S1E24: From Being Right to Being Real: What We Love About Getting Older

Shattering glass, aging laughs, and spiritual glow-ups—Pam and Deb keep it real and ridiculous. 

Check out Julia Louis-Dreyfus' Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/wiser-than-me-with-julia-louis-dreyfus/id1678559416

Transcript

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That's pretty neat is actually one thing that I heard somewhere. I forget where. I think I told you this. That, like, when a woman's born or conceived, I guess, or even born, all of their eggs are already there, right? So when a child of a woman has a baby, that baby was all the way back all the generations, through all the moms, because you were born with the eggs. That she was born with the eggs. If she. If she has babies that will be used for that. You were born with yours from your mom, she was born with hers from her mom. Does that make any sense, what I'm saying? You're looking at me like I've lost my. I. I have to understand. I'd have to look that biology up. I don't know. I don't know where I heard it, whether I heard it from, like, a reliable source or it was just like, oh, the Internet. I don't. Yeah, I don't know. I'd have to look that up. I think it might have been a doctor that said it. Like one of those. I still have to look that up to read it myself. I think we look. I love you, but let's look it up. All right. I think we should look it up. Chat GPT. We can chat. We can chat GPT. If that's fine. Perfect. See if she knows the answer. So here we are. Great to chat with you all. Hey, welcome back to she Said, she Said with Pam and Deb. I am back in the chair after last week. Yeah, it is good to be here. I am Pam Prior. I'm a cfo, author, speaker, and I balance the books. And I'm Deb Reinhart, a corporate. Corporate worker. Corporate worker. Corporate worker. Meditation teacher, an executive coach. And I mostly balance. Pam, that is actually true sometimes. Mostly. Yeah, a lot. Mostly true. So a funny story just to start, because we were sitting here and Francis said, oh, my gosh, our shower door just shattered this morning. Shimmery glass, out of the blue. Just shattered out of nowhere. Kaboom. I remembered this story. We immediately went to that story. Do you want to tell it? Because it was pretty funky. Yeah, we were. So you were outside, right? You were outside. I was lawn mowing or something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And. And we were. And we had a. Music was blaring. There was music. Yeah, yeah, we did that a lot. Annie Lennox blaring music. And we had a screen door with glass that was, you know, from our porch out to where you were doing. And we hadn't put the screens in yet. The glass was still In. And she started with dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun, dun. It was like the walking on broken glass. Walk, walk. Walking on broken glass. And it feels just like I'm walking on broken glass. And then the entire glass fell out of the door and shattered all over the thing. It was a. It was. It was like. It was. She was calling it into believable. And where I was standing, it shattered, like, around. Around you. It didn't. So I was literally walking on broken glass. Yeah, you were literally on. And it was weird because it was almost like. It just, like, splayed out as if it fell in one piece. Yes, but it fell in shards. No, no, no. Or shattered it. It shattered into shards. But it did fall in one piece. But it. Like all the. All the shards fell, like, in the shape of the door. It was. Was bizarre. And then we were walking on broken glass, and we looked at each other, like. And then from. For years after that, whenever that song came on, we changed the channel. We would change the channel because we're looking at what. What could possibly break, what could shatter. Yeah. Are you sure it wasn't playing in the background, Francis? I'm pausing. It wasn't, but. Oh, my God. That was the first time I knew there was like, some higher order. Some higher order. Yeah. That's something I started to appreciate. Silly spirit. Trying to mess with your mojo. Bingo. Yeah. Somebody with a sense of humor. Yeah, that had to be the case, so. Yeah, that's true, I guess. I think that more and more as I get older, too. Yeah. How about you? Does your spirituality or your. I don't know what you want to call it. Connection. Kind of grown as you've aged. Yeah, I. I do think so. Aged. I hate that word. As you've aged. Matured there, you guys. You've matured. Yeah, I think it has. I think it has. My. My sense of. It's. It's changed. It is definitely changed. Right. So I think when I was younger, it was much more, you know, what. You learn, like, what you learn, like, by the book. By the book. And I think now it's much more what I feel and what I experience. Experience and how I. How I imagine the world. Yeah, I think I. I probably say the same. So I was. I grew up Christian in a bunch of different Christian religions, like Anglican, Methodist, Baptist, Episcopalian. Those are denominations. Yeah, the denominations. Thank you. United Church of Christ. So we moved around. We did them all. And the one common thread was always the music. Right. And through the music is how I learned most of the Bible because I fell asleep during the sermons or played or whatever. But so my whole concept of an other was just God. Because that's like you said, that's what we learned. Yeah. And then I guess it really wasn't until I was much older, I'd say in my 50s, before I started to see and connect different things. Like I remember Angela called me the Woo Woo cfo. Yeah. Because I actually started to like, look at things like Abraham Hicks or all of the literature all the way back to the guy who wrote that first book, Napoleon Hill. Not the first book. First Napoleon Hill. Think you grow rich. The first book was probably written back in the medieval orb of the bcs. I don't know if they wrote on what they wrote on back then, but the philosophies have been there forever. Yeah. Yeah. And then I realized they're all the same. Like not all, but generally. Yeah, there's, there's there. If you, if you can, if you think abstractly enough, there is a. There's a common thread. Right. That you can see throughout a lot of different religions. Right. And then the dots started to connect for me at that point. So I thought that's kind of cool thing about getting older is that that perspective has broadened. I don't know what else has jumped out at you as kind of a cool thing as you've gotten older. A cool thing. A couple of cool things I can think of. I think I. I give fewer fucks. Yes. I think when I was younger gave way too many. Like I gave way too many. You give several fucks still? I do, I do. But like it was a lot more. It was a lot more. I think I spent a lot of years, energy and a lot of energy contorting myself to meet expectations of other people. I think, I think we probably. I did that too. I think I still do a little bit, but I've gotten much more aware of it. Yeah. Much more aware of it. And I've gotten more. I mean the words selfish, I guess. Like I'll now go. Whereas before I might not have said no, I really don't want to do that. Now I'll say it. So self care matters. Yeah. Like I think there's boundaries, I think there's an appreciation that. Yeah, you have to. Nobody else is going to take care of you. You have to take care of you. For those kind of things. Yeah, yeah, that's. That's really true. And in my business I can see many more boundaries than I had before. And it just makes for much Peaceful life. The other thing, I think maybe it's the same as giving a few fucks is I was so I had to be right. Like, up until I was about 35, I, like, I knew everything. Like, if you're wondering who the smartest person in the world was in. She was the one. When I met her, what, the 1990s, the. It was me. I knew everything in my little head. And I would fight things to the death. All the things. Like with you work in particular, I would just take it to the end because I had to be right. And I don't know when that let go, but, boy, was that freeing. Yeah. Yeah. It's kind of fun not having to be right. Unbelievable. The freedom that comes with it when you. When you just allow somebody else to have it. It feels really, really cool. Especially when you were as black and white as I was. Like, there was no. There was no gray area. And it just. Yeah, you're right. It's just so much easier. Number one, you learn a lot more. Well, you do. I think you. You're. You become more open to. To other people's ideas. Yeah. And that a lot of times it's just perspective. You're saying the same thing with different perspectives. And so, like. So that's the thing, I think. Know when you look back and when you. You, like, even you look at some of our. You look at our kids, you know, there's a lot of. The world is still, like, they see fewer shades of gray than we see. I feel like they see fewer shades of gray. That's a youth thing, I think. I do think that's a youth thing. That's just because you haven't seen all the stuff yet. I think that's. It's kind of good and bad about being older is you, like, you see more stuff so, you know, more like you. You know that things aren't as black and white as they're cut out to be or is. But on the other hand, that's kind of nice for you. But on the other hand, it's really hard to see people struggle with what you struggled with. Yeah. And you can't. They have to go through it themselves. And. But like, you know, I do think, you know, on the. On the flip side, you lose some of the. Just some of the. The beauty of idealism. Idealism, you know, the feeling that things could really be really good. I want to put a twist on that and say it's not necessarily lost idealism. It's a broader perspective with more possibilities because it's not idealism to say everybody will be happy with the things I'm happy with. That's just silly. But we don't know that when we're 18. But now I can say, oh, I can really get along with a whole bunch of people. Not because I contort myself, but because I can listen and appreciate that it's not black and white and there is a different perspective and there is common ground. That's actually my big theme these days. I know it is, I know it is. Is there's more common ground than not. And, and I think knowing that's just so much more peaceful. But then when does it. But does it, but does it, does it. In some, in some cases, does that also cause you to become a little less active? And I, I mean like active for change. Right. So if you, if you know a different. It's a different active. But like I feel like there's something about holding an ideal that makes you want to. That fight for change, fight for things to be better, fight for things. I think that's what it doesn't want to fight anymore. Versus when you get, when you get to that position where you're like, it's all cycles, it's all going to come around. Though that's not the position at all. What I'd say is we've been, we've been gay our whole marriage, but since we're both gay. Right. So we met in the 90s. Yes. And early, early 90s. And it wasn't as accepted a thing back then. And we didn't go out and carry banners and fight the fight. We just lived our lives. People did what I'm saying, but people. Did so that we could live more easily. Yeah, no, that I think they did. Oh, see, I. Well, first of all, yeah, people in the 70s and 80s, absolutely. Like what they had to go through was horrific. I'm not, not downplaying that at all. But I'm saying that once you got to the 90s and you were already standing on those people's shoulders, which we were, we had a much easier time. Sure we did. And we chose not. Well, I chose, maybe I shouldn't speak for you not to go out and carry the banners and scream things and make people change their ways. Instead we just lived our normal, boring married life and people caught on and changed their minds. And the place I think about that most incredibly happening was at Christchurch in Ridley Park. I mean, we were in the, you know, a very conservative area, blue collar conservative area of Philadelphia and we had a house in A neighborhood. And we clearly lived together. And at church it was pretty funny because they all just assumed we were friends because that never occurred to them. And wonderful people. Like, we were in a Bible study. We had it at our house. We love. The ladies were probably in their 60s. Oh, gosh, 70s, I'm guessing 60s or 70s. And we were in the choir and all the things. And then Deb got pregnant. And I remember that it hit them, oh, my God, these are lesbians. And we don't care. And I don't think there's any other way that would have ever hit their radar screen than the way we happen to do that. Is it easier and less Hassley? Sure. But we also couldn't have done it to your point if the 70s and 80s hadn't done it. So I'm wondering to some degree, are we sitting at one of. Are we sitting at one of those junctures now? Well, we could be, but here's my thing. What I want to do is active. I tend to believe that the only way anything's going to happen is if we get rid of the polarization, identify the common ground, and then say, okay, now we've identified the common ground. What are the things we can give on? What are the things we can't give on? And let's actually talk about them as opposed to what's happening now, which is just total polarity. And do I think that's more important than carrying a banner? Because all carrying a banner is going to do right now. But no, I'm not going to say it's more important. Equally as important. Equally as important. Because the marches and the noise are critical. I don't mean to downplay them at all. But it also continues to polarize at the same time that we're making our points or people are out there making points. I think we need to figure out how to make it work. Just making our points on both sides of a spectrum that's so far apart isn't going to progress anything. Yeah. There's no. There's no desire. There's no understanding what the end game is. Yeah, yeah. Because everybody's going back to my toy. Everybody's right. Yeah. Yeah. And there's just not a right. So that's. I don't think it's just like, I'm going, oh, it's just cycles and, you know, let it work its way out at all. It's what needs to be done to fix things. Yeah, you got to get along. Anything else about getting old that you like? Anything else about Getting old. That I like. Older. Older. That I like maturing, as we say. I. I think I like. I like the idea of becoming a grandma. I'm not saying, like, it has to happen immediately, but I love the idea of life coming back around again. That's pretty cool in a. In a different way. That's pretty cool. Yeah, that is. It's an exciting. It's an exciting idea. That's pretty neat is actually one thing that I heard somewhere. I forget where. I think I told you this. That, like, when a woman's born or conceived, I guess, or even born, all of their eggs are already there, right? So when a child of a woman has a baby, that baby was all the way back all the generations, through all the moms, because you were born with the eggs. That she was born with the eggs. If she. If she has babies that will be used for that. You were born with yours from your mom, she was born with hers from her mom. Does that make any sense, what I'm saying? You're looking at me like I've lost my. I. I have to unders. I'd have to look that biology up. I don't know. I don't know where I heard it, whether I heard it from, like, a reliable source or it was just like, oh, the Internet. I don't. Yeah, I don't know. I'd have to look that up. I think it might have been a doctor that said it. Like one of those. I still have to look that up to read it myself. I think we look. I love you, but let's look it up. All right. I think we should look it up. Chat GPT. We can chat. We can chat GPT. That's fine. Perfect. See if she knows the answer. So here we are. Great to chat with you all. On today's topic, somebody has to go to work. The good stuff about aging. Oh, yeah. What I do is not work, apparently, but Deb has to go to work. So you make sure like and subscribe here. Tell us what you like about getting older, whether you're turning 30 or you're turning 60 or you're turning 90. Let us know what you think in the comments. Yeah, no, I will say this for the idea, for folks who are thinking about what it's like to get older. Julia Louis Dreyfus has a podcast. What's it called? I can't remember the name of it. When. What's the name of her pod? Well, they'll drop it in. They'll drop in the name, drop it. In, because it's really cool. She talks to other women about the idea of getting older. Very cool. Yeah. And it's really been. It's interesting to hear the people that she interviews and what they're exploring. We'll have to check that out. Well, there you go. Check that out. But like. And subscribe us because we just talked about it too. Have a good week. We'll see you next time. See ya. Sa.