I have a January birthday, so aging is on my mind. There's a lot of advice out there about how to live long and well. Following a Mediterranean diet, regular exercise, and socializing are all well-established contributors to healthy aging and longevity. Snooze. This is not exactly breaking news. We've all heard this before.
But I recently stumbled upon a lesser-known nugget of wisdom about positive aging from Dick Van Dyke, the legendary song-and-dance man from Mary Poppins and The Dick Van Dyke Show who celebrated his 100th birthday on December 13th. He attributes his longevity to a simple strategy.
“I never really was able to work up a feeling of hate. There were things I didn’t like, people I don’t like and disapprove of. But I never really was able to do a white heat kind of hate.”
It’s a remarkable admission from someone who has made it through a full century of reasons to be angry. He’s lived through wars, social upheaval, and his own twenty-five-year battle with alcoholism. Yet somehow, he never tumbled into that toxic vat of a “white heat kind of hate.”
Science backs him up. Research shows that recurrent episodes of anger can impair blood vessel function and heighten inflammation in the body, raising markers like IL-6 that accelerate aging. Chronic hostility functions like a physiological tax, straining the systems that keep us resilient. But Van Dyke’s insight goes deeper than physiology. What he’s describing is a kind of emotional discipline, not suppressing feelings, but refusing to let them calcify into the corrosive resentment that, as he says, eats you up from the inside.
In our current moment, we’re constantly fed reasons to be outraged — algorithms designed to trigger anger, news cycles built on conflict, social media engineered for fury. Van Dyke’s wisdom suggests that resisting this pull, making the conscious decision not to let anger harden into hate, might be one of the most important choices we make for our health and our lives.
Van Dyke’s insight reminds me of the three questions Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield says people ask at the end of their lives: Did I love well? Did I live fully? Did I learn to let go? At any stage of our lives, these questions have a clarifying power and reorient us to what matters most: connection, engagement, and the ability to let things go (and not hate).
Did I love well?
This isn’t just about romantic love, though that counts. It’s about whether we let ourselves love the people around us, family, friends, community, even strangers. It’s about whether we treat people with kindness and show up when it matters.
Did I live fully?
This question challenges us to look at whether we actually engage with life or just watch it pass by. Do we say yes to experiences? Do we pursue what matters to us? Do we let ourselves feel things deeply? Kornfield suggests we ask ourselves whether we’re following a path with heart, not the path that looks good on paper or makes sense to other people, but the one that feels alive to us. Living fully doesn’t mean being reckless or chasing every impulse. It means being present to our own lives, awake to experience, willing to show up even when things are hard or uncertain.
Did I learn to let go?
This might be the hardest question, especially now when we’re surrounded by so much to rage against. But learning to let go means refusing to let that rage consume us. It means releasing our grip on how things should be, on past hurts, on the need to be right. It means we can disapprove, we can work for change, we can feel frustrated but we don’t let those feelings calcify into the kind of resentment that corrodes us from within.
What strikes me most about these three questions is how they reframe what matters as we age.
Having just had a birthday, I've been thinking a lot about these questions. We spend so much energy worrying about decline, about what we’re losing, about how things used to be or should be. Kornfield’s questions redirect us to what matters. They’re not about what we’ve achieved or accumulated. They’re about the quality of our presence, the generosity of our hearts, and our willingness to release what we cannot keep.
This year, I'm doing my best to answer these questions with action. I spent my birthday at Citymeals on Wheels with family and friends, packing more than 1,550 meals for homebound older New Yorkers. Along with nourishment, the goal is to deliver connection, care, and dignity. There may be countless reasons to feel rage right now, but I’ve learned that it’s hard to hold onto resentment when your hands are busy helping someone else.
As Van Dyke reminds us, positive aging is about letting go, treating people with kindness, and moving forward.
Republished with permission from The Dose — subscribe here.
Dr. Samantha Boardman is a New York-based positive psychiatrist committed to fixing what’s wrong and building what’s strong. Based on 15 years of experience, she helps clients cultivate vitality and boost resilience. Visit her website and follow her on Instagram.
