number of prior guests how these negative messages that we get sometimes put us put us down or try to put us in a place. But the truth is we keep getting these messages. We tend to integrate them and so on.
But today is an introduction to a new podcast approach we’re taking with a new name and a new look. But in the future, what we’re gonna largely be looking at is how to live successfully how to age successfully. And part of that aging successfully does include, you’re gonna hear these messages, but part of it is to accept the fact that yes, you are aging, but acceptance is not surrender.
It’s not, if you look at the Sun Tzu’s message, acceptance is not surrender. It’s recon reconnaissance. It is helping us to understand what we’re up against and responding positively so that we don’t get overwhelmed. So even we’re gonna have these messages, we’re gonna have our own health reports.
I just got. I just had some blood work done and so forth, and that information comes back to me. Now I have to process that information. What does that mean? What do I do? That sort of thing. When I’m could look at a report like that and I could say, oh wow, this is really bad, or This is up, or that’s down and it’s not supposed to be.
But the truth is it’s given me reconnaissance. It’s given me information now that I can do something with and I can respond positively as opposed to just reacting and taking it in and feeling like I’m constantly losing. Exactly. And that brings us to this notion of what we named our program kicking against the slats.
Yeah. This kicking against what’s happening to us and fighting it. Don’t go. Quick into that dark night, to fight with all you got. It’s an emotional drain, Dawn. It’s a resentment that I shouldn’t have to deal with this, or this is abnormal, or this isn’t right. What’s happening to me, or I remember.
Being better and all of this, my, my point of view in this program is that yes, we could, we can have that, and we definitely want to stay active and we wanna do all the things that keep ourselves healthy. We don’t wanna miss our doctor’s appointments. We don’t want to, we’ll stop our exercising. We wanna keep going and we wanna keep saying yes until we have to say no.
But at the same time, we wanna stop the resentment. That so many people, the difference between a person who’s aging successfully and well is this resentment ideas that I don’t like what’s happening to me. I’m unhappy with what’s happening. I’m not happy being myself in the condition that I’m in. Oh, Ohio, I wish I was different.
Instead of finding a way to move forward and seeing all of the good things that we have that we didn’t have before. Yeah. And that’s so true. And one of the things we’re gonna be doing is from time to time we’ll have a guest on, or we’ll be talking about specific individuals who are doing really creative, new, innovative, fun, interesting things.
We’ve had guests in the past on Peaceful Life Radio that. Demonstrated this in their own lives we’re gonna be talking about. Yes, they did these kind of positive things and we’re encouraging, in today’s podcast is the resentment tends to narrow our thinking and narrow our mind. What we want to do is move to a stage of acceptance, which rarely when we accept the reality of where we’re at and we’re open to new ideas or ways of responding, then we have new open doors.
Things that we can do in our lives that are gonna. Continue to make them rich and valuable to ourselves and to others. I’m reminded of a person that was very meaningful in my life who talked about her life as a rehabilitation psychologist, and she would get patients who had lost a hand or something like this, and some of them just lived in constant victimhood of what had happened to them and feeling like I just will never be able to enjoy life the way I once did.
And there were others who said This happened, but I’m going forward. What else can I do? I think this idea that the core insight that you’re giving us here is move forward and don’t allow yourself to narrow the focus of what you can do. There’s a whole bigger universe ahead for you than there is a smaller universe ahead for you.
Middle Path and Discernment
I really believe that Don, the acceptance part of it. Is the key, don’t you think? Yes, I do actually. And this idea that the practical wisdom for choosing a middle path a way that lies between defiance, the actual throwing a fit because you’re getting older. Giving into that. There’s a middle path there, right?
Right. Exactly. When we try to defy something, it often, it can lead pretty bad outcomes and feeling defeated, giving up that leads withdrawal from life. And when you do that, you basically you’re giving. So much, and that’s part of our message is that you don’t have to do that. We’re arguing for more discernment in our lives, responding to changes with clarity and making positive decisions about our lives and the things we want to do, the things we wanna accomplish, and recognizing that once again, as long as we’re upright and breathing, we are viable human beings and we can contribute or develop or our develop ourselves.
Make lives of others better. There’s just a thousand different ways. And that’s really what we want to do, is we wanna highlight many of these ways in which people can grow, continue to grow in, into old age and and accomplish, or maybe accomplish the wrong word. Just experience well, opportunities.
Acceptance isn’t defeat. No. When we say we are accepting what’s who we are and what we can do it, what it is we’re responding to the change in us with a clarity that says, okay, that may not be in I, honestly, Don, I’m very careful about getting on any kinda ladder. I’m just not. I can tell the difference.
I don’t know how to explain it. And some people say I’m going to get up that ladder no matter what. I’ve known several people who’ve broken their arms and other things. It’s just better to say that’s probably not a great idea for me at this age, but defeat is not an answer either. Just before Christmas, I was out on a ladder, out doing some work above my garage door, and a neighbor came by to check on me to make sure I was okay.
So maybe I didn’t, wasn’t worried about it, but apparently it was scary enough looking that when my neighbors and actually I think that you’re age, you probably still can, but I’m just beginning to notice in my seventies that I don’t feel as safe and comfortable as I used to. And so maybe discernment is the idea if you’re noticing.
Closing Reflections and Next Time
You ought to notice what you notice and not let’s talk a few closing reflections before we go today. Sure. This has really been a great show with you, Don, and I think true freedom and later life comes from learning when to fight and when to adapt. What do you think? Yeah. Yeah. Fighting is, people talk about, fighting cancer or fighting this or fighting that.
Yeah. I think fighting is actually a pretty poor metaphor going back. Yeah, that’s probably right. Son, Sue. Most of the time what he, his biggest message is if you understand your enemy and you know you can’t win a battle, then you try something else. Yeah. Don’t, yeah. He says it in many different ways.
Okay. If your enemy outnumbers you and they’re stronger than you and you don’t meet ’em head on, instead you go around, you do something else you figure out another way because the way the fighting part isn’t gonna come out good for you. And so fighting is really, I think, a really. Poor metaphor.
That’s why I think kicking me against the slats, these kind of concepts that we have, that you’ve got to fight aging is not necessarily helpful. What you need to do is you need to realize what’s happening, why it’s happening as much as you can. Yes. And then decide for yourself how you’re going to respond to that.
And the way that you do that. And this is just my personal observation about many of the people we’ve talked to. When we look at how people respond, they find just a huge number of creative ways they do that. Were not even open to them when they were younger. And sometimes this results in artistic endeavors.
My wife Christie was tied down with the boys when she was younger and they took a lot of her time and so forth. And so she delayed her career. A long time. So now, she’s a couple years younger than I am but she is still really coming into her own in that area and she’s enjoying it so much.
Yeah. And she’s enjoying it so much. So that’s, yeah. And she’s good at it. Yeah. And that’s work. Okay. Other people I know your wife, Cary, has found many things that she’s interested in and does that she did not take time. And in fact, one, and we may talk about this some other time, but I know in Carrie’s case, that’s David’s wife.
In some cases Cary has tried something that she thought she really wanted and then discovered that in fact, that’s not really working for her. But you can do that. When we were younger, everything had a, seemed like it had such a high stake to it. Yeah. And now, we go in, I go into pain.
I have no delusion about becoming a great painter. That’s not why I do it. And there’s other examples. We’ll talk about those things in this podcast and not just you and I we’ll be talking with and about other people and some of the really great things they’re doing. Don, as we close, we just wanna remind our listeners that acceptance isn’t about giving up or becoming passive.
It’s about strategic reconnaissance. It’s the moment you stop fighting the wrong battle and start fighting the right one. The battle to stay awake, to stay engaged, and to stay whole. The fifth season begins the moment we stop wishing for a different reality and start shaping a life that fits the person we are right now.
So listeners, as you go through your week, look at your life. Are you still kicking against the slats in some part of your life? What resistant, what resentment is costing you energy that you could be using for something different and beautiful? Maybe even a little more fun and what might you change if you shifted just a little bit towards acceptance.
Thanks for joining us for the beginning of this journey. We’ll see you next time on the fifth season.