Showing a spirit of 'lightness'

When you go to lunch to interview Chieko Okazaki, expect to be interrupted. She's a colorful Life Saver. People are drawn to her like candy.

To tell the truth, it's why I also enjoy interviewing her. She perks me up.

Let me tell you what I know about her.

First, she is thinking about another book. And she has a big box of talks she's given over the years that would make a good one.

She's traveling almost nonstop — except when she stops to be with her grandkids.

She's talking to men in prison, to women at firesides and to nosy newspaper columnists.

And know this: Contrary to what you have heard, Sister Okazaki does not — I repeat — does not look and act half her age.

She looks and acts a third of her age.

Hundreds of people have asked her to share her secret.

Let me try.

It has to do with genetics, of course, and with diet and exercise. But more than that, it has to do with "lightness." Conversations with Sister Okazaki never bog down over the terrible state of the world. The talk is always about the beauty and the wonder of the solutions — and how one can put those solutions within reach of people.

Her Fountain of Youth is the Fount of Many Blessings.

She's buoyant.

As I helped her over the ice, I could swear her bones were hollow like a bird's.

She floats wherever she goes.

But more than that, Sister Okazaki stays light and young at heart because she is so well-connected — not connected to people in power, but connected to people in general. She is always engaged in the lives of others. Hers aren’t "random acts of kindness." She follows a steeper path — she deals in acts of kindness that are deliberate, personal and open-ended. And that will give any person a real spiritual workout. Spiritual health — like physical health — demands robust exercise. But the reward for such sacrifice is vitality.

Sister Okazaki takes people as she finds them — a trait, she says, she inherited from her mother. Her mother didn’t judge or scold. She saw people as simply following "their own way." And for her daughter, that phrase has now become a motto.

She's built her life around Joseph Smith's notion of teaching people correct principles and letting them make their own choices.

All people are different. All have "their own way." Some make unrealistic demands of her, some interrupt her lunch, put her on a pedestal or treat her like she’s made of porcelain. But that is simply "their way." Her way is to help them along "their way."

And that goes double for newspaper columnists who spend too much time talking and not enough listening.

Newspaper columnists who, like Sister Okazaki, should eat less pasta and eat more spinach salad.

Heavy, sleepy, bald-headed newspaper columnists who will never be interrupted and asked how they stay so young.