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Today we conclude this 17 part series to Baby Boomers on Positive Aging and the “Autumn of Life. Much of this series has be taken from our new book LIFE IN FULL, and our publisher has agreed to give away 6 copies of the book to Meridian Readers. Simply comment on this article (or on the series in general) and the name you use on your comment will be put into a random drawing and we will list the 6 winners and have the books sent out next week.

To conclude this series, we thought it might be interesting to share the brief story of how the books title came about. Sometimes naming a book is the tricky part. If you name it before you begin, the title always changes because your thoughts evolve as you write the book. If you wait until it is finished, the book has become so many things that it’s hard to boil it down to one title.

With this book, after going through at least a dozen possible titles and subtitles, it occurred to us that most of the possibilities we considered and rejected still have something to say about what the book is…so they might work as a kind of a shorthand preface. Here are a few of them:

YOUR AUTUMN

Why Fall is Life’s Richest Season…

And How to make it Even Better

FINDING LIFE’S NEW PRIME

Why Just over The Hill is the Best Place to Be…

And How to make the gentle slope longer and smoother

NOW YOU KNOW

Why This is the Best Age in Which to Age

And How to Spend your Extra Years on What Matters

YOUR SECOND LIFE

Why Your next 20 Years will be Completely Different than Your Last 40

And How to Relish and Re-invent this new life

65 IS THE NEW 45
Why We are the First Generation to get a 20-year Bonus

And How to Expand and Exploit Every Day of It

THE POWER OF LONGEVITY

Why you should plan to be 100

And How to Prosper in The Long Twilight

CHOOSING PEOPLE OVER THINGS AND LOVE OVER TREASURE

Why Relationships Matter Now More than Achievements

And How to Reconcile and Rescue all of Them

Since we couldn’t use all of these titles and sub titles, we incorporated a few of them into the names of some of the book’s chapters. But the sheer number of possibilities and the fact that the title could have gone so many different ways was an indication that this whole life-phase has a lot to it and can be full of excitement, variety, and adventure.

And, you will notice throughout all of the alternative sub-titles the recurring theme of “Why and How.” Because really, at our age, we’ve got most of the What, Where, When, and Who questions answered. It’s the Why and the How that count now. Knowing Why we want to have another 20 or 30 good years is important, and understanding How to make it happen—well, and with joy—is what we all need to understand.

Ultimately we choose the title Life In Full because it is a positive expression of how rich life can be and how much of it there is left; and because our research told us that what people fear most, as they move into life’s later stages, is emptiness. Any such fears, we believe, are based on old perceptions and not on current reality or possibility. And with that, we set out to make this book a testimony and a manifesto that life’s autumn can be the fullest time of all.

Click here to comment on this article or on the series, and to be eligible for the drawing for free copies of the book.

And tune in next week for a new mini-series on a new Half Diet Diet that is an integral part of preserving the health that is such a key element of Life in Full.