At the beginning of her entertaining and informative book, The Well-Lived Life, Dr. Gladys McGarey – age 103 at time of writing – says she is often asked “the secret of a long, healthy, happy life.”

“No, I don’t run. I do occasionally do Pilates. And yes – I do eat cake. In fact, I really love cake. I even popped out of one for my 95^th birthday,” she writes. But the secret, she continues, has “nothing to do with vitamins or supplements,” but “a simple shift in perspective.”

“To be truly alive,” she notes, “we must find the life force within ourselves and direct our energy toward it.”

She distills this general idea into six “secrets,” the first one being, “you are here for a reason.”

“Each of us is here for a reason, to learn and grow and to give our gifts,” she explains. “When we are able to do so, we’re filled with the creative life energy that I call the `juice.’”

The juice, she continues, “is our reason for living. It’s our fulfillment, our joy.”

“Lives filled with juice become lives filled with purpose. And that has a profound effect not only on our mental healthy but on our physical health,” McGarey states.

Her second secret is that “all life needs to move.”

“Life itself is always in movement, so aligning with our life force means that we must always look for the flow within us,” she writes. “Children understand this. That’s why they’re always wiggling. I never stopped wiggling…. Wiggling is good for us – it indicates that life is happening around and through us. It moves our lymph, lubricates our joints and keeps our muscles from getting tight.”

The third secret is that “love is the most powerful medicine.”

“Our life force is activated by love. Love has an uncommon ability to transform everything it touches,” she explains.

The next secret is that “you are never truly alone.”

Social connections are essential, she explains. “Connective with community amplifies our individual life force by re-aligning it with the collective life force,” she writes.

The fifth secret, an especially wise one, is that “everything is your teacher.”

Even bad things carry a lesson, she states. As we get older, “we begin to extract more and more from the pain of the past. We realize that we can keep gaining lessons out of our old hurts, and they can affect how we approach what comes next.”

Finally, she advises, you must “spend your energy wildly.”

This last secret needs to be integrated with the first five. “When we align our energy with life, we create a give-and-take, sharing relationship with the source… we invest the energy we have in life. Then when we’re running low on what we need, we simply borrow it back.”

In the end, she concludes, we need to “flip our understanding on its head, from thinking that we are in life to understanding that life is in us.”

This is a mesmerizing journey of a book, well-told and filled with exercises and examples to keep your thinking on track.

A long, well-lived life will require some savings.

And if you’re saving on your own for retirement – or want to get started – look no further than the Saskatchewan Pension Plan. SPP offers a voluntary defined contribution pension plan to any Canadian with available registered retirement savings plan (RRSP) room.

You can make annual contributions to SPP up to your RRSP limit, and can transfer in any amount from other non-locked in RRSPs you may have.

SPP’s role is to grow those savings in our professionally managed, low-cost, pooled fund. When it’s time to log off for the last time at work, your retirement income options include the security of a lifetime SPP annuity payment or the more flexible Variable Benefit.

Check out SPP today!

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