The Masai say "Don't fight a lion with a stick."

Hemingway wrote that there’s a world of difference between stalking a lion on foot than in a car. That’s why I was intrigued when I heard about life coach Richard Leider’s walking safaris in Tanzania. Unlike Hemingway, however, Leider isn’t interested in downing lions, but in showing people how to hunt the big game within themselves.

Leider began these three-week “inventures,” as he calls them, in 1983 after falling in love with Africa on an Outward Bound trek to Mount Kilimanjaro. The group usually includes 12 men and women who visit sites such as the Serengeti National Park, the Ngorongoro Crater, and the Yaidi Valley (home of the Hadza, an endangered tribe of hunter-gatherers). They camp in native villages, hang out with the Masai and other tribes and hike mindfully across the savannah. The point of an inventure, says Leider, is to experience time in new way–not as a commodity but as a way to deepen human relationships. To do that, you need to embrace new cultures “with the curiosity and acceptance of a child–to allow the heart and the mind to travel together.”

The most telling moments often happen late at night sitting around the campfire with the tribal elders. Once Leider was sharing a fire with some Hadza elders when one asked him: “What are the two most important days in your life?”

“Birth and death,” he replied.

“No,” answered the elder. “The two most important days in your life are the day you were born and the day you determine why you were born.”

For Leider that day came in 1967 when he met Viktor Frankl, the famed psychiatrist and author of Man’s Search for Meaning, at a conference in San Diego. Frankel talked about what he learnd as a prisoner in a Nazi concentration: that the last of the human freedoms is to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances. Leider, who had just completed a master’s degree in counseling psychology, was transfixed. “I decided at that point that purpose and meaning would be my life’s work,” he recalls. “And ever since I’ve been a student of one question: What makes us get out of bed in the morning?”

Leider found wisdom in Tanzania.

The answer, he discovered, was in Africa.

During another campfire session, Leider asked a group of Hadza wise men, “How do you become an elder?”

“Who are the elders in your tribe?” one man replied.

“ I don’t have a tribe,” said Leider.

“What?” said the man, dumbfounded. “How can you survive without a tribe?”

Inventurers searching for big game (in a vehicle this time).

Leider was silent. As he sat by the fire that night, he realized that the Hadza, whose way of life hasn’t changed much in the past 100,000 years, had a great deal to teach us about community and purpose. One study that fascinated Leider was conducted by scientist and author  Jared Diamond, who spent 33 years working in New Guinea with hunter-gatherer tribes similar to the Hadza and concluded that they were on average “more intelligent, more alert, more expressive and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is.” Spending time with hunter-gatherers, Leider found, triggers a “great recalling” in our psyches of certain core traits that for centuries have gone largely under-utilized:

1. Intelligence—Hunter-gatherers are “walking encyclopedias” of natural history with remarkable powers of observation and memory.
2. Alertness—They wake up every day to the reality that time is precious and limited and, says Leider, “experience more joy in a day than some of us do in a lifetime.”
3. Expressiveness—The Hadza tribe is the “original affluent society,” he adds, because they’re satisfied with very little. Once they’ve gathered the food they need on any give day, they spend the rest of their time telling stories and strengthening the community. To be a Hadza is to serve the tribe.
4. Curiosity—Change is not an abstract concept; it’s ever-present in Hadza life. For hunter-gatherers, cultivating a curious mindset is a matter of life or death.

“I tell people that the wisdom of the hunter-gatherers can’t be taught, but it can be caught,” says Leider. “When you’re with the Hadza, you experience what our ancestors knew about the natural rhythms of life.”

This is why Leider keeps returning, year after year. “I haven’t had one person who has gone with me to Africa whose life hasn’t profoundly shifted in some way,” he says. Some group members return home and immediately start simplifying their lives, while others find the courage, all of a sudden, to reinvent themselves. Two couples even asked Leider to marry them.

“It’s primal,” he adds. “The backdrop—one of the last great wilderness places on earth—clarifies your mind. When you’re off the grid, without a lot of distractions, whatever’s inside you will come forward.”

To watch a video on how to live the life you love, featuring Richard Leider , go here.

Photos by Peter Malsbury/iStockPhoto (lion), Gary Smaby (Leider and giraffe) and ranplet/iStockPhoto (Masai warriors).

Masai warriors can look imposing, but they tread lightly on the earth. One tribal proverb says, "Foolishness first, then wisdom."

My introduction as a toddler to the secret of Irish cooking.

When I hear financial pundits counsel unemployed people over 50 to start a business if they can’t find a job, I think of the last time I tried to go entrepreneurial.  This was not an experience for the faint of heart.

The idea sounded good at the time. I was in my early 30s and the magazine I’d been editing had just folded. The last thing I wanted to do was sign up for another intense 9-to-5 job. So when my friend, Barbara, asked me if I was interested in publishing a book on Irish cuisine, I jumped at the chance.

O.K., it wasn’t a book exactly, more like a booklet. Barbara had a read story about a woman who made a killing on recipe booklets that she marketed with classified ads in the National Enquirer and thought, Why not me? After all, her Grandmother Lynch had left her a box full of recipes, which, Barbara assured me, had been the talk of the lace-curtain set in Pittsburgh.

Forget that the phrase “Irish cuisine” is an oxymoron. There’s not much you can do with potatoes, oats and ox blood. In fact, TitanicAwards.com recently surveyed 2,000 people from 80 countries and concluded that Ireland had the seventh worst cuisine in the world, which seemed surprisingly high to me. The only comfort for Irelandophiles like Barbara and me was that the United Kingdom was first on the list.

Lesson One: Make sure the pig Is in the pen before you invite the guests.

In retrospect, it might have been a good idea to examine the recipes before we took the leap, but we had more important things to worry about. Our first move was to purchase a book–through an ad in the National Enquirer, of course,–on how to get rich selling booklets in the National Enquirer. The main thing I remember was the author’s list of “secret power words” to use on the cover, two of which were “secret” and “power.”  Ah-ha. We had our surefire, million-dollar title:  Grandma Lynch’s Secret Irish Recipes. What the Get Rich booklet failed to point out, however, was that  “grandma” and “Irish recipes” were on the secret un-powerful words list.

Lesson Two: Don’t pull the trigger until you’ve counted your bullets.

The smart thing would have been to create a business plan before we spent our first penny. That might have prevented us from making our next blunder: shelling out the rest of our budget–$600—on a four-line classified ad in—where else?–the Enquirer. Naturally that was before we discovered that Grandma Lynch’s recipes were not as “secret” as we originally assumed. To make the booklet even vaguely live up to its promise, we set up a test kitchen and tried to add a few French and Italian flourishes to Grandma’s lifeless recipes. We even invented a few new dishes, including one of the most godawful concoctions in the history of this godforsaken cuisine: Chicken Delehanty (a.k.a. Drunken Chicken with raspberry jam and Irish whiskey).

Lesson Three: Never confuse a hunch with a hope.

The final product was a lovely booklet with ten kitchen-tested recipes, ranging from Irish Stew Pittsburgh Style to Tipperary Cheesecake, plus charming tidbits of culinary wisdom from Grandma herself. In a moment of Irish chutzpah, I bought a kit for making Irish Mist liqueur, but the results were so vile, we decided to leave that recipe out of the book.

Our first order came from Lucy Cohen from Boynton Beach, Florida. The price was $2.25 (including shipping and handling). Two more orders came later that week, and then the mail stopped. That was it: a grand total of $6.75. In the end, I didn’t have the heart to cash any of the checks.

After the shock wore off, I calculated the damage:

Expenses:

Booklet on How to Get Rich                               $4.95

Ad in the Enquirer                                             600.00

Books on Irish cooking                                        23.00

Food for test kitchen                                           285.00

Bottle of Irish whiskey                                          18.00

Irish Mist DYI kit                                                    14.95

Design and production                                         40.00

Printing                                                                     27.00

Postage                                                                         0.75

Subtotal                                                            $1013.65

Revenue:                                                                 $0.00

Bottom line: Before you take the plunge, do the math.

When I look back at this fiasco, I think of what that famous Irish risk-taker James Joyce once said: “A man’s errors are his portals of discovery.” Yes, we lost a chunk of change on this ill-conceived project, but we picked up a lifetime of wisdom along the way.

Shortly after we closed shop, I became a freelance writer and one of my first assignments was interviewing M.F.K Fisher, author of How to Cook a Wolf and other classics. When I told her our story, she joked about her live-in Irish grandmother who thought that bland, unseasoned food was good for your health.  As a girl, Fisher got so sick of her grandmother’s wretched nettle soup, she prayed for her to go on long vacations.

Her grandmother's stinging nettle soup gave M.F.K. Fisher nightmares.

After the interview, I sent Fisher a copy of our recipe booklet as a token of appreciation. A few days later I received a note from her praising the booklet, saying it reminded her fondly of her grandmother.

No doubt, she meant to be ironic, but it didn’t matter. Winning praise from the world’s greatest food writer—even it was a tad left-handed–made the whole misadventure worthwhile.

So I was thrown off guard a few weeks ago when Tommy, a muckety-muck in the entertainment industry I’ve known for years, burst into a meeting wearing a tight-fitting Prada jacket and black jeans and looking tanned, buffed and Botoxed. “Who is this guy?” I said to myself. Tommy (not his real name) is at least five years older than me, but there wasn’t an inch on his face that hadn’t been “youth-enhanced,” as they say in the cosmetic surgery business. It was scary, not because the work was awful, but because it was barely noticeable. Forgive me, AARP, but I don’t think I’ve ever felt older than I did on that day.

The Perfect Man? John Wayne...

...or Brad Pitt?

Granted, Hollywood is a weird place. To survive there, you have to either know a good surgeon or be blessed with the genes of Dorian Gray. Comedy writer Alan Zweibel, part of the original Saturday Night Live team, loves to talk about the contortions his contemporaries go through to appear as if they haven’t aged a day since they turned 39.  To keep up appearances, not only do they look and dress like thirty-somethings, they’ve had mental cosmetic surgery as well. They’ve cut out any words from their vocabulary that might hint that they were boomers. “How did this happen?” he writes in the AARP Bulletin. “Why am I the only one  in Hollywood who got older? Why doesn’t anyone else remember Vietnam? Or Willie Mays? Or blue suede shoes?”

This is not just happening in southern California; everybody seems to be getting into the act. The number of men getting facelifts went up 14% nationwide last year. Some men turn to surgery to fend off age discrimination in the marketplace—I get that–while others get swept up in hapless quest to attain the new liposuction-centric ideal of masculinity. Time was, writes Alicia Potter in The Boston Phoenix, the manliest men in popular culture were “burly, barrel-chested, even hairy” guys, like John Wayne or Burt Reynolds who “probably couldn’t even point out their deltoids, never mind sculpt them.” But now the two models are the “slender, sculpted, almost feminine look” of Brad Pitt or the “pumped-up but still low-fat physique” of Nicholas Cage.

This is not a diatribe against cosmetic surgery. Who am I to judge if someone feels they need to get a little tuck here or a slice there to make themselves more attractive? What concerns me, however, is the basic assumption underlying our obsession with looking young. Dominique Browning, the author of Slow Love, believes that the wide acceptance of cosmetic procedures among the over-50 set heralds the birth of another “ism” among boomers: ageism. “We’ve crossed the line; we’re angry that we’re growing old.” she wrote recently in The New York Times, “We’re angry at people who remind us of what aging looks like. We are colluding in an elaborate social compact to convince ourselves that we don’t have to go there. And no one wants to say that the Emperor and Empress look better with naked faces.”

Homer: The first ageist?

Ageism, of course, is not a boomer invention. It goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. Homer described the elderly as “hateful, accursed, difficult and sorrowful,” and Socrates, who is widely regarded as a paragon of wisdom in Western culture, was vilified by an Athenian mob and sentenced to death for allegedly corrupting youth.

What’s different now is that if you have enough money and aren’t squeamish about anesthetics, you can fool yourself for a lot longer than Socrates could that you can pull a fast one on Death. But Death has all the time in the world—you don’t. The purpose of life is not to cling to the past but to embrace the present and all the mysteries it holds. The late Zen teacher Charlotte Joko Beck once told me, “The only thing you can count on in life is this very moment. Everything else is an illusion.” I was in my late 30s at the time and didn’t understand what she was talking about. But I never forgot what she said, and the older I get the more sense her words make.

Maybe it’s because I inherited my father’s gray hair at an early age or because I had an emergency tracheotomy when I was really little and developed an aversion to surgery of any kind. But I figured out a long time ago that the search for eternal youth is a sucker’s game. When I think about how far I would go to look younger, none of my options include a needle or a knife. I prefer the philosophy of actor Henry Winkler, who was honored at an AARP event last year. Asked whether he’d rather be young-looking or young-thinking, he replied, “The way you look is not as important as the way you use your energy–because energy can make you very attractive.”

You take Homer; I’ll go with the Fonz.

Mr. Energy: Winkler as The Fonz

What’s your take on cosmetic surgery for men? Would do you think is sexier John Wayne or Brad Pitt? This is not a rhetorical question. 

Alvy: With your wife in bed, does she need some kind of artificial stimulation, like, like marijuana?

Old man: We use a large vibrating egg.

It’s a funny line, in no small part because it plays off a stereotype as old as Oedipus: that old people having sex is weird. Young people have a hard-time imagining their elders “doing it” so they make jokes about it. Like Oscar Wilde’s famous quip: “Young men want to be faithful, and are not; old men want to be faithless, and cannot.”

Older men are portrayed as impotent and dysfunctional, while older women are perceived as asexual and invisible. As actress Julie Harris puts it, “After the age of 50, we become women of glass. Men look right through us.”

But the reality is that many men and women have the best sex of their lives after 50. Therapist Gina Ogden, Ph.D., author of The Return of Desire, conducted a study of 3,810 men and women, age 18-86, several years ago and discovered that older lovers are more likely to integrate sexual and spiritual experience, which leads to richer and more fulfilling love-making. When asked “Have you ever experienced God in a moment of sexual ecstasy?” 58% of the respondents 60 and older answered “yes,” compared with only 23% of those 30 and younger.

More after the jump…

Integrating sexual and spiritual experience, the study concluded, also has a positive impact on the emotional and physical health, particularly in areas such as feeling acceptance and love and oneness with one’s partner and experiencing intense inner vitality, energy, and security. “Sex is the principal means to directly experiencing our authentic life,” Ogden told Yoga Journal. “Our sexuality is much more complex than the Masters and Johnson model of arousal, orgasm, and rolling over and going to sleep.” According to Ogden, brain research shows that orgasm and sometimes even vaginal stimulation light up the whole brain, including the parts typically associated with spiritual ecstasy. In other words, “we’re all hard-wired for multi-dimensional sex.”

In her essay, “Why I’d Rather Sleep with a Man over 50” in American Sexuality magazine, Katherine Anne Forsythe makes the case that older men have “a quiet confidence and patience” that allows them to enjoy the entire sexual experience, not just their own pleasure. She writes: “The mellowness of having been ‘around the block’ with age—and, most likely, a high number of partners—permits [them] to let go of having to rush, and prove, and perform. Without those pressures, older men (and women) can see themselves as equal partners in a titillating, creative escapade.”

As our bodies slow down and change with age, some men freak out and others learn to accept the reality and respond more creatively. Creativity leads to experimenting with alternatives to an intercourse-centric approach to sex, which in turn reduces performance anxiety. (I don’t mean to be glib here. For some men erectile dysfunction is a serious issue and requires medical treatment. For more on this subject, go here.)

“New thinking invites slow touch, spending time to caress and tease. It means talking to your partner,” writes Forsythe, a sexuality educator. “Foreplay becomes foretalk. It means what really feels good to both of you. It means thinking about alternatives to the old kiss-grope-intercourse-orgasm routine. It means discovering your partner’s real needs, and yours. It means true pleasuring.”

Click here to view the embedded video.

When we were shooting 5 Weeks to a New Life, several of the men in the group said that they were much more interested in the emotional aspects of sex now than they were earlier. At one point, John Ford, a single man in his early 50s, confessed, “As opposed to pure sex, I have more of a drive toward more sexual intimacy than I did when I was younger. To me that’s more enjoyable because it’s really about intimacy as opposed to the animalistic act. Not that the animalistic act is bad.”

Men like John who embrace a more expansive view of lovemaking in later life often find a whole new world of sexual experience opening up to them. They also discover that their partner’s sexual needs are different from what they originally assumed. While most older women admit being turned on by rigid erections, says Forsythe, what’s more important to them is being pleased, and that usually means talking to their male partners about the experience and enjoying each other’s bodies completely. Men are often surprised to learn, she adds, that for most women intercourse is “not the primary drive but simply one of several delicious menu options.”

Large vibrating eggs, anyone?

Tell us what you think: Does sex get better as you age or is that just spiritual mumbo-jumbo?

Barbara and me at our wedding in San Francisco.

What I remember most, however, was the reading. When my wife, Barbara, and I were planning the wedding, the only thing I insisted on was that the minister read a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet” in the ceremony. I was 35 years old at the time and something about Rilke’s perspective on marriage as an act of self-discovery gave me solace as I prepared to leap into the unknown. For Rilke, love was not about merging, giving over and uniting with another, but “a high inducement for individuals to ripen, to become something in themselves, to become world in themselves for another’s sake.”

More after the jump…

Here’s the key passage: “Above all, marriage is a new task and a new seriousness—a new challenge to and questioning of the strength and generosity of each partner and a great new danger for both. It is a question in marriage not of creating quick community of spirit by tearing down and destroying all boundaries, but rather a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his or her solitude.”

Barbara, who had already been through one less-than-successful marriage, was far less sentimental about the institution than I was. But she went along. And though she loves to make fun of my obsession with Rilke, even she will admit, when pressed, that one of the main reasons our marriage has been so strong for the past 27 years is that–whether intentionally or not–we’ve followed the great poet’s advice.

This idea resurfaced a few weeks ago when I was interviewing Harville Hendrix for the“Five Weeks to a New Life” series. Hendrix is one of the nation’s leading authorities on marriage. During our interview, he said that the key to eliminating negativity from your relationship is to cultivate genuine curiosity about your spouse—not your projection, but the real person.

That sounds like Rilke, I said, and that prompted him to tell the story of how he arrived at his theory. Several years ago, his marriage to his second wife, Helen, also an expert in the field, was in trouble. Rather than give up on each other, though, they decided to take one more stab at revitalizing their marriage by studying successful couples and applying what they learned to their own relationship.

The secret, they discovered, was looking at each other with new eyes. “When you realize that the other person is not your projection, it’s an enormous relief,” Harville said. “We were each plumbing the mind of a person that we’d made up. Once we let go of that idea, we found that we were actually living with a fascinating human being. It’s a paradox: the more solitary we allow each other to be the better the connection between us.”

Bingo.

This reminded me of a moment back in April when Barbara and I were watching the Bishop of London deliver the sermon at Will and Kate’s royal wedding. Given the circumstances, it was a remarkably engaging talk about the psychology of marriage.

“Faithful and committed relationships” he said, “offer a door into the mystery of spiritual life in which we discover this; the more we give of self, the richer we become in soul; the more we go beyond ourselves in love, the more we become our true selves and our spiritual beauty is more fully revealed. In marriage we are seeking to bring one another into fuller life.”

At which point, Barbara turned to me and said, with a wry smile, “Look out: Here comes Rilke.”

What do you think? Join the conversation and share with us quotes on love and marriage that have inspired you.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been building my bucket list. It sounds weird, but it’s true. I remember in the sixth grade creating a list of all the things I wanted to accomplish in life.

At the top of the list was “play second base for the Dodgers.” That one didn’t happen, but a lot of the others did. I became a writer (#2); I traveled to Ireland (#4); I lost my virginity (#7)–to name a few.

Friends make fun of me, but I remind them that several famous men and women were bucket list makers, including Plato, who declared that every man should check off the following before he dies: 1) plant a tree, 2) father a son, 3) build a house and 4) write a book.

My list is a tad more elaborate. (Of course, Plato didn’t have the advantage of Groupons.)

More after the jump…

1. Sail around the world.
2. Write a bestselling novel.
3. Paint my masterpiece.
4. Learn to tango.
5. Become fluent in Italian.
6. Build a school.
7. Save a tiger.
8. Play Gershwin on the piano.
9. Walk in the footsteps of the Buddha.
10. Dance at my granddaughters’ weddings.

Bucket lists have grown in popularity recently, in part because of the movie starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman, but mostly because a growing number of people—otherwise known as baby boomers—have begun to hear the toll of mortality in the distance and can no longer ignore it.

Not long ago I hosted a three-day retreat for boomers in Gloucester, Massachusetts, as part of the online series AARP and WGBH-TV are launching in June called, “Five Weeks to a New Life.” The people who came were smart, thoughtful men and women in their 40s, 50s  and 60s going through important transitions in their lives. What surprised me, though, was how little thought they had given to their future, beyond salting away money in their 401Ks.  When I asked everybody to create a short bucket list, they stared at me in horror, as if I had asked them to recite Hamlet’s soliloquy.

Carl Jung said that the purpose of mid-life was to shift away from focusing on worldly accomplishments to becoming more attuned with life and nourishing the soul. “Anyone who fails to go along with life remains suspended, stiff and rigid in mid-air,” he writes. “That’s why so many people get wooden in old age; they look back and cling to the past with a secret fear of death in their hearts.”

Jungian psychologist James Hollis says that the mature people he works with fall into two camps: those who feel that life is a challenge worth fighting for and those who are full of bitterness and regret. The difference, he says, is that the former have usually undergone a life-changing transformation—a career shift, a major illness, the loss of a spouse—that inspires them to accept greater responsibility for their lives, while the latter resist change and fear their lives have no meaning.

Which brings us back to my bucket list. A few months ago I asked a meditation teacher I respect how to reconcile my quest for inner peace and my burning drive to check off items on my bucket list.

He laughed and said, “Maybe you should focus less attention on what you want to do and more on what you want your life to be about.”

Good idea. I think I’ll add that to my bucket list.

 I’d like to hear from you now! Join the conversation and send me your bucket list below.