This weekend I presented my work for the first time, at the annual conference of the Council on Contemporary Families, a group of social scientists and practitioners whose work I greatly respect. The title of the talk was “The Value of Work in Late Life,” but I pulled a slight bait-and-switch, because it turns out that this project isn’t about work any more. It's about ageism, starting with our own internalized biases.  Here’s the ten-minute talk I gave:

The poster child of this story on CNN.com today is Jack Borden, a 101-year-old attorney who practices fulltime in Weatherford, Texas. Retirement is the last thing on his mind. “I have to use a walker because of old age, so there's not much else I could do except sit in my house. Why do that when I can not only enjoy life, but help some people?" In Borden’s view, as in Bill and Ruth Stein’s,  limited mobility is a catalyst for staying on the job rather than a reason to take a load off.

I’ve been working on the Introduction for the book proposal, and am delighted by the fact that a number of ideas fell nicely into place. One of them was the framing of three central paradoxes of aging well.  The first I knew intuitively.  The third one was a complete surprise when I encountered it through my reading; then (duh!) I realized that it mirrored my own experience. The second one I only figured out a few weeks ago, while trying to synthesize research findings.

When I posted about becoming an “old person in training,” I was talking the talk. Participants in a three-hour sensitivity training program called Xtreme Aging are walking the walk. Handicapped by glasses that blur vision, cotton that blocks hearing, and gloves that impair dexterity, they find out how hard it can be to carry out routine tasks like dialing a cell phone or fishing change from a purse.

Renowned industrial designer Eva Zeisel is still at it at 101, despite macular degeneration that means she can only see bright objects, and only indistinctly. That hasn’t dimmed her sense of style: when I ask permission to take a photograph, she instructs me to move a pot of pink impatiens closer to pep up the background.

It’s been chastening and illuminating to see certain preconceived notions fall by the wayside as my research progresses. An early one was the assumption that good health was a precondition for an active old age. Although I expected to encounter the occasional, extraordinary geriatric Stephen Hawking, it seemed intuitively obvious. And certainly most of the people I’ve spoken with are exceptionally healthy, remaining physically mobile as well as mentally agile. Good luck, good genes.

But many also suffer from chronic or degenerative disease — and it doesn’t keep them from their work.

How important is good health? Heading into this project, I presumed it was a sine qua non of active old age. That’s what common sense would dictate, right? Paradoxically, it’s not what I’m observing in my interviews.