Growing, Older

Perhaps the most pernicious of the common ageist ideas in our society is the assumption that because middle-aged and older bodies show some wear and tear, that all growth has stopped. While it's true that some older people do choose to stop growing, it is neither necessary nor healthy to do so.

People who write about the second half of life consistently name seven areas of growth and learning for those who develop a robust maturity: adventurousness, openness, outrageousness, resilience, self-possession, wisdom, and soulfulness.

Adventurousness

Here's what I've come to see as the fundamental choice each of us faces throughout the second half of life: Are you going to get bigger, or are you going to get smaller?

Think about the older people you know or have known. Who got smaller? I can think of people who retired to gated seniors' communities. First they became afraid to leave those communities, then afraid to leave their units, and finally fearful that even the staff who came in to clean would rob them.

Physically they became smaller, with a smaller and smaller range of motion. They didn't make new friends. As old friends died, their circle of connection shrank. They became less curious. They didn't learn new skills. Their brains got slow and rusty from lack of use.

Now let's look at the other choice. Who do you know who got bigger with the passage of time? Who became more themselves, more real, the older they got? There's an interesting paradox when I ask myself that question, because the number of people I can think of who got bigger is smaller than the number who got smaller, but the people who got bigger occupy more room in my heart. They feel almost larger than life.

Ruth Masters is one of my personal examples of a person who keeps getting bigger. At eighty-three she still hikes and does trail work in the mountains, even though her knees are giving her grief. She knows there are risks to being there, but she says, "There's no place I'd rather die than up a mountain somewhere."

Ruth is an active environmentalist, fundraising to preserve special pieces of land. She's no stranger to non-violent civil disobedience in defence of the environment. "It's great being old," she says with a twinkle in her eye, "because they don't know what to do with you."

Ruth is always out and about at public events. She is opinionated, certainly, but also curious and open. There's a playfulness about her. She's one of those people everyone seems to know, and when her name is mentioned, people smile.

What is it that makes some people keep getting bigger, while others shrink with the passage of time?

Many people see retirement as a kind of safe harbour. They have no responsibilities; they no longer have to take risks; they can take it easy and coast. If you relate to the second half of life that way, you will shrink, I guarantee it.

Why is that so? Imagine that your life is made up of three circles. In the inner circle are activities that are completely familiar and predictable to you. The inner circle is a comforting place to visit. As a place to live, it's boring.

Around the outer perimeter of your life are all those activities so completely unknown and unpredictable as to be terrifying. It's not a fun place, even for a short visit.

In between the circle of the completely known and the completely unknown is the circle of adventure, filled with activities that are somewhat familiar, but with sufficient newness and unpredictability to offer challenge.

Life tends to be most satisfying when we spend enough time in the inner circle to feel secure, and enough time in the middle circle to feel a sense of challenge and excitement.

An unfortunate fact about the three circles is that they are not static. If you spend your days in the inner circle, the outer circle will steadily push inwards till it starts to nibble away at your inner circle. In fact, there seems to be some either/or function: If you're not actively making that middle circle bigger, the outer one will creep in on you.

If your idea of retirement is that you're always going to feel safe and comfortable, your life will be boring. You will be boring. And you will shrink.

If you want the second half of your life to feel like an adventure, if you want to feel excited and fully alive, you'll need to challenge yourself, push the edges, do things you've never done before. You need to set up new opportunities for yourself to learn and grow -- when you're fifty, and even when you're ninety. That's the price you pay if you want to keep getting bigger as you get older.

In talking about the choice to get bigger or smaller, I am not talking about something hypothetical or future tense. If work has been dominating too much of your life for too long, by mid-life you're probably already starting to shrink. Your circle of friendships may be getting smaller. You may be less involved in your community. Your range of interests and hobbies may be shrinking. Being overweight or unfit may already be limiting your physical capabilities. Theoretically, all those losses can be reversed when you retire, but the smaller you get, the harder it's going to be to turn the tide. The best way to ensure that you'll get bigger rather than smaller in the second half of life is to make a commitment to start getting bigger right now.

Openness

I met Lila Carrol when I was twenty-six. She was eighty-two. I had travelled across Canada in a Volvo station wagon, which I had outfitted as a camper. Lila was a relative of a friend of a friend. The friend had said, "If you get as far as Courtenay, call Lila -- you'll really like her." I did call Lila, not even quite sure why. "Yes," she said, "come for tea." I went for tea, and Lila immediately began asking questions. She asked questions more personal than I would usually expect to be asked by a complete stranger. She also told me about herself and invited my questions. She invited me to stay in her spare room for a day or two. Over the next two days we talked and talked. By the time I left I felt I knew Lila better than many people I had known for years. She already knew more about me than most people did. Sometimes I suspect I eventually moved to Courtenay in part because of how welcome Lila made me feel.

What was it about Lila that made our contact so powerful?

Her door was open. I may have been the one who took the first step by calling her, but in a very real way Lila was the one who initiated the relationship. She invited me to her home. Once I was there, she invited me to stay. She invited me to tell her about myself. She looked for ways she could connect to me rather than fearing me as a stranger. She wasn't without caution -- she invited me to tea and looked me over before inviting me to stay -- but she took risks.

Lila was curious, curious about what my dreams were, curious about what I'd learned on my journey. She wanted to know what was important to me, what brought me joy, what caused me distress. She had strong religious beliefs, but they weren't etched in stone. "The truth isn't fragile," she said. Lila wanted to know what Quakerism was and how it was different. Her curiosity engaged us and opened me.

Lila was open-hearted. More than once she cried during those two days. She laughed a lot. She allowed me to see the places where she felt vulnerable, unsure, and sad. She allowed me to affect her. She was generous with her time and attention. She was willing to trust in my goodwill. She was fully present, fully herself.

I was twenty-six. I didn't usually hang out with "old ladies." But Lila was so Lila it was impossible to think of her as an old lady. When she talked about something that happened when she was twenty-two, the twenty-two-year-old was there in the room. When she talked about being seven, I encountered the seven-year-old.

Who have you known in your life who has shown an outsized ability to establish connection and print themselves large upon your soul? When we meet people who feel larger than life, it's easy to think they've always been that way, to forget that what we see is often the result of decades of practising the skills of open heart, open mind, open door.

Outrageousness

There is a liberation that can happen when we finally let go of needing to please or impress other people.

The roles our society prescribes for seniors are suffocatingly narrow. Seniors are supposed to relax somewhere in a hammock, play bridge and golf, perhaps go to a prayer meeting or two. They're not supposed to be too loud, too angry, too sexual, or too political. And they definitely shouldn't be living in communes.

Those old scripts for senior citizens are gradually breaking down as millions of seniors studiously ignore them. Nonetheless, it's good to cultivate a certain degree of chutzpa if you plan to keep getting bigger as you get older.

The other reason why it's good to have chutzpa is that you may feel called to explore your shadow in the second half of life. Exploring the shadow means going into an area where you felt clumsy, inept, or embarrassed in the past. You need a particular kind of damn-the-torpedoes courage to explore the shadow.

Jane Juska is a wonderful example. Jane was a retired schoolteacher. Divorced and living alone, she had convinced herself for years that she was past being interested in sex. At age sixty-six she realized, No, it's not true. I am still interested. She placed the following ad in the "personals" column of the New York Review of Books:

Before I turn 67 -- next March -- I would like to have lots of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.

Over the next year, Juska had romantic and erotic relationships with several men, including one half her age. She even found a man who shared her appreciation for novelist Anthony Trollope. Then she described the whole experience in a book -- A Round-Heeled Woman -- that became a bestseller. That's how outrageous you can be if you don't let others decide what you can or cannot do in the second half of life.

Sam Keen was a successful writer and teacher of philosophy. One month before his sixty-second birthday he went to his first class at Trapeze School. That's right, trapeze as in the circus, as in flying trapeze. He became hooked immediately, eventually setting up a trapeze in his backyard so that classes could be held there. In his mid-sixties, he and his friends established a "flying" school called Upward Bound.

Juska and Keen both offer us examples, not just of how to be outrageous in the second half of life, but also of where that challenge often lies. It's hard enough to be outrageous in an arena where we feel talented and experienced. In the second half of life we are often challenged to go where we feel least capable and most unsure of ourselves.

It was easy for Jane Juska to be successful at teaching. It was so easy, in fact, that for many years she had used an obsession with teaching to push down and push aside her longing for intimacy. Teaching wasn't where Jane felt lacking or incomplete in her life. Relationships, particularly sexual relationships, was an area where she was woefully inexperienced and lacking in confidence. To feel whole and complete, at age sixty-six she had to go back and do what she had been too afraid and too wounded to do as a younger woman.

Sam Keen also had to leave his strengths behind to go where his dreams demanded. He'd spent his life as a philosopher, living in the kingdoms of the mind. What connection he'd had with his body had been macho -- strong, hard, in charge. To excel on the trapeze he had to learn grace and softness, had to learn a new kind of trust in his body. But again, there was no academic success he could imagine that had the immediate excitement of "learning to fly."

It is a natural human tendency to do what we're good at, to focus our energies where they are rewarded, and to avoid activities where we feel clumsy, inadequate, or unsure of ourselves.

Maybe in the first half of your life you developed a strong, sharp mind. Perhaps you've become so good at thinking that you use your mind to solve every problem, even the problems where a soft heart is needed. To enter the world of the soft heart, you'll need to leave all that expertise behind. You'll need to become a rank amateur. You'll need to make dumb and embarrassing mistakes. And it's probably exactly what you need to do if you are ever to feel whole and complete in this life.

What's in your shadow? Is there something you wanted to do when you were younger that you never quite got around to? Was there some interest that fascinated you but that you were too shy, too embarrassed or too fearful to pursue? In the second half of life, you have the freedom to do whatever you didn't get around to in the first half. Especially if you remember: you can be outrageous.

Resilience

Resilience in the face of life's vicissitudes is often considered to be a trait of character, perhaps even a virtue. Those who have studied resilience have come to see it instead as a learned set of skills and attitudes, a skill set that it's important to learn as we grow older.

George Vaillant is a psychologist who was involved in three wellness research studies which monitored large groups of people over several decades and sought to understand why it that some people are able to age much more slowly and gracefully than others. In his book, Aging Well, Vaillant argues that the resilience which typifies successful aging is a product of what he calls mature defenses. He clarifies: "In everyday life, the term mature defenses refers to our capacity to turn lemons into lemonade and not to turn molehills into mountains."

Vaillant reports that he had to learn to use only objective criteria when assessing the health of his study participants. To illustrate why, he describes meeting two study participants for their annual reviews. One identified himself as a "heart patient" and was anxious and withdrawn, afraid to exercise or be sexual. The second remembered halfway through his review, "Oh yeah, George, I had a small heart attack last year, so I'm paying more attention to getting enough exercise now." Vaillant found himself thinking one man was really sick, while the other was still healthy
-- till he reviewed their medical charts and found they had nearly identical heart conditions.

Mature defenses are not denial. Where the "heart patient" retreated, the man who had a "small" heart attack was actively engaged in improving his heart health. Where one person saw the heart attack just as something that had happened to him, the other adopted the identity of "heart patient."

I can remember years ago, as part of my education for working with handicapped individuals, receiving training about multiple sclerosis from Tim, a forty-something man with MS. Tim knew a whole lot about MS, but what impressed me most was his attitude. Where many people with MS got depressed or railed against the unfairness of it, Tim's attitude was simply "This is the hand I've been dealt, and my job is to play my hand the best way I know how."

He learned everything he could about MS and then measured what he had learned against his own experience. He noticed heat made his MS worse, so he changed his summer work schedule to avoid going out in the heat of the day. He experimented with dietary changes. He noticed that when he allowed himself to get tired, it aggravated his MS, so he paid particular attention to pacing himself. He noticed that whenever he got depressed, his MS got worse. His attitude became "Other people can afford to be depressed -- I can't." He noticed that many people -- especially children -- related to a person in a wheelchair as a "cripple," but did not see a person on a motorized scooter that way, so he got himself a scooter.

One of the reasons MS is such a difficult illness is that while it generally causes progressive deterioration, it is also incredibly quixotic, getting worse or going into remission pretty much at random. Sometimes what Tim called his "bag of tricks" wouldn't work, and when they did work he could never be sure it wasn't just luck. Even that uncertainty, Tim would say, was part of the hand he'd been given to play.

Tim wasn't able to cure his MS, but for several years his symptoms diminished to the point that he was able to get his scooter in and out of his car by himself, and could drive using hand controls. He was thus able to stay mobile and retain the independence that comes with mobility. Perhaps more important, he was able to use his illness as a discipline to become a relentlessly positive person.

At its best, making lemonade from life's lemons goes beyond minimizing losses. It involves learning from whatever happens and finding the positive good in every situation.

At age sixty-five, Ram Dass had a massive stroke that nearly killed him. After months of pain it left him unable to walk and able to talk only slowly, with some aphasia. Initially he went through all the fear, anger, self-pity, and grief you might expect, but he was unwilling to be a "victim" of his stroke. Two years later, writing in Still Here, he talks about his stroke as both a gift and a teacher in his life. His stroke helped him slow down from an obsessive busyness. He tells how his difficulties speaking clearly and remembering words taught him the poetry and clarity that can come when few words replace many. He shares how his disability has helped him learn to receive, to be given to, rather than always needing to be the helper.

Self-Possession

In The Force of Character, Jungian psychologist James Hillman argues that our principal task in the second half of life is to become fully and unapologetically ourselves, to become "joyfully eccentric." The lines on our faces and the grey in our hair, Hillman would argue, are badges of character we should wear with pride.

"Self-possessed" is the term we use to describe people who are relaxed and confident in their own skins. Self-possessed individuals have a certain strength and potency. They are more able to keep to their own course in life, whatever happens. They also have a capacity to give others space: If I don't need you to like me, if I don't need you to agree with me, if I don't need you to do things my way, I am more able to let you be yourself.

One of the keys to self-possession is owning all of who you are. Owning what you want even if what you want goes against your talents. Owning who you are even if society, your parents, or your children don't approve.

Self-possession can be learned. By paying attention to when and how you give away your sense of worth, you can learn to give it away less often. Adversity has its own opportunities in this regard. Losing a job or taking a politically unpopular stand can initially shake your sense of worth, but it becomes an ideal opportunity to learn to separate your worth from your social position.

One of the opportunities in the second half of life is to learn the inward half of the art of being happy. It is easy in the first half of life to seek happiness by accomplishing one or more outer goals. You can put large amounts of time and effort into manipulating the exterior world.

In the second half of life, you can begin to see how much of your happiness -- or misery -- depends on what goes on between your ears.

There's an old Buddhist story about a young prince who loved the feel of carpet on his feet. He began carpeting his palace, then the palace grounds, and finally even the road to town. The cost of miles and miles of carpet was bankrupting his kingdom. Finally, in desperation, one of his ministers had special carpet-lined sandals made. The prince loved the sandals because now he walked on carpet everywhere he went.

It is easy for young people to think that things outside them will make them happy or satisfied. In the second half of life we are more likely to notice how much more important than what happens to us is what we tell ourselves about what happens. Equally important to our pleasure is the ability to clear the mind of all the distractions and anxieties that prevent us from savouring the immediate moment. There's huge value to be had in learning to wear the prince's sandals.

Wisdom

Social scientists tell us that, as far as they are able to measure wisdom, older human beings are collectively no wiser than younger human beings. I don't think this means that it is arrogance or wishful thinking to aspire to become wise as you grow older. Rather, it indicates that for every older person who achieves wisdom as he or she ages, there is another old person who has retreated from life and who became less wise with the passage of time.

I can think of several people I know who were wiser at age thirty-five than they came to be at fifty-five or seventy-five. Fear and shrinkage do a good job of dumbing people down. I have also known people who kept learning and growing all through life, and the wiser they got, the more valuable they became to everyone who knew them.

The paradox of wisdom is that while wisdom is a destination worth seeking, don't imagine that you can ever arrive. All the wise people I have known had a striking humility about them. Know-it-alls make themselves impervious to learning; stagnation is the inevitable result. I am reminded of the old Zen koan which says that in a conversation between a wise man and a fool, the wise man will always learn more than the fool.

Soulfulness

Most North Americans, if asked, will say they believe human beings have a soul that survives the death of the body. But we don't spend a lot of time thinking about what that soul is and how it might differ from the ego.

The part of you that desperately needs to win at sports, is that your soul? How about the part that gets upset over sagging muscles? Perhaps not? Then where is your soul?

Ram Dass reports that the experience of growing older is very different in India than in North America. In India, the belief that the soul lives on through a multitude of lifetimes is a fundamental assumption, part of the everyday fabric of life. People carry their bodies, their gender, their egos, their life stories like a set of clothes that is worn today and discarded tomorrow. There is a conscious effort to experience life as a soul tied to God, rather than as an ego or a personality.

We all die, sooner or later. Believing I have a soul that will survive death does not free me from the terror of dying if the "I" I feel myself to be is the husk left to rot after the seed is gone. If I am a body, a life story, and an ego, death will feel like the loss of everything. All the marker points of growing older will be scary to me because each brings me one step closer to death and dissolution.

So how does a person learn to experience the soul? Most writers on the subject ask us to notice when we feel ourselves outside of time, however briefly, and to seek out those moments. We may feel it when we talk to loved ones long dead. Ram Dass found it as a companion to people who were dying. Some people feel it in silence, in nature, in prayer. Others feel it when they surrender to loving. Sometimes soul emerges in particular
moments: when we are holding a baby, walking quietly with a dear friend, sitting alone in the afternoon sun.

In the second half of life we all have the opportunity to untangle ourselves from the world's brouhaha and live with soulfulness. Soulfulness has a power to take us outside of time. It can bond us to others in ways that transcend time. It can take us to a place beyond fear or loss.

For those strict materialists who believe that death is the end, full stop, the Buddhist sage Gelek Rinpoche reminds us that the universe is made up of three constituents: matter, energy, and consciousness. The first two may change form, but they cannot be destroyed. Why should consciousness be different?

Death is a mystery. Maybe you don't believe we humans have souls. On the other hand, if one day you die and find you have one, it might be convenient if you are not a stranger to it.

A "Bigger" Commitment

There's a profound freedom that comes at mid-life for those who can embrace the second half of life, not as the loss of youth, but as a new adventure, as an opportunity for the full flowering of all they can be in the world.

Courage is easier said than done. But recognizing the need to keep growing and challenging yourself can strengthen your resolve. If you want the second half of life to feel like an adventure, the starting place is to make a commitment to live on life's green and growing edge.

Bruce O'Hara is a writer living in Courtenay, B.C. His latest book, Enough Already!:Breaking Free in the Second Half of Life has just been published by New Star Books of Vancouver.