Despite receiving a press release filled with compelling language, I failed this month to attend what was billed as “The First Annual LifePart2 Festival.” Held in San Diego, this happening was a “combination educational event, spiritual retreat, and vacation for those who are reluctant, skeptical, fearful, and intrigued by their own aging process.”
If you are any of the above, perhaps you, too, missed something you should have been at. For a registration fee of a mere $575 plus a discounted room rate at the Town and Country Resort Hotel and travel costs, you could have enjoyed four days of feeling groovy about your own aging.
You and I should be chastising ourselves for not making the trip to a festival designed as “a spa for one’s Mind, Body and Soul.” Where else are you going to find a spa for your constituent parts? And imagine gaining what the festival promises – “a complete understanding of the interrelationships of the mind, body, soul, and environment!”
Surely we would have come away from the event with our bods soothed and streamlined for LifePart2. Among the exercises offered were: “Aqua Aerobics (low impact jumping with deep water interval training), Watsu Therapy (deep body work therapy done in water), . . . Instinctual Movement (guided movement exercises accompanied by live drumming), Salsa Aerobics (a combination of exercise and dance that connects with the spirit), Qigong (a powerful ancient Chinese healing technique), Meditation, Chanting, Yoga, Belly Dancing, Tai Chi, Running, Power Walking and more.”
How can you have reached whatever age you are without having employed at least several of these therapies, preferably each day? I must, however, confess never having done any belly dancing at all, though I have on occasion watched graceful women with considerably more comely bellies than mine doing it. And salsa, to me, means food rather than music.
In case you think the festival people put too much emphasis on the body, you should understand their philosophy. “Our bodies are literally the framework of the soul,” they announce. Literally? I would have thought the soul, being spiritual, had no literal framework at all. For myself , I tend to find a deeper unity: “I stink, therefore I am.”
Going to the festival might have filled definite lacks in your life, as it would have in mine. Do you, for example, consider yourself successful? Or, like me, do you perhaps give yourself only middling marks in this regard? Festival organizers scheduled a keynote speech that might have done you and me a world of good. It was given by “professional success expert” Cheryl Richardson.
I am so benighted as not to have known there was such a profession as success expert. Instead, I have long believed, perhaps ignorantly, that success cannot be taught. I also hold the outmoded position that success is made up of things other than money, celebrity, and power.
Other speakers gave keynote talks as well. Among them were “some of the most revered thinkers of our time.” When I mention the names of certain among them, you will surely recognize how well they deserve this reputation. Author Marianne Williamson, poet David Whyte, and AARP Executive Director Horace Deets will undoubtedly register in your household among those revered thinkers.
What? You have never heard of them? That’s simply another reason why you should have been in San Diego last week.
For fear you did not recognize the importance of these speakers and others on the schedule, they are also called “some of the most influential, provocative, and innovative thinkers of our era.” Left to myself, I would have thought that these superlatives belong more to the inventors of the artificial heart or the author of the Harry Potter books than to the three people mentioned.
Discussion was to form part of the agenda also. It would “cover the many ways to enjoy a richer, longer, and healthier life.” Presumably that would touch on how those of us who are barely getting by can find more economic support.
Sometimes we can forget that our growing older lends itself to hype and hucksterism, often pitched with the most sophisticated techniques of Hollywood and Madison Avenue. Clever people who know how to make slick presentations can shape aging into an elite enterprise. They can make us feel that aging must be made into a mindful, modish business if we are to get anything out of it.
“Get a Jump on Life,” they urge us in the festival brochure, forgetting that some of us are already on.
When I was a sophomore in college, the university president once came to visit the large house where many of us students lived. I will never forget the message he left with us. “Be skeptical,” he said. At the time, this message scandalized me in part because of my still youthful illusions. Since then, however, I have come to appreciate the wisdom in this advice. It’s not enough to guide all of life but this wisdom covers more than a little.
Richard Griffin