Transcript
Speaker: So generosity, gratitude, we can call them partners.
Speaker: Hopefully as we get older, we have perspective.
Speaker: We get to places in our lives where we're able to more easily access the sense and the spirit of generosity and gratitude.
Speaker: Retirement.
Speaker: That's what we're all aiming at, right?
Speaker: But exactly what does that mean?
Speaker: It conjures up visions of endless days of golf, drinks with little umbrellas in them on a tropical beach, feet up reading a book.
Speaker: Is that what it's all about?
Speaker: I don't think so.
Speaker: Life would get pretty dull after a while without anything meaningful to do, don't you think?
Speaker: I'm Jackie Doucette, and I'm on a mission to discover exactly what life is like beyond retirement.
Speaker: Join me while I chat with people who've already done it, who've retired to something rather than from something.
Speaker: Let's find out together exactly what's waiting for us when we say goodbye to that nine to five.
Speaker: Hi, everyone.
Speaker: Welcome to another episode of Beyond Retirement.
Speaker: Today marks my final guest episode for 2023, and I'm thrilled to be joined by fellow podcaster Hugh Willard.
Speaker: Hugh's a psychotherapist and is the author of a new book called Finding Beauty in the Gray, Stories and Verse from the Third Age.
Speaker: Hugh's facilitated numerous workshops, and he's taught courses on several topics related to or relevant to folks in the second half of their life.
Speaker: Thanks for joining me today, Hugh Willard.
Speaker: I really appreciate you having me on, Jackie.
Speaker: Looking forward to it.
Speaker: As am I. I might as well finish up the season the same time.
Speaker: And that's it for this episode of Beyond Retirement.
Speaker: Thank you so much for hanging out with me.
Speaker: I hope you enjoyed it.
Speaker: To check out the video interviews, please go to my YouTube channel at bit.ly forward slash beyond retirement.
Speaker: That's B-I-T dot L-Y forward slash beyond retirement.
Speaker: Be sure to subscribe so you won't miss any new episodes.
Speaker: with the same pattern that I usually use.
Speaker: Can you give us a little bit more about who you are and how you ended up doing what you're doing now?
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: So I've been a psychotherapist for pushing up on 35 years now.
Speaker: And over the course of that time, I've, of course, worked with many, many folks.
Speaker: I've
Speaker: of all sorts of ilk and background and presentation, including a number of folks who were in or approaching retirement years and really coming into experiences, surprises, concerns, joys, all of that mixed in there together of this time in their life.
Speaker: And I certainly was drawn to
Speaker: connecting and supporting them in these experiences, particularly as I'm aging as well, as we all are.
Speaker: And out of that, I hooked up with the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute folks, there are Osher Lifelong Learning Institutes in the United States all over the place.
Speaker: And I connected with one at North Carolina State University nearby and started teaching courses for them
Speaker: really honing in on salient issues for folks in the second half of life.
Speaker: So issues of identity and meaning and relationships and also creativity, which is a big, big interest of mine.
Speaker: So I started teaching courses and out of that came the book.
Speaker: So that's, that's really a lot of, that's a lot of the background for me on the professional side of things.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And the,
Speaker: During your teaching, you probably found a few people that you could talk to on your show, I imagine.
Speaker: I have.
Speaker: Yes, I certainly have.
Speaker: And this, you know, I'm on my show, on my podcast.
Speaker: It's it's a mix.
Speaker: I think certainly is your experience as well.
Speaker: It's a mix of having experts that come on and share their time in whatever angle, you know, with respect to the folks in the in the latter years, you know, that just important information and resources for folks to have.
Speaker: So have those folks on.
Speaker: But also I have folks who are just telling their stories, just telling their experiences.
Speaker: And those are as long as the day is.
Speaker: And people can relate.
Speaker: And I love having those folks on as well.
Speaker: And I've come across both of these types of profiles, if I put it in those sort of objectifying terms.
Speaker: with respect to the courses that I've taught and also the clients that I've had.
Speaker: And so, yeah, some of those folks have made it onto the show.
Speaker: I think it's really fascinating listening to the stories of people who have lived long and creative kind of lives, the things that people that have tried new things and, you know, gone on different paths that we don't always think to follow.
Speaker: And they make for fascinating stories, I think.
Speaker: They do.
Speaker: They do.
Speaker: And I'm very interested in advocating for folks to know that each individual has innate creative capacity.
Speaker: It is not reserved for the select few.
Speaker: It's easy for us.
Speaker: I think there's a lot of conditioning that goes in the direction of, you know, when we see someone who is an accomplished person,
Speaker: visual artist and what they come up with is just stunning and we are just so moved by it or a beautiful singer.
Speaker: Um, you know, we can go down the list of some of these traditional art forms.
Speaker: Um, and we feel that separation, you know, we don't have that skillset.
Speaker: So we think, you know, I am not a part of that.
Speaker: And I want folks to understand at really at any age, but particularly for folks in the second half of life that, um,
Speaker: You know, creativity is, it's just core, it's innate, it's a part of who we are.
Speaker: How we understand that, how we express that, how we cultivate that, that's the process.
Speaker: And I think if we tune into that, it's going to make us healthier, happier.
Speaker: There's a lot of research that supports that.
Speaker: We're just, it's going to ripple out across our environments and our relationships.
Speaker: So everybody has their gifts in different ways.
Speaker: It's how do we understand that and how do we use those for this time of life and the experiences we have and the things that we look forward to.
Speaker: I think that's so true.
Speaker: I've had a couple of other guests who have said similar things that we all have a skill.
Speaker: We might not know what it is until we try a few things and just let loose with the idea that, hey, maybe I can do this.
Speaker: And I think one of your recent interviews was, maybe I can.
Speaker: It was someone who was saying, maybe I can, and trying new stuff.
Speaker: And that kind of got to me because we go through our life saying, oh, I can't do that.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: She actually wrote a memoir that was sort of detailing her experience of coming into her own after many years of caretaking for family members and then just coming into that opening up of, say, looking in the mirror and saying, who am I?
Speaker: And geez, you know, learning about that and going forward.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So when you filled out the application to become a guest, I was looking for people to talk about a couple of different themes that I was aiming at in how they
Speaker: interact, not interact, how they relate to our life in future years.
Speaker: And they were freedom, confidence, generosity, and planning.
Speaker: And you indicated that you'd like to talk a little bit about generosity.
Speaker: And I really liked the comment that you made that generosity is an intentional act that requires examining ourselves, our values, our purpose.
Speaker: And I was hoping that you could talk a little bit more about that.
Speaker: I would love to.
Speaker: And I think I'll start with marrying generosity with gratitude.
Speaker: And, you know, we can have some different conversation and consideration about chicken and egg kind of quality to these things.
Speaker: So, yes, generosity is an intentional act.
Speaker: It is an act of giving.
Speaker: And yet it is
Speaker: As more research is coming online with respect to generosity, we're learning more about the benefits that we as individuals, when we are generous, when we give of ourselves, without that expectation of return,
Speaker: that we get just the abundance of return from it.
Speaker: There's research that's looking at improved mental health, improved physical health, longer lifespan, better connections, a lot of these different markers that are directly tied to acts of generosity.
Speaker: I love seeing that.
Speaker: And I think it certainly passes the
Speaker: for lack of a better way to say this, it passes the smell test.
Speaker: On face of it, you know, the face value of it is that, yeah, that makes sense.
Speaker: You know, I'm going to feel better when I am giving of myself to others.
Speaker: Because, you know, for most, most, most of us, we have had experiences when we were generous.
Speaker: And so we can have that sort of kind of organic sense of what that feeling was for us.
Speaker: Now the research is backing that up.
Speaker: I'm tying this to gratitude.
Speaker: There is a, there's a great Ted talk.
Speaker: And I actually referenced this in the book, in my book by a monk.
Speaker: His name is David Stendhal Rost.
Speaker: And he, his talk is on gratitude.
Speaker: And he is also citing research that looks at
Speaker: gratitude as, of course, an intentional act.
Speaker: And when we engage that intentional act, we are happier.
Speaker: And now we can have some different ideas and conversation about happiness as a goal.
Speaker: But I think in general, most of us would agree that we want to be happy.
Speaker: We want to be happier.
Speaker: And so, you know, to have
Speaker: some in some respects to say, we can use the word intentional again, but deliberate intentional materials, another word, acts where whatever my mental state is and my emotional state, I can make a choice within reason.
Speaker: Certainly I respect when folks are in a very difficult and challenging state, it can be hard to move around with this.
Speaker: But that noted, I can choose to be generous.
Speaker: I can choose to be, I can work towards gratitude.
Speaker: I can work.
Speaker: I mean, I can, all right, I'm not happy in this moment.
Speaker: I'm not feeling thankful for some experience that I'm having.
Speaker: But what am I thankful for?
Speaker: And how can I light on that?
Speaker: How can I touch on that?
Speaker: And when I do those things, that has a return.
Speaker: It has a way of helping us
Speaker: just feel more fulfilled, more connected, more engaged, happier.
Speaker: So generosity, gratitude, they're sort of, we can call them partners, we can call them fraternal, or they're not identical twins, but we can call them fraternal twins, however we want to phrase that.
Speaker: But yeah, and it's hopefully as we get older, we have perspective.
Speaker: And we get at, you know, we get to places in our lives where we're able to more easily access the sense and the spirit of generosity and gratitude.
Speaker: There's a lot of loss.
Speaker: The older we get, you know, that's a part of the equation.
Speaker: There's a lot of loss.
Speaker: And so, you know, we have those things to have to grapple with or to integrate.
Speaker: But yet, hopefully we can sort of survey, you know, the span of our experiences and histories and look for those things.
Speaker: And out of that, draw on that spirit of gratitude to be generous and generous.
Speaker: You know, I can ramble all day on this, you know, Jackie, but, you know, I didn't even mention things like legacy.
Speaker: And we have.
Speaker: you know, formal understandings and, and sort of conditionings around a word like legacy.
Speaker: Um, but legacy really is, it has to have, you know, in its core, um, uh, uh, a character of generosity.
Speaker: Um, now again, we just can live our lives organically and, um, out of that other people will witness it and will receive from it.
Speaker: And we may model in some ways, but, um,
Speaker: Yeah, so it's, you know, when we act generous, we could call it the paying forward, paying it forward kind of thing.
Speaker: You know, when we engage in acts of generosity, there is a contagion quality to it.
Speaker: Again, I could keep rolling on this.
Speaker: It's an important topic for sure.
Speaker: I think one of the things that you said in the idea of, you know, I'm not grateful for this situation right now, a lot of people really have trouble with the idea that,
Speaker: I can find something to be grateful for and that's going to make the situation better.
Speaker: It's hard to explain to people who haven't felt that, that, you know, it really is true.
Speaker: It's like when you're in a bad mood, smile anyway, because things will get better.
Speaker: If, if you try to, you know, look on the bright side, it's not like be a Pollyanna, but think of something that good that can come.
Speaker: Think of something good that you've done before, you know, just move past the situation and it,
Speaker: it gets a little bit easier it's hard to remind people of that when i was a much younger therapist um i i was given at times to talk about how we cannot hold um opposing emotions simultaneously um
Speaker: And, you know, I would just chalk it up to being young and not really, you know, that far along in the quality of experience and learning and integration for myself.
Speaker: In fact, we absolutely can hold opposing emotional experiences simultaneously.
Speaker: And so we can be certainly swept away with the distressing experiences.
Speaker: My goodness, in this day and age, there's so much that we could just be sort of shackled by.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And yet there is, you know, and again, research so solidly backs this up.
Speaker: We can really work in a, in that sort of opposing direction, in that counter direction and say, no, I don't like this situation.
Speaker: I, I, I have a lot of problem with this situation.
Speaker: I'm very, very distressed by this situation.
Speaker: But while that is true, what is it that I have in my experience, in my present context that, you
Speaker: you know, is generative, that reminds me that there are good things in my experience.
Speaker: And I won't put an or to it, but I'll say and, you know, specific to generosity, I'm not feeling well, I'm feeling depressed, I'm challenged in this circumstance.
Speaker: What can I do that moves outside of me?
Speaker: And, you know, that's another way to speak to the manifestation of generosity.
Speaker: What can I do that is going to be of help and lift and support to someone else or something else in my life?
Speaker: And then that creates a whole, you know, that shifts the quality of that experience.
Speaker: And that's the whole idea of taking control of what you can control instead of letting your life just kind of spiral out of control.
Speaker: You can stop and take a look because there are almost always things that you can control.
Speaker: True.
Speaker: Yes, we won't make absolutes out of it.
Speaker: But no, in more cases than we might consider, there is something there that we can light on that we can orient to.
Speaker: And that can create a positive effect outside of us, of course, and also the positive return for ourselves.
Speaker: So you mentioned the the TED talk on gratitude and that you've referenced it in your book.
Speaker: Can you tell us a little bit more about your book?
Speaker: I would love to.
Speaker: So yes, the book is Finding Beauty in the Gray and the subtitle is Stories and Verse from the Third Age.
Speaker: You mentioned that on the top.
Speaker: So and so.
Speaker: Right away, I take pains to say in the author's note at the beginning of the book that I'm not doing a self-help book.
Speaker: That's a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but it certainly does not follow the more standard form of self-help books.
Speaker: I'm very interested in story.
Speaker: I'm very interested in narrative.
Speaker: I know that to be such a powerful medium, such a powerful connector for us.
Speaker: We relate to stories.
Speaker: I mean, that's one of the things that primarily defines us as a species.
Speaker: We are storytellers.
Speaker: We do that in many traditional and non-traditional forms.
Speaker: But
Speaker: It's how we make sense of our experience.
Speaker: It's how we understand it.
Speaker: So with respect to the folks who are writing the more traditional self-help books out there, I took a different tact.
Speaker: And so I just chose to highlight many stories of individuals that I have had the great pleasure and fortune with respect to sometimes challenging situations, but just the opportunity to connect with and interact with.
Speaker: And so I tell some part of their story specific with a link to the dynamics, again, that I mentioned a little earlier, that the first section of the book is looking at identity and meaning.
Speaker: Essentials.
Speaker: pillars, essential constructs for any of us at any time in our life.
Speaker: But absolutely, as we come into the second half of life, you know, those questions still are there.
Speaker: Who am I and what matters to me?
Speaker: And so it's an exploration of that in the first section with through people's stories.
Speaker: The second section is on relationships.
Speaker: And of course, there are many facets of people's lives and the relationships they have.
Speaker: There's changes, there's maturations, there's losses.
Speaker: how do we approach these and how do we look to make sense out of these experiences?
Speaker: So that's the second part, again, all in the form of stories and poems.
Speaker: So the poems are my poems that light right into these dynamics.
Speaker: And the third section takes us into creativity and all different sorts of angles.
Speaker: And again, to that idea I'd said a few minutes back,
Speaker: that we all are, you know, we all are creative.
Speaker: So we all have this innate creative capacity.
Speaker: How do we understand it broadly and its place and it's important for us?
Speaker: And then how do we find what that looks like within ourselves and then do more in the direction of making that tangible and manifesting it in our experiences once again for the benefit of others and ourselves, bring us right back around to generosity within that.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: And you wrote your own poems to go along with it.
Speaker: That's wonderful.
Speaker: I did.
Speaker: Yeah, thank you.
Speaker: Yeah, that's a love of mine as well.
Speaker: So I'm currently in an MFA program in creative nonfiction through Bay Path University.
Speaker: And while I'm not in a poetry track with that, it's...
Speaker: You know, it has, there are ways that that does have a
Speaker: a familiar slant.
Speaker: Now, there's poets of all ilk and all manner and do all sorts of things, but it's another way for us to share story and to make meaning out of our experiences.
Speaker: So, yeah, so there's a mix of the stories and the poems.
Speaker: And there's a couple of spots in there that are a little bit more memoir, sort of autobiography.
Speaker: Occasionally, I tell snippets of my story.
Speaker: uh that again are aligning with these these um these particular dynamics that we're highlighting that i'm highlighting in the book wow so how long has it taken you to uh create this book well that's a great question and actually i'll share a little tiny spoiler alert it's not i'm exaggerating that but um
Speaker: In the epilogue of the book, I speak to that.
Speaker: And I say that it has taken me the length of my life to write this book.
Speaker: And that may sound a little gimmicky to say that, but I want to emphasize that really what I'm bringing to bear in the writing of this book was...
Speaker: all of my experience, all of the integration and learnings and whatnot.
Speaker: Now, to be reasonable about it, I did start writing the book.
Speaker: I've been teaching classes at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute.
Speaker: So the pandemic is a time-distorting thing for many of us, so the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaker: It was a couple of years before those.
Speaker: Let's go back to maybe 16 or 2016, 2017 that I started teaching the courses.
Speaker: And then I started in earnest with writing the book in 2019.
Speaker: And of course, we were all waylaid in different ways, which would suggest that maybe I would have more time to write.
Speaker: But I don't know.
Speaker: Life is life.
Speaker: So.
Speaker: um so yeah it took me it took me a couple of years and and then you go through the process of uh shopping it and talking to agents and publishers and and then you get into the publishing process and that has its whole sort of length and and uh process to it so yeah wow so it's been a while and that's nice to see it come to an end
Speaker: It is nice.
Speaker: It's very gratifying.
Speaker: Again, I'm grateful for it.
Speaker: I hope that it will, for the early feedback I've gotten, certainly folks feel that they're getting a lot of insights and they're able to connect to their own stories and experiences.
Speaker: And so I certainly wish that going forward for other folks who will pick it up.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I will make sure that there's a link to it in the show notes so people can find it easily.
Speaker: One of the things I mentioned at the start, you're a fellow podcaster and in your opening credits and closing credits, I guess, on your show, you talk about writing and performing the music that you use.
Speaker: So you've got all sorts of talents.
Speaker: Well, thank you.
Speaker: That is also a joy.
Speaker: And we could call that an avocation.
Speaker: It's one that I've been doing for many years.
Speaker: It's a passion.
Speaker: It's a joy.
Speaker: It's a gift.
Speaker: I consider that I got that from my mother.
Speaker: She and I were the singers in the family, and so we were singing along to everything.
Speaker: Some of her music's from the 40s and the 50s and then coming into the 60s and the 70s.
Speaker: Yeah, so I started playing guitar.
Speaker: this is relative, but we could say late, I suppose, but I was in my late 20s and I picked up a guitar and just started teaching myself to play.
Speaker: And it's been a fast and steady friend for many years.
Speaker: It meaning music, playing the guitar, singing.
Speaker: I've been with a band for a number of years.
Speaker: I do solo stuff and, and yeah, I did, did write the music for the, for my podcast.
Speaker: So yeah.
Speaker: That's really nice.
Speaker: I really like the music.
Speaker: And I was surprised on the first episode that I listened to where it said at the end that you had written it and performed it.
Speaker: Wow, I'm not that talented.
Speaker: But yours, again, you know, you as all of us, you know, it's our talents are different and varied.
Speaker: So how do we how do we touch and tap into those?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, I'd like to stay and chat some more, but we're coming to the end of our time.
Speaker: Is there anything that you'd like to share with the audience about things that you're doing or things that are coming up in your life before we sign off?
Speaker: Well, that's a great question.
Speaker: What's in my mind as you asked that right off the top of my head.
Speaker: So we all experienced the challenges through the time of the pandemic.
Speaker: And in some respect, it continues forward to today.
Speaker: I mean, new variants and whatnot.
Speaker: So I think we find our way to go forward and integrate in these experiences.
Speaker: But the time of pandemic, certainly in my field, within the field of counseling and psychotherapy,
Speaker: It's very discernible the impact that it has had and I'm sure that the researchers, the social scientists will be studying this for years to come in terms of the impact.
Speaker: But out of that, there certainly was a lot of isolation, a lot of disconnection for many folks.
Speaker: We see the effects of that.
Speaker: I see it in my practice.
Speaker: My colleagues see it in their practice, you know, as these years move out and go forward, that it's still there.
Speaker: There still is a shelf life and, you know, an impact.
Speaker: And I think it's just we need to remember that it's really incumbent upon us to do things like try to make choice in the direction of gratitude, of generosity, of, you know,
Speaker: of being vulnerable in ways that are, it's not about just being exposed and not taking care of ourselves, but going back in the direction of connection, of reconnection.
Speaker: We need that at any time in our lives.
Speaker: We certainly need that, you know, as we get on in our years and we do experience more losses as, you know, as we get older.
Speaker: So we, you know, we are social beings, you know, we need community and many of us know that and tap into it.
Speaker: And so it's, it may just be a,
Speaker: sort of a confirmation of that, but the extent to which others may have some feelings of disconnection, anything you can do to reach out to make those connections and touchstones, that's so important.
Speaker: We just need that, more of that.
Speaker: That's beautiful.
Speaker: I agree completely.
Speaker: Reach out to someone, say hello, just a smile on the street sometimes is enough to change somebody's day.
Speaker: That's an act of generosity.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: Thanks very much for joining me today, Hugh.
Speaker: I've really enjoyed it.
Speaker: And I think that probably you've given a lot of things to think about to the audience today.
Speaker: Jackie, I really enjoyed it and appreciate you having me on the show.
Speaker: And that's it for this episode of Beyond Retirement.
Speaker: Thank you so much for hanging out with me.
Speaker: I hope you enjoyed it.
Speaker: To check out the video interviews, please go to my YouTube channel at bit.ly forward slash beyond retirement.
Speaker: That's B-I-T dot L-Y forward slash beyond retirement.
Speaker: Be sure to subscribe so you won't miss any new episodes.
