Are you starting to think about retirement, about wanting to get off the treadmill of continuous outer-directed busyness? Or have you recently retired, and are you finding yourself wondering how best to spend your time now that you no longer have to spend the majority of it at work? Or have you been retired for a while, and have you been one of those people who are as busy as you were when you were working? Do you find yourself saying, “I’m so busy. I don’t know how I ever found time to work.”
In my early blog entries, I talked about moving from the first half of life to the second half. One of the hallmarks of this transition is to feel a desire to slow down, to take some time away from constant doing to spend more time being, more time looking inward. There is no particular age at which you may begin feeling this desire, but if you wish to age consciously, you must begin honoring it when you do. And you don’t have to wait until you are retired to start slowing down and looking inward. In fact, if you start doing some of this when you’re still working, the adjustment to retirement won’t be as hard. And besides, nowadays there are more and more people who choose not to retire. It might be harder for you if you’re one of these people who don’t retire to move into the second half, but it would be a shame if you didn’t, if you spent your later years stuck in mid-life.
Before hearing the message of the conscious aging and sage-ing movement, many people see later life as a time of diminishment and loss. But instead, as Rabbi Zalman says in From Age-ing to Sage-ing: A Revolutionary Approach to Growing Older, “later life can be a time of self-development and spiritual growth” (5)
Rabbi Zalman says, “Elderhood offers us the wonderful opportunity to complete our lives triumphantly, but how many of us accept the offer? Most people want to arrest their youth at one point—say at forty-two, in the prime of life. But we cannot arrest the process of life without stopping it, so we experience a deep sense of frustration when we fail at this impossible task. We are failures in remaining middle-aged, but we are not failures in becoming sixty-five, eighty-five, or older. With our longer life spans and the wide-spread availability of psychospiritual growth techniques, we can shape ourselves into the kind of elders we want to be, enjoying creative, deeply fulfilling lives.” (17–18)
Instead of being a “failure in remaining middle-aged,” we can embrace this opportunity we have been given to be old; we can age “triumphantly.” But in order to do this, we must resist the temptation to be what Dr. Bill Thomas calls a “Denialist” in his book Second Wind: Navigating the Passage to a Slower, Deeper, and More Connected Life (see blog post 6) and become at least a “Realist,” but hopefully, at least eventually, an “Enthusiast.” “Enthusiasts aren’t just willing, they are eager to explore life beyond adulthood because they believe this life phase contains far more developmental potential than adulthood.” (133)
If you have been reading my blog, I hope you’ve been noticing the empowering language that the writers and teachers of conscious aging and sage-ing use. I hope you come along with me on this journey into elderhood, into a “slower, deeper, and more connected life.” You don’t have to settle for the “frustration” of trying to prolong your adulthood. Enthusiasts have discovered what life can be when you step off the” treadmill of continuous outer directed busyness” that I mentioned at the beginning of this blog entry. In elderhood, this new life stage that our longevity has gifted us with, we have the time to pay more attention to our inner life and to value “being” over “doing” for a change.
