Writing a Life Review: What Makes You YOU!
A Worthwhile Exercise in Self-Reflection
You never know where inspiration will come from. I’ve learned that following my hunches, even the sometimes “resistant” ones, usually leads me somewhere that connects to something fruitful. When a friend who knows how I feel about later life suggested the book Prime Time: Love, Health, Sex, Fitness, Friendship, Spirit: Making the Most of All of Your Life by Jane Fonda I found an unexpected gift as well as a worthwhile and thoughtful look at later life from someone who is actually living it.
Fonda suggests writing a “life review” to help you look at your own life and, with that information, reflect on and decide how you want to live your later years. She writes about her own experiences and how the life review presented certain themes in her life that came up again and again. She includes doses of great exercise and diet advice (and she practices what she preaches), but I hadn’t come across the life review suggestion in other places. On a hunch, and dispensing with the “What good could that do?” voice in my head, I decided to give it a try.
Your life review is not meant to be a well-written biography or even something that anyone else would read. It can be notes and impressions as well as sentences and stories. The goal is to reflect honestly about your life, warts and all, and to ponder questions like, “What brings me the most happiness, really?” or “What have I kept coming back to and never pursued, and why?” or “What kinds of people have I gravitated towards, or not?”
To genuinely appreciate how you feel about your life is an exercise in courage. To revisit the best of times and worst of times, with as much honesty as you can muster, is a cathartic exercise. Plus, once you get writing, in a free-flowing unedited spirit a la Natalie Goldberg from Writing Down the Bones, you never know where it will lead you and where you will end up.
In my own case, this exercise unearthed several hidden dynamics that I write about in my book, A Life Yet to Live. Writing about my childhood, especially the death of my father when I was 7 years old, led me to some deeper emotional truths of just how traumatic those years were and how much work was still left to be done to process them. And on the flip side, it also reinforced how much I enjoyed staying active and moving, whether that was working or exercising. Using, and being in, my sensual body has always meant more to me than just exercise or labor or even sex. For me, moving is one of the expressions of life itself. Throughout my life I kept going back to it—finding a way to bring movement into my life—and it is what I now call a “primal” feature of my natural life that has served me well in these later years.
Getting to Know Yourself Better
You may think you know yourself pretty well. Yet I guarantee that if you are honest with yourself as you are writing your life review, you will come across a few surprises. These come not only as important memories coupled with deeply felt emotions, they come as repetitions—behaviors and activities you came back to again and again—maybe because they were enjoyable or maybe because they could teach you something. As you write, they are the ones that “stick”; they mean more today than they did yesterday. Writing your life review is far from just a memory exercise or a factual biography or a when-and-where list of events. It is a “spirit” story, the spirit of what makes you YOU.
Memory, especially longer-term memory, plays an outsized role in later life. For reasons that no one really knows, older memories come into sharper focus as we age. Perhaps it’s that we are looking for comfort in them, or perhaps they are episodes of our lives that we need to take a closer look at. Whatever the reasons, don’t fight it. If reminiscing brings you pleasure, by all means indulge in old memories with anyone who will listen. But a written life review is for you. Telling yourself what, and who, has been, and is, important in your life can give you clues for what really matters to you and how you want to spend these magical yet culminating years. It is ultimately your inspirations and aspirations that will give you the drive to keep healthy and live longer in order to act on those inspirations and achieve those aspirations.
In my case, the life review helped me focus my attention to areas of my life that needed attention, to help me emotionally “clean house,” so I could sort that baggage and live my life now more productively and genuinely. This “emotional detox” has been, and still is, every bit as important as my dietary ones.
