The Second Half of Life: Re-visioning our Future with Margit Novack

Welcome to the Living to 100 Club Podcast. Here's our host, Dr. Joseph Casciani.

Well, hello to everyone joining us today on our podcast. You're listening to the Living to 100 Club, and I'm your host, Joe Casciani. If you're looking for inspiration about your future and staying positive when hit with setbacks, you're in the right place. We're here to help you get the best out of all the years we are given, regardless of what obstacles come our way. From my articles and podcasts to our club membership, I want to invite you to join our community and stay uplifted about aging and keep a positive mindset in all you do. Today we're talking with Margaret Novak, widely recognized as the founder of the senior move management industry and the author of the recently published and award-winning book, Squint: Revisioning the Second Half of Life. Just a little background on Margaret. Margaret is an entrepreneur, thought leader, and industry founder in senior move management. After decades in the field of aging, she moved away from her life of work and title to a new role: author, speaker, and champion of a revisioned picture of aging. Squint: Revisioning the Second Half of Life is her first book. Margaret lives with her husband and 3 dogs, a retired greyhound racer and 2 puppy mill rescues. She divides her time between Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the Eastern Shore of Maryland, where she loves kayaking upwind. To learn more about Margaret and Squint, please visit margaretnovak.com. Margaret, we're thrilled to have you with our program today. Welcome to our show.

Thank you, I'm delighted to be here.

Great, great. Yeah, I'd love to start my programs by asking our guests to tell us a little bit about the journey brought you to where you are today?

I've had a wonderful journey. I think everyone dreams of having a business or a career or a job that they never want to leave, they never want to retire from. I had that, and I did not always have that in my life. So when I, when I started Moving Solutions, and that is how I felt about what I did and what we were accomplishing, both for the industry and for the clients. I knew how special it was. I know how many people go through life getting a paycheck and counting the, the years and months and hours until they retire. And I love what I did. So I got here because I was successful and did every entrepreneur's dream of found— sold my business. Which meant I had to figure out what I wanted to do next. The selling of the business occurred about 3 years ago. I worked with the acquiring company for about a year and a half, and right before COVID hit, they determined that the original owners were no longer going to work there, which always happens when your business is acquired. And boom, it was COVID. So all of a sudden I was without title and without work, and I always felt I would need to leave Moving Solutions and go to something. I always felt that I wouldn't do well if I didn't have a goal and know where I was going. But that's not the way it worked. Um, I didn't have my goal set out. I did work on writing Squint, which was very, very gratifying. But to my— almost to my embarrassment, I've done amazingly well without on this journey that seems not to be as focused as I would like and not to have as much purpose as I would like and hope that I will have more. But I found that you just have to do the journey sometimes. And I've been more mindful of my husband and more appreciative. We, we've said, if not now, when are we going to enjoy each other? That was a gift of COVID I think, for us. To stop and say, look what we have to be grateful for. And I'm not sure where I will end up, but, uh, I'm on the journey. So that's how I got here, and it was a great journey. I feel very lucky.

Sounds like quite a ride. I see some parallels between your path and mine. I sold my practice. I had a company that worked in nursing homes, and I sold that in 2019, and 6 months later COVID came along and sharply restricted access to long-term care facilities. So, I too was looking at new, new roads and, you know, I found my Living to 100 Club. So, similar, similar pathways. So, the senior move industry and you worked with seniors for so many years, helped them with their moves and downsizing. Let me ask you, what did you learn about aging and moving on? In our senior years?

I think what I learned surprised me because I learned many things over the years, but I learned something at the end of my career when my husband had a severe heart attack, which, which happened 3 years ago, and we had made a decision. We had bought a home by the shore, which we were very excited about. It had been a dream come true, and we had made a decision to move to a senior living community because we wanted to have lock and go. So we were upsizing— we were downsizing our belongings so we could upsize our lives. It was the perfect lifestyle decision made for all the right reasons. What could go wrong? Timing was perfect. And then he had a severe heart attack, almost died. We didn't know for a while if he would live. And fast forward, he had a triple bypass, although he had a lot of comorbidities, but he's fine. He's doing great. We're both doing well. But the move occurred. We had committed to move to the community. I couldn't go back to our 3-story stone colonial. So even though we were in— instead of moving in the best of circumstances in a literal heartbeat, We were moving under the worst of circumstances, which happened to so many of my clients. So many people would call me as a move manager because someone had just passed away, someone had gotten a bad diagnosis. Instead of making the decision when things were going well, they made the decision and, and implemented that at some of the hardest times of their life. So my move was very imperfect. A lot of things ended up coming to my new home that I later said probably shouldn't have, and I dealt with some of them and I haven't dealt with others, and I realized it didn't matter. I got to my new home, I was enjoying life in the community, and I realized that waiting for perfection is fruitless because you can never make it perfect timing. You can't sell your house one in the morning, settling the morning and move in the afternoon. It never works out like that. And don't wait for the perfect time or the perfect downsizing. That Plan B is often a better plan, and Plan C sometimes is— becomes a terrific plan. Because while you're waiting for perfection, you're missing out on experiences and connecting with people So I've learned no longer to say, is it the perfect timing? But do I want to lose this opportunity for an experience or a connection? And that's how I think about opportunities now. Like, I've never done that before, why shouldn't I?

Yeah, you've learned a lot of things about advising people with planning and plan A, go to plan B. So you applied some of that advice to yourself. You and your husband had to adjust. You thought you had the perfect plan and now you are you going to plan B or plan C?

That's right.

That's an important lesson. I can see that. That's an important lesson. We do need the plans, right? We do need to have them in place, but be prepared.

And for people not to be so hard on themselves about what they have to do. I thought about the fact that I now participate in a virtual training program with 5 other people. And unlike the videos where people are smiling while they exercise, we grunt and groan. We make funny comments. So, I could have done, gotten videos for free and done them at my own schedule, but it wasn't working for me. I just wasn't doing it. I joined this virtual training group where we actually are there, we Zoom. So, we're together. We have a, we have the connection with other people and I'm doing it. I'm meeting my fitness goals. And it hits me that a lot of people are going, I've got to accomplish this. I have to clean up my basement. I have to do this. They, and, and they have to do it by themselves. And it's made me think, if you have to pay to get other outside help to do something, do it. I'm, I'm not ashamed that I'm paying for my personal training. I'm proud that I'm meeting my goals. It's reframing what you're doing to say I don't have to accomplish everything on my own. I'm accomplishing my goal now, and if I'm not doing it the same way you accomplish your goal, that's fine. This is what works for me.

A lot of it is about reframing, isn't it? It is. You can interpret an event in so many different ways, and how do we want to interpret that? How do we explain that to ourselves so we can reframe it from a negative to a positive kind kind of opportunity, for sure. So moving on is so difficult for many people who have to sell their homes unexpectedly, or even anticipated to sell their homes. It's still hard to move on and give up those familiar possessions. What's the overriding message that you would offer to people who are, you know, just kind of holding on to that current lifestyle and independence?

Well, first, when people move to senior living communities, they're not giving up independence. There is some structure, but they are living independently. I think my guidance would be most of us don't use our homes. We use our master, we use the main bedroom, the kitchen, and a family room, and the rest of the home sort of goes for the ride in most cases. And the things around our home are not what makes our life rich. The people in our lives and the experiences we do are what enrich our lives. And Things are not people. When I decided to part— I had kept a set of Rosenthal china for my mom for 40 years after she passed away, and it was her pride and joy. It was service for 16. It had a gold rim around it and a little dainty floral pattern, and all of that meant that it couldn't go in the microwave and it couldn't go in the dishwasher. So I never used it, and it finally hit me that I'm not honoring my mother by keeping her dishes in a box in the garage. So after 4 decades of just moving them along, I kept one serving piece and donated the rest to a thrift store whose purpose my mother would have felt good about. And I said, that's honoring my mom more than keeping something in the basement.

Yeah, it's the memories, right? I read your book, and we'll talk about it a little bit more, but I remember the story about the cake plate that you inherited from your mother and how important it was and how special it was, your favorite cake plate.

Until it broke.

It broke, yeah. And as you described it, it was the memory that that offered that was really the pleasure, that was really the joy, and not the material possession. Per se, not the object per se, but the memories that were involved with that event.

So interestingly, I don't hear people who have moved and downsized saying, "Woe is me, I really missed the 2 extra sets of dishes that I parted with." "Woe is me, I don't have a fish poacher." I mean, "Woe is me, I don't have a Dutch oven, 2 Dutch ovens anymore." No one is going around saying, "I miss those things." They're busy doing things.

Yeah, the interesting story I heard, someone who moved from a large home into a senior living facility, and she had trouble giving up her possessions, her furniture, all of her belongings. And someone advised her, "Well, look, take pictures of those things so you'll always have the pictures." And she said, "Well, I did just that. I took all the pictures, and I've been here for several years, and I haven't looked at the pictures once." But those pictures enabled her to let go.

So they were a good— I won't use the word crutch, but they were a tool that helped her.

Kind of a bridge.

Yeah, a bridge.

Yes, sure, sure. I wonder if you could share some of those stories with our audience, some of the memorable stories, people you interacted with over those years with Senior Moves.

We had lots of memorable stories, and I'll share two of them. Now, the bulk of the people that we moved were in moving to independent living. One person that— one thing I always remember, this happened to be a move when we were helping clear out a home. The father had been— was not an independent. He was in memory care. And we saw on the wall what was a plaque from the Patent Office. US Patent Office, and I read it, and it was kind of technical, but I said— I looked at the daughter who was with us and said, "Did your father invent the pacemaker?" And she said, "One of the prototypes." And it really hit me that we are looking at one chapter in a very long book that has had some really exciting and important chapters. So those types of experiences helped us not see someone only in this phase of their life, but to understand how brilliant they were and what they had accomplished. Another favorite story is someone that I helped move into a senior living community in his early 80s, and he was very involved in directing the move and moved into a lovely 2-bedroom apartment with Lots of wonderful things from his home. And I heard from him again about 18 years later when he called and he said, um, I would like help moving internally in the community because I'm in the building that's farthest from the dining room and the main areas, and I'm finding that I'm not going to it as many meals, and I'm not going to as many activities. He said, although I'm 100, I don't want my life to get smaller. And I love that at 100, his fear was my life is getting smaller. So we went to meet with him. And we went over to the new apartment. I said, should I take notes? He zips out, whips out his iPhone and says, no, I'll use the note function here. I said, do you need both of your computers? He said, yes, I'm working on two new inventions. He was an inventor. I said, what about the 2 keyboards? He said, I compose several hours a day. He clearly has a formula for an engaged life. And when he got some calls from, you know, trying to sell car, a car extended warranty, we said, you know, there's a way to fix, to make it so you don't get those calls. He hands us his phone and he doesn't say, do it for me. He says, Show me how to do it. And we walked away saying, we want to be 100 exactly the way he is 100. And you could say, oh, he's got great genes. And but he also, I use the expression, buys a ticket. He also stays engaged. He's taking responsibility at 100 to create an environment where he has easier access to things that he will find meaningful. He is living that life of engagement in part because he takes responsibility for creating an opportunity for engagement. And I think that's important as we get older. We have to be mindful of creating the structure that allows us to have meaning and fulfillment. We can't just say, I wish I had it. We have to take some responsibility.

Yeah, no, I agree. It's, you know, the notion of engagement, staying engaged is so important at any age. But to me, let's take the chronological age out of the picture, right?

That's right.

100-year-old man, but who cares? Because he's living his life fully engaged and he's learning and he's contributing and he feels good. He sees rewards in what he's doing and he contributes. And that's what's That's what's beautiful about this. That's— yeah, it was.

So that was one of my memorable stories.

10-year-old, sure, sure. Yeah. So you shifted away from that senior move management and looking now at aging and positive aging. So tell us about the possibilities that lie ahead. What are, what are some of the opportunities that we face post-retirement?

I think the opportunities are to recognize what's out there and to create. I think the opportunity goes hand in hand with the responsibility and intentionality. As people get older, it's harder to make new friends. When I was young, I made friends automatically because we had kids the same age. I had my work friends, my work wives. And recently I was in a book club and we had talked about one part of the book and where— and a woman had been— in the book, a woman had been beaten by her husband. And afterwards, one of the women said that her father was an alcoholic who beat her mother. And I thought about the fact that I had seen this woman 100 times walking my dogs and we talked about the weather. But nothing deeper than that. I didn't consider her a friend. I considered her an acquaintance. And I thought about that it took creating a safe space to get to know someone better. It's rewarding to make new friends because you have to have a new friend in order for them to soon become an old friend. And it was exciting to have new friends. But I thought about the fact that I can't— again, I can't just wish it would happen. I have to take some time and invite someone over, and I have to be willing to share personal things or more meaningful things myself in order to create those meaningful relationships. And it was exciting to realize that I have more of those coming in my life. If I can have— if I can be intentional, they're there, they're out there. And that was exciting.

Yeah, yeah, it's kind of getting out of our comfort zone in some ways to realize this is going to take some work. It's not going to be like it was when I was a young adult or middle-aged adult. I really am going to have to apply myself and be determined and motivated to take on these things. They're not going to come knocking on our door, right? We understand that, but they're out there. And I, you know, as you say, they're out there.

So one of the other, one of the other opportunities of this phase is for those of us who were the— well, I was a person that postponed a lot of things until later, until I retire. I'll get regular exercise when I retire. I'll be more mindful of of getting back to friends and creating time for people when I retire. I put a lot of things out there because for the future, because I was so busy and I was so willing to give whatever my work required. And the more a job or a business will take as much as you want to give it. If you— as much as you want to give up, it will absorb. If you want to be, um, on your phone or thinking about work all the time, it will absorb it. And I gave a lot of my mind and my heart to my business, and I didn't regret it at the time, but I realized that this is my time to do those things. And not only am I free to do them, it's important to do them. I wrote courses on aging well. It requires you just Physical fitness, people talk about it, but my muscle loss in my 70s and late 60s is very different from what it was like to go from 50 to 60. If I want to be able to do the things that I like, I really have to take it seriously. And I knew this intellectually, but now I've said, okay, Margaret, put your money where your mouth is. If you want to be vibrant at 75, 70 and 80, you're going to have to do regular exercise because otherwise your body is going to decline. It's been an opportunity to do that and some thankfulness that I have the time to do it.

Sure. That's such an important message that we have to work at it. It's not going to be easy. To stay healthy and vibrant and resourceful. It does take some work, and like I said a minute ago, that determination and motivation. Now, you also talked about people who are depressed and not wanting to— they don't look forward to getting older. They don't look forward to aging and, you know, aging in place or moving to another location. What kind of thoughts or recommendations do you have to maybe help those folks a little bit?

Well, I think a lot of us have, I guess I call it internal ageism, our thoughts of what this phase in life means. I think that brings on our sense of, I don't want to think about myself as being older or less capable. Internal ageism, it affects the language we use, it's how we see ourselves, I can look at my skin when I'm doing an exercise and I go, "Whose wrinkled skin is that?" And then I go, "Oh, that's mine." It looks like a Shar-Pei. And I can be upset by it or go, "It's fine. It is what it is." I think it's very hard when people are in chronic pain. I think that's very challenging. But for many of life's issues. It's whether you want to try to keep life big. When my husband needed a hip replacement, about 6 months before he had the replacement, he said, you know, we're not doing things and we're not going places because of how much my challenges in walking. He said, our lives are getting smaller. Let's get a mobile cart scooter. I was astonished because if I had suggested it, I thought there was no way he would be receptive. So I instantly got on Facebook Marketplace, and a week later we had ourselves a mobile scooter, and we were back on going to the boardwalk and going, taking the scooter on trips and doing things. And I see so many people who say, "I would never do that," as if Using a scooter is making some kind of statement, and to me it makes a statement of you want to be in control and you want to go places, so you found a way to accomplish that. It's the person who's made— who's not— who doesn't use a scooter and doesn't go out, they're the one I feel badly about, not the person who does.

Yeah, yeah, that's, that's so important because that idea of implicit bias or internal ageism and how we hold on to those stereotypes about what aging means. And we know years ago we used to think of aging as, you know, decline and we become frail and dependent and, you know, needy and, you know, requiring a lot of resources. And now that bias is going away, it's evaporating, and we're starting to see the positives. And let's celebrate aging, right? Let's look at these upsides and the opportunities. And I think that's really important for the person who feels depressed or discouraged or, you know, pessimistic about his or her future, because maybe they are wearing these blinders and all they see is what's wrong. And let's take the blinders off and let's look at the whole picture. There's a lot of good that comes with advancing years, as we talked about, the wisdom and decision-making, the judgment, all of that.

I got a lot out of looking backward in writing Squint, and I think looking backward is a worthwhile thing for people to do as they get older because it helps you have a lot more peace. You have a different perspective, and often people feel better about parts of their life when they look at it with this perspective they have today. So I do suggest that people take that time to think about some of the experiences in their life, the good ones and the bad ones, because so often it had— you have a different perspective as you were older. And we can think about being young. When I say to people, would you like to be 15 again or 18 again? They uniformly say, "No way. It was too hard." And people my age are happier than people who are younger. I mean, this is a generalization, but studies have shown that there's more satisfaction. If you said to me in my 40s, "So-and-so doesn't like you," I would have been upset. Now I go, "Well, not everyone's gonna like me." You just get more self-satisfied with who you are, saying I'm probably not going to change, so I've learned to accept who I am.

Sure, yeah. And what you're talking about is that life review process, right, that we look back and we see a lot of our successes and a lot of our triumphs and a lot of our accomplishments. And those are important because it helps to put in perspective some of the struggles that we're facing today. We can see what we, we've succeeded in the past. This is Robert Butler's life review thinking, right? We, we see those accomplishments, and okay, we can muster up that same strength today and, and probably get over the same hurdles. So that's important, looking back and to apply that to our future. Yeah, so tell us about your book, uh, Squint. What, what prompted you to write the book?

I had— I, first of all, I like writing. I like the craft of writing. I like to write something and then edit it and say, can I make it tighter? Can I take out some extra words? Can I create juxtaposition that makes the sentences more interesting. So I like the craft of writing. And I had written blogs over the years and found that I really like telling stories that are part of larger stories. I found it satisfying, and I felt that I had some important things to say that would be available to, to people depending upon the things that resonated with them. So I looked at different parts of my life and different stories that came from memoirs or things with my business and grouped them into some logical sections and saw that they all related individually to, to logical— to some bigger themes. And I've had responses as people call me up or email me that different stories are what resonate with them. Two people were really struck by the chapter about medication management, where a really tiny change in my mother-in-law's medication regime really impacted how she saw herself. When she took 16 medicines every few hours, she saw herself as as an ill person who couldn't go places and do things because she always had to take medicine. When we were able, when her doctor grouped them into just 4 times a day, she could use a pill organizer, and she saw herself as less sick, and she started going out and doing more. And people have said to me, this is exactly what I'm experiencing with my mom or with my my mother-in-law. In one story, I'm with a daughter who is continually correcting her mother, and I say, "Hi, Mrs. Smith, how long have you lived in your home?" And she goes, "34 years." And the daughter goes, "Mom, it's 35 years." And I see the mother's face falls, that she's misremembered something. And a few minutes later, the mother is taking me for a tour of her home, and she points to a picture and says, This is my daughter Ellen. And then the daughter goes, no, Mom, that's Sharon. And again, her mother stops the middle of the story. And I wanted to say, it's not important. She was telling a story. She was enjoying the interaction. And I know that if that daughter thought about it, she would say, you're so right. I shouldn't be correcting her. I should be kind. It's not important that I could— she's telling you a story, and whether it's 34 or 35 years doesn't change the story. And I heard from someone who said, this is exactly what I'm doing with my mom. So different people have responded to different parts of it. Um, there are a lot of different themes there, and nothing as an author Nothing is as meaningful to me or as exciting as when people call up or email saying, this really is where I am at life. And, uh, that's— I, I get very excited about that.

Yeah. So you took your talent and passion for writing and put it into the book, and I can see the stories are the personal experiences, things that you've observed, things that you've experienced on your own, in your own family. So it's, it's really uplifting to, you know, hear those insights and share those observations because, as you say, people read it and they— it touches them. They— it strikes a chord in them too. So it's helpful. Those stories can be helpful.

Some of them are less emotional. Some of the stories are very personal and they may resonate with people in a very personal way. I talk about my— the things that I did when I raised my kids that I can't forgive myself for. Decisions that I look back and say, how— why did I make that decision? Why did I act that way? And I thought about how my mother said the same thing. She was tortured about some of the decisions she made as a mom. And I looked back and said to her, you did the best you could, you know, we all got over it. I am. So it was so— yes, I forgave her. She didn't forgive herself. And I'm realizing that my own kids have said, relax, Mom, we got this.

He's up by yourself.

Those are deep things. When we were— when I met with someone, they talked about the fact that her daughter had been killed by a, um, a drunk driver. She had read the book, and she said, in your chapter about guilt, that about things you did with your children, she said, after my daughter died, I was not there for the next 15 years for my younger son. He grew up eating cereal. I was a not-present mother. And she was sharing about his personal thing as someone can share. And the story is about saying it's okay to forgive ourselves. We did the best we could. But I felt really honored that she was willing to share that with me.

Sure. Yeah, it's easy to look back and find fault with decisions we made or things that we did. As we know, you know, at the time it seemed like the right thing to do, or we, you know, we were dealing with our limited resources, or whatever. It seemed like the only thing we could do. So it's easy to find fault and, you know, finger point at what we did in the past. So yeah, that's good advising people to let go of some of that. It's unloading that burden. Sure. Yeah. So you have a— it is a great book, by the way. I really enjoyed it. And really some very highly regarded reviewers of the book and, you know, people that I respect and have seen over the years in their work. So it's a great book. I recommend it. We'll get to that toward the end, but let me ask you about this guide for book clubs. You have a—

Created a discussion guide and it's available on the website and it has questions that will help prompt some people to look at some of the issues that are raised Groups don't have to use that. I think this is a type of book where they'll, they'll fall into discussing it all by themselves, but it's available for anyone to download, and you— and some people may like to download it before they read the book to give them some things to talk about.

Okay, so any of our listeners who may be members of book clubs, that would be a good thing to take on for your group. So just, um, just quickly, how do you define revisioning our future? Do we talk about setting goals or creating a new vision of what we want? How do we create this new vision for ourselves?

I don't know if it's about setting goals, but I think I use the concept of buying a ticket. There's an old joke, and the way I heard it is like someone saying, God, how come you never let me win the lottery? How come you never let me win the lottery? And God says, do me a favor, buy a ticket. You can't win the lottery if you don't buy a ticket, but maybe you can't— we can't— this is not about winning the lottery in life, but maybe it is. Having a successful and rewarding life now requires our being— I use the word intention, mindful— we have some responsibility. It does take some action on our part, some creating a mindset, creating a willingness It was interesting. There are pressures about us that sometimes we're not aware of or don't want to even admit. In spite of all my years as a move manager, I never understood that people are also dealing with the disapproval of their friends when they make some decisions about how they're going to age. When we moved into a senior living community, All of our friends disapproved. Oh, maybe that's right for you. Maybe you're willing to give up independence. It's not right for us. And my husband said, how did we give up independence? The independence to mow? I mean, or people who have used a cane and they're the first one among their friends to use a cane and the rest disapprove of it. Now, fortunately, I think we're going to make progress with using hearing aids because everyone's got something in their ears now hanging out, and your hearing aid connects to your phone and your Bluetooth, and you can do everything with your hearing aid. You can watch TV. So maybe we'll— because not hearing is an enormous barrier to being connected with people. But I think it's people who will say, I want to enrich my life in all the ways that I can do that.

Yeah, to get out of those predictable, familiar places that we talk about, comfort zones and seeing that a little differentness is okay?

Usually it's okay. I was at a ferry terminal. It was around 3 o'clock and they had a little wine bar and my husband said, "Go get me a glass of wine." And I said to the woman, "I guess I'll get two." And I said, "I never drink at 3 in the afternoon." And she said, "Well, lady, you're not young. Isn't it time you start?". And I thought, well, yes, it is. There's another thing I haven't done in the past that I should start. So maybe it's some— I'm not saying you should drink a glass of wine at 3 o'clock, but not be, oh no, I don't do that. Because we get pretty into our routines.

We do. We do. But the unfamiliar, unpredictable is a little bit anxiety arousing, but it's also filled with new opportunities and new doors to open. So I always advocate Let's give up some of those familiar places and knock on some new doors. So we're just about out of time, Margaret. What would you like our listeners to take away from our conversation today?

I think there is opportunity. I know it's what you espouse and describe all the time. I hope you will get a copy of Squint. It's available in paperback or electronic on Amazon or any indie bookstore. And look back at your life with different perspective because it is rewarding and it's a great way to move forward.

Yeah, to look forward, keep looking forward. I always like the saying of Dan Sullivan, who's a professional speaker. He says our future should be bigger than our past.

I saw something the other day and it said, what if the most important thing that you do in your life you haven't done yet.

Sure. Yeah, the past is important, memories are great, but what do we have in store for tomorrow? Well, as I mentioned, we are out of time, but before we wrap up, I just want to remind our listeners about a few items. I'm pleased to announce a new co-sponsor for our podcast, A Mighty Good Time. Are you looking for ways to engage and stay active? Check out amightygoodtime.com. It's a one-stop shop for events and activities for those 50 and over. It's free to search and it's free to post. Amightygoodtime.com. Also, there's a new offering on my website where individuals can arrange one-on-one coaching calls with me to discuss bouncing back from setbacks. How can we tap into our resilient self? How can we find ways to make it over those obstacles we face on our different journeys. Take a look at the Work with Dr. Joe tab on our website, livingto100.com, and also be sure to subscribe to our email list to receive our newsletter and other announcements. And finally, pick up a copy of my book on Amazon, Living Longer Is the New Normal. I think that whatever age you're at, inspiration and a positive mindset can be put to good use. That's my message in the book. Margit, thanks so much for being a guest. For those who might want to contact you, how can they do that?

They can go to margitnovak.com, M-A-R-G-I-T-N-O-V-A-C-K dot com, and there's a contact button right there, great, and email address.

And your book again, Squint, S-Q-U-I-N-T, is available on your website and available.

It is one click. Yes, great.

Okay, it is. Well, thanks again, and thanks to everyone for listening to this episode. Hope to see you next time.

Thank you. Hi, I'm Laurie LeBay, and I wanted to tell you about Alzheimer Speaks, which is another great podcast You see, my own mother lived with dementia for 30 years, and I felt lost. Did you know every 3 seconds someone in the world is being diagnosed with dementia? Odds are it's going to hit your families too. We want to help you connect to services, products, tools, research, and stories so you can be prepared. Please subscribe to Alzheimer Speaks on your favorite podcast platform.