A New Stage of Life

I am so happy to be starting this blog. All my life, I’ve been learning things and then sharing what I’ve learned with others. I did it for 34 years as a high school English teacher, and then for five years as a career counselor. When I retired at 64 in 2012, I had no idea that I would have the opportunity to do this one more time.

I thought when someone retired, they played golf, and that is what I was doing when a woman in my foursome mentioned that she was going to Chicago for a conference with Richard Rohr. I had never heard of Richard Rohr. Then the following weekend in an enneagram workshop, someone mentioned Richard Rohr, who among other things is an enneagram teacher. After hearing his name twice in one week, I had to check him out, and because I’m a voracious reader, I looked at the list of books he had written. One title really caught my attention: Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life. And the very first paragraph of this book changed the way I saw my future. Rohr wrote:

“A journey into the second half of our own lives awaits us all. Not everybody goes there, even though all of us get older, and some of us get older than others. A ‘further journey’ is a well-kept secret, for some reason. Many people do not even know there is one. There are too few who are aware of it, or know that it is different from the journey of the first half of life.”(vii)

When I read this quote about the “second half” of life, I remembered something I had read when I was a career counselor. In his book The Big Shift, Marc Freedman wrote that he had just finished the book tour for his book “Encore,” and he decided to take a vacation with his family. He made a reservation at a Holiday Inn with his AARP card. When he told his wife what he had done, she asked, “Did you ask for two cribs?” He hadn’t. But when his wife asked this, he suddenly realized that something new was going on in his life. AARP and two cribs didn’t used to go together. Freedman realized that later life had changed. He realized that all these extra years of longevity hadn’t just been tacked on to the end of our lives; instead, we have been given a whole new stage of life between middle age and really old age, a new stage that we are going to have to create.

When I put what Freedman and Rohr were saying together, I was hooked. I felt very lucky to have been let in on this “well-kept secret” at this time in my life. I couldn’t wait to set out on that “further journey,” and I couldn’t wait to find out how the second half of my life would be different than the first half.

As I was reading Falling Upward, I was also taking two classes at the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI). OLLI is like an open university for older adults. Anyone who wants to can submit a proposal for any class they might want to teach. When I finished reading Rohr’s book, I decided that I wanted to teach a class about the second half of life. I wanted to let as many people as I could in on this “well-kept secret.” I submitted a proposal to teach “Spirituality in the Second Half of Life” based on Falling Upward and another book that I happened to have on my shelf called Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally Really Grow Up by James Hollis.

Not only was my proposal accepted, but I had a long waiting list. I limited my class to 15 people, so we could spend most of our time in discussion. In 2013–14, I facilitated this class four times, twice at OLLI and twice at my church First Universalist Church in Minneapolis. I am thrilled that many of the participants in my classes thought this information was as life-changing as I did. When I retired, I had no idea what my retirement was going to look like, but everything just seemed to be falling in place. I couldn’t wait to see what would come next.

You can contact me at “karenw0214@gmail.com” or 651–399-9571.