Author: Ken Besser

In January of 2018, I enjoyed the funeral of Louis R. “Lewie” Donelson, the hundred-year-old name partner of the huge law firm, Baker Donelson. In 1990, I started practicing as a new lawyer in a large Memphis firm, Burch, Porter & Johnson, watching Lewie, then 73, still going strong in the Shelby County Courthouse. I continued to be impressed by him as he hit his 100th year of life, still practicing law, merely because he loved it.

I continue to be impressed by Lewie’s partner, my dear friend Leo Bearman, Jr., who is now 82. I was pleased to have Leo teach me third-party beneficiaries in my first year contracts class in the fall of 1987 and I was honored to sit in his private office, thirty years later, a few weeks after Lewie’s death, for 15 minutes to reminisce about how Leo and his father, whom he still calls “Daddy” joined Lewie’s firm. At age 82, Leo was still, literally, up to his armpits in the Mississippi v. Memphis Light, Gas & Water lawsuit heading to the United States Supreme Court. It is a huge case, with financial implications ranging into billions of dollars. And, Leo appeared to be relishing every day he gets to spend on it and I have been following the parties’ filings in the Special Master’s Court in the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals as the case moves steadily along toward an evidentiary hearing sometime in 2018.

In February of 2018, I shared the joyous funeral of Leo’s and my mutual friend, Mary Shainberg, along with hundreds of others who were her friends and family in Memphis’s Temple Israel, where Leo, Mary, and I have often prayed and socialized together. Besting Lewie Donelson, Mary was 101, when she passed from this world to her place in the Garden of Eden, and like almost everything else in her life, she immaculately planned and executed her dying, her death, her private funeral with her family, and her public memorial service for her friends. Mary lived a lively and purpose-driven life through her last day. She did it happily despite bits and pieces of adversity that interspersed the majority of her wellness in body, mind, and spirit.

Almost everyone wants to live as long as they can, but they still want to have as much fun as they can while they do it. As we all grow older, we begin to break down, become less lively, and enjoy life much less in our 70s that we did in our 40s. Others, however, blow and go from 70 to 100 having the time of their lives.

Seeing happy and healthy centenarians like Lewie and Mary naturally leads most people to have the question, “How can I do that?” A recent TIME magazine article (February 26,2018 edition) explains a lot about how we all can do it, most of which I saw in action through Lewie and Mary.

1. How a positive attitude about aging. People who carried a gene variant linked to dementia, but also had a positive attitude about aging, were 50% less likely to develop the disease.
2. Work hard and play hard.
3. Move to the big city. Big cities have strong health systems, opportunities for continued learning, widespread public transportation, and abundant arts and cultural events. Nothing like all this stuff to fight loneliness, boredom, and a sedentary life; all of which leads to a bad case of the “dwindles,” a condition in which one’s body, mind, and spirit just fritters away.
4. Create, build, and maintain as many strong friendships as you can.
5. Develop a passion for things rather than anger about other things; be engaged rather than indifferent.
6. Shake your body, shake your body for you! Increasing physical activity improves endurance, muscle strength, and balance; reduces falls; and lifts your spirits. You don’t have to be an octogenarian marathoner. I just walked a 91-year-old woman from the hospital (where I had recently admitted my 79-year-old mother for a week for blood clots in her legs) to her car while she explained to be still walked a mile per day. When she was 87, she walked four miles in an hour; now, as her rheumatoid arthritis is ravaging her bones, she is determined to never drop below a mile and never drop before an hour a day. And she looked great to me; not a day over the average 80-year-old great-grandmother.
7. Eat. Never skip breakfast and make it a meaningful meal. Enjoy any food you want anytime you want it, but only in moderation.
8. Drink. The healthful benefits of reasonable alcohol consumption are not a reason to start drinking if you don’t already imbibe, but they are good reasons to continue to enjoy moderation in this and most other vices, except smoking.
9. Be merry. Happy people outlive persistent scowlers time and time again.
10. Maintain a healthy sex life. My Daddy often said in his seventies, “I’m not always as good as I once way, but I’m as good once as I always was.” Frequency need not be your goal, nor should a big finish and sticking the landing every time. The real things people should care about, regardless of their age, begin with enjoying intimacy with a partner and focusing on mutually pleasing each other.

These are just a few suggestions for meaningfully optimizing your life to make it as long as possible. What suggestions do you have based on your experience so far and hopes to enjoy in the your distant future?

 

 

Have you ever experienced something significant you did not desire and, when you’ve enjoyed about as much of it that you can stand with, you screamed, “My God, why have you done this to me?” Yeah, me, too. But, I’ve thought about this a lot, especially after having suffered many setbacks over the years. So, let me tel you what I’ve found out.

Life gives us our challenges, to which we are liable to respond, and how we respond to them makes us who and what we are. For example, meet a pair of my new Planet Fitness friends, Stacey and her father, Doug. I will not use their last name or home Planet Fitness facility to protect their privacy. Before I tell you what little I know about them, however, let me tell you more about another father and daughter-in-extremis couple I know.

A few years ago, I handled a post-divorce child support case for a mother of a lovely child who was badly injured during her birth. The child, now in her late teens, continues to live despite severe brain damage that causes her to have very little muscular control, thinking power, or verbal ability. Her mother loves her and has made it her life’s mission to manage and use the child’s large legal settlement trust to give her as good a life as possible. Her father, however, divorced her mother shortly after her birth and essentially checked out of the child’s life, leaving the mother to pursue the lawsuit, the settlement of which has now provided both daughter and mother a better life than they would have had. The mother is employed by her child’s trust to take care of her child. It is a win-win situation. The father married another woman, had more kids, and is much less involved in his challenged daughter’s life.

Let me say here and now, as I have often said before, no one knows what it’s like to be in a particular marriage, challenged family, or other situation until one has actually been there. So, any disparagement of this first father is only based on my objective perception of the facts presented to or discovered by me as part of my work as that mother’s lawyer in that case. So I do not judge the father as a person, though I can imagine some better ways to handle a situation where a couple is challenged in life by having a challenged child.

For example, Doug and his recent Sunday morning workout accompanied by his daughter, Stacey. I was just starting an elliptical step workout when I saw someone near my age pushing his daughter in a large, custom-built wheelchair to a cable-driven weight lifting machine in front of me. The daddy was much buffer than I think I’ll ever be, but he was not the object of my attention. Stacey was.

From my medical education and experience, I assumed Stacey has experienced either a massive neuro-muscular genetic mutation or a hypoxic brain injury. The etiology of her disease is not important, nor the specifics of her physical and mental impairments. What is important, however, was her ability to engage me with some facial expressions and hand movements while her dad did his set on that machine.

Stacey grinned and me and I could not help but grin back. I am, after all, a tremendous flirt with attractive women. And Stacey, challenged as she may have been, attracted me with her attention to me. We flirted for a good, long time as her father finished a set on one machine in the row in front of me and moved her and himself to the next, again and again. Each time, Stacey adjusted her head to look at me and smile and, each time, I could not help but smile back and imitate her hand motions as she thumbed her own jaw line and grinned.

After I finished my time on the elliptical, I went over and introduced myself to Stacey and her father and told them both how much I admired and respected the way the two of them came to work out together. Doug informed me he came to work out with his daughter and she came to ogle the hunky guys. I felt even more flattered by her attraction.

Doug was the opposite of the other father in this story. Her saw the challenges shared by him and his daughter to be life affirming instead of life imposing. Such is the essence of the definition of Greatness! I teach in my writing and speeches, “Doing what is best in the present circumstances for the optimal balance of the highest priority and greatest number of those for whom our values make us responsible.”

Most religions teach, we should be thankful for both the good and bad things in our lives, for we do not know with certainty which is which as they happen but they all make us who and what we are.

Doug and Stacey (and their wife and mother, Mary, I am sure) are the essence of such Greatness! They are inspiring and have added to my life. I hope this post has added to yours.

Turn not away from uncomfortable things for coming to know them better will usually teach you something better about them and, hopefully, your self.

Have you ever been focused on getting something in particular done or going somewhere in particular as soon as you expected to get done doing whatever it was you were doing at a particular time, only to have something pop up here, there, or somewhere else that requires you to either stop what you were doing or postpone what you wanted to do next when it does? (Was that convoluted enough for you?Well, sometimes, life is that messy. But, I digress.) Yeah, me, too. Because, sometimes, we are liable to respond to what life makes go on around us.

This whole idea of responding to whatever life throws into the present circumstances is a major part of the definition of Greatness! So, let’s start with a review of that whole definition.

Greatness! — is a peaceful and satisfied state of mind resulting from using proaction, perception, planning, preparation, practice, and persistence to promote your values, vision, and mission into a practically perfect performance of a balanced creation, highest and best use, and recreation of your life’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people to do what most enhances life in the present circumstances for the optimal balance of the highest priority and the most of those people, places, things, and ideas with whom and which you have relationships and to whom and which and for whom and which your values make you responsible.

Focusing on the underlined last half of this definition, we see that our purpose in life is to “do what most enhances life,” but what most enhances life, like beauty, art, ugliness, and pornography, almost always lays (or lies, depending on your perspective) in the eyes of the beholder. And then we have to consider how what most enhances life changes in response to what life throws at us in the present circumstances, because change in the moment brings with it the anxiety of having to constantly assess and then reassess what’s the “optimal balance of the highest priority and the most of the people, places, things, and ideas with whom and which you have relationships and to whom and which and for whom and which your values make you responsible.”

Seeing all this stuff in action may make it a bit clearer for you, so let’s enjoy tonight’s “true life adventure.”

My dear friend, Linley, spent the afternoon watching his son fish (see “Proud Papa’s” photo above) and pooped out on doing my second workout of the day tonight, so I was forced to enjoy the evening in Cordova’s Planet Fitness alone, after which, I planned to watch Madam Secretary long distance with my wife.  It was the best alternative enhancement of life we could think of instead of watching it with her in person, because I am working in Memphis this week while she is working in Maryland. Fools plan and God laughs, however, and life was about to hang a Louie on us.

As I returned from my post-workout shower to my locker, at 8:10 p.m., ready to head home and FaceTime my dear wife back in Maryland to recap our respective days, I noticed a large, muscular man sitting on a bench in front of a bank of lockers, pensively and intently closely staring at a nice sturdy lock on the locker directly in front of him.

“You look like you’re trying to think open that lock, man,” I jested.

“Nope,” he replied. “I’m trying to figure out how I’m going to get my keys out of that locked locker and get to work on time by nine.”

I advised wisely, “So, go to the front desk, get their bolt cutters, snap the lock off and get on to work.”

He sighed and answered, “They can’t find them,” just as one of the two young night time front desk employees came up with a pair of channel locks and a hammer.

The attendant explained, “We still can’t find the bolt cutters, so we’ll just have to beat your lock open.”

I put my second stockinged foot in my pants and proposed, “You got too much lock and not enough tool there, sir.”

“Why?” he asked, hitting the lock ineffectively another time or two.

As I called Linley, who ignored me again and didn’t answer his cell phone, and then called my sister to send her scouring her nearby garage for some bolt cutters, I explained, “You’ve got three-sixteenths of an inch of high-carbon cold-rolled steel hook tucked in a solid brass lock casing and you’re going to break your locker hasp long before you break that lock.”

I turned to my new, forlorned friend and asked, “What kind of work do you have to get to in forty-five minutes?”

“MPD. Night shift.”

I finished tucking and buckling, gathered up my bag and told the front desk attendant, “Stop beating that thing. You don’t have the right power, the right tools, nor the right angle of attack to defeat that lock.” I looked at my cell phone clock and said, “Well, the wife will have to wait and we’ll watch Madam Secretary in the morning. Did you go to church this morning?”

He looked at me a little puzzled and embarrassed and said, “Nope, I didn’t get  off until nine this morning and went home and went to sleep.”

“That’s okay,” I assured him as I put my big, black religious beanie on my head, “because the Lord has sent another Jew to save you again.” He chuckled as I finished. “Get your shoes back on and let’s go work the problem here.”

I told him we were going to take my car, drive south, turn in to the first store we thought might sell bolt cutters, buy some, and come back here and snip the lock off. He protested that his wallet was locked in his locker, along with his keys.

“Figures,” I chortled, leading the way away.

AutoZone was first on the left. I left the cop, whose name I still haven’t asked, in the running car. Josh, a nighttime AutoZoner, was reluctant to let me borrow the store’s bolt cutters without giving him some security, until I jammed my iPhone 7 into his hand. “I got an MPD cop in my car who needs to get his uniform out of his locker at Planet Fitness up the street there and get to work in thirty minutes. I don’t have much time. Here’s your collateral. I’ll be right back.”

Five minutes later, the musclebound member of Memphis’ finest, snapped the lock and handed me back my emergency cell phone pawn ticket.

“I don’t know who you are, man, but you are totally awesome.”

“Ken Besser’s the name and Greatness! in the moment’s the game. Just do the same for the next person you see who needs your help.” I split quick, because AutoZone was closing sooner rather than later and I’d already missed the first 20 minutes of Madam Secretary.

Why did I go through all that trouble for a stranger I’d never met and will likely never see again? Because, in those present circumstances, with me having only a less-than-perfect virtual TV date with my wife and with a cop needing to get to work protecting me and the rest of Memphis from bad folks, my values made me responsible to do what is best for the optimal balance of the highest priority (me, first; Susan, second; this cop and the rest of Memphis being normally lower priority) and largest number (the community at large needing this cop’s protection) of the people, places, things, and ideas with whom and which we have relationships (we are all related to some degree) and to whom and which and for whom and which our values make us responsible (we all have the duty to serve and protect our respective parts of the world).

All that being said, in the circumstances that presented themselves, I had to interrupt my planned evening for the exigent circumstances presented. I let me schedule slip a bit and stuffed in a little bit of knight work for a city night watchman. It cost me little of my life’s precious resources of time, effort, and energy; but it paid me a larger amount of the resources of emotion in that I was doing good in my little part of the world.

And it all gave me a timely and practically perfect example of Greatness! in action.

All this being written, the next post I promised you in the last post, will have to be the next post I’m now promising you in this post. See you then.

[reminder]What would you have done tonight in these same circumstances? Turned toward the need and fed it or away from it and fled it? Hopefully, the former. Certainly, next time ….[/reminder]