MARY: What I’m curious about is — if you need to get away, and you close your eyes because you’ve just got to get away from wherever you are, with whomever you’re with, where do you go?

LILY: There used to be exercises — many people follow a guided meditation. I always thought — I’m lying in a hammock by a creek or a river and I just like to bliss out. A friend has a little farm kind of place up near the Bay area, and she has a hammock. She sent me a picture of it, and it was idyllic; exactly what I’d always pictured in my mind. I keep it close to me in my office.

MARY: You’re so lucky because the person who taught me meditation taught me numbers!

LILY: Well, you can meditate on anything.

MARY: That’s a lovely place to go. The trouble is, if I’m trying to relax or get away from something, I would go to numbers since I was taught that, and at one time it actually did work. But I find that now I have so many things to do that what happens is that I go to lists.

JOAN: Not good. OK. Let’s hear some wisdom. Some advice to a 21-year-old, or a 42-year-old, or a 48-year-old.

LILY: I’m still looking for advice, so I don’t know if I can give any.

MARY: I will give you one that I read a long time ago, and I really believe in it. I’ve checked it out with various people, doctors and psychiatrists. It’s this: You should never have a birthday past 60. Because birthdays are very bad for your health. You should just give up the idea that you’re getting older, because the mind controls the body to such an extraordinary degree that your mind is encouraging the aging of your cells, and aging to meet your expectation of getting older. If you just stop celebrating it, and just stopped thinking that you ever got older, it would be so much better for your health. It’s an enormous issue and nobody makes enough of it.

LILY: I totally believe that. I used to think that you could really think yourself as young as you wanted to be.

MARY: But I think you have to really, really believe it. It’s like anything else.

LILY: I don’t know how accurate this is; it may be something I invented and thought was true: that the human mind cannot hold two opposing thoughts at the same time. So if you hold a positive thought, you can’t hold a negative one. Speaking to what you’ve just said, if you think of yourself aging, you’re thinking somewhat negatively.

MARY: The trouble is, it’s been so long since I’ve had a birthday, and it’s so long since I’ve celebrated my children’s birthdays, so they’re extremely concerned about the birthday presents they haven’t had.