What do you live for?
That’s a question posed by Dr. Gladys McGarey in her book The Well-Lived Life: A 102-Year-Old Doctor’s Six Secrets to Health and Happiness at Every Age. Now 103, Dr. McGarey, a board-certified physician of holistic and integrated medicine, is still seeing patients. I listened to the book on my morning walks last month.
First a word about the book: Dr. McGarey is a persistent optimist, but she’s not a starry-eyed romantic in her approach to life, living, and aging. She admits that her body has declined and that many of us will face illness, heartbreak and hardship at any age, but particularly as we age. (She has twice survived cancer, and her husband of 46 years left her just before she turned 70, so she knows a thing or two about life’s losses. She maintains that “It’s not a matter of getting over stuff, it’s a matter of living through it.”)
McGarey maintains that one secret to a long life is knowing that each of us is here for a reason. She doesn’t mean that every one of us is here to pursue a vocation, like her own practice of holistic medicine, though that may indeed be the case. But she says that each of us are here to fulfill purposes small and grand: raising a family, being a good friend, pursuing a passion. We each have gifts to offer the world, and when we are pursuing those gifts, she says, it generates an energy and zest for living. She calls this energy “juice.”
McGarey uses stories from her own life and the lives of friends and patients to explain her secrets for greater health and happiness. She often poses that question to patients: what do you live for? McGarey says her conversations with patients often reveals that they have lost the sense of what they live for, and part of her work of healing is in helping them answer that question again. Her insights echo those of writer and teacher Parker J. Palmer’s observation that what we live for “comes from a voice ‘in here’ calling me to be the person I was born to be.”
I’ve been thinking a lot about Dr. McGarey’s question. When I begin my work a new coaching client, I ask the client to reflect on a series of questions about how they have lived and how they want to live in the future. I think I may add this question to the list: what do you live for? I live for several things, and you probably do, too. All my life, reading, writing, and teaching have been at the core of all the things that give me “juice.” The ways I practice those things has shifted over time, but they remain at the heart of what gets me out of bed in the morning.
What about you? What do you live for?
P.S. In case you’re wondering, Dr. McGarey’s other five secrets include:
Spend your energy wildly.
All life needs to move—spiritually, mentally, and physically—to help let go of trauma and other roadblocks.
You are never alone and can build a meaningful community.
Everything is your teacher.
Love is the most powerful medicine.
If you like audiobooks, Dr. McGarey herself reads short sections throughout the book. She also tells fascinating stories about growing up the child of medical missionaries in 1930s India.