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1
 Being 60:
 A Scholar’s Search for Fearlessness
Alternative title:
Being 60: On Death & Dating
Patricia Mellencamp
Table of Contents
Section I:
Death:
A Passage through Time
 
2
 Prelude: Becoming
60
 
Chapter 1: Facing Death & Aging: From Anxiety to EquanimityChapter 2: A Spiritual Quest in India: A Student of DeathChapter 3: Of Mothers, Daughters, Fairytales, and DeathChapter 4:
 
How I Learned to Read the
Wall Street Journal 
: Money, The Market,and my Mother, A Love Story
Section II:
Dating:
The Problem might not be the Prince
Chapter 5: Melodrama in Morocco: ‘Deep Sixtied’
 
Chapter 6: Sea Ranch, California & the Buddha
.
Chapter 7:
 
An Asian Odyssey: Buddhist Boot Camp
 
Chapter 8:
 
High Drama in the Himalayas: On the Road in Tibet, Nepal, andBhutanChapter 9: Southeast Asia: The Silence of HistoryChapter 10: A Man, A Plan, A Canal: PanamaChapter 11:
 
An Old Girl Can Learn New Tricks: China, the Market, and Me
.
Epilogue:
 
Now:
 Being
60 . . . or 70 or . . .FootnotesAuthor
 
3*****
 Although personal experience is used as illustration, this book is neither autobiography nor memoir. Far too many encounters and people are missing toconstitute a life. The highly selective focus is on moments of learning about fear and moving through its anxiety. So it’s about 5% of a life. Is it 
 self 
-help? Yes. Particularlybecause the goal is to find and nurture the inner self. Is it 
 how-to
? Yes. Because it relies on the updated yet ancient teachings of great beings who reveal ways to deal with fear and other emotions. But it is intimate and private rather than objective and  professional, a tale told by an amateur. The structure is a search for fearlessnessthrough events, books, countries, and finally the lense of a new, late in life love affair. And it is told from the point of view of a 60 year old woman, a feminist media scholar and author of seven books, and a single mother, unmarried for 25 years, who reveals her struggles with a late-in-life relationship, along with the self insights and happiness that emerged from confronting fear and embracing love. It is a tale of mother love and of romance, including love at first sight and travel to exotic places like an ashram in India,Tibet, Bhutan, Nepal, the remote, primitive regions of Myanmar (Burma), Vietnam, Laos,and China. It is a book which anyone who has had fear about losing a child, caring for ill and dying parents, death, aging and growing old, money, and finally, men and relationships, will understand. Along the way, Distinguished Professor Mellencamp shares her many great teachers – keeping their invaluable words intact so that they may be reapplied to other lives.
 Happiness is Not an Accident
is a creative encyclopedia of great spiritual writers,including many women, whose words are guides through life’s fears.
 And it is a book which consistently reveals the adventure and joy of being 60, a secret that has been kept from younger women for generations.
 As the Epilogue says:“Being something, anything, is to fully inhabit, or embody . . . whatever, without hedges, or qualms or self-doubt. It is a state without equivocation.
 Being 60
is toembrace all the aches, wrinkles, intelligence and experience that have accrued in sixdecades. Being 60 is facing the last part of life with an attitude – of assertion and acceptance, of curiosity and humility, of adventure and retreat, all dosed with humor. Being 60 is prime time.”
 
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