Last March I interviewed and profiled Emily Kimball, The Aging Adventurer, in The Erickson Tribune. Now I receive her monthly newsletter in which I always find something interesting or relevant to the Tribune. This month, I found one item particularly insightful when I thought about the local pages of the Trib and Erickson Retirement Communities’ product in general. Here is the item, to which I give credit to Ms. Kimball. Her website is www.theagingadventurer.com, and I strongly encourage you to check it out.

Wondering What to Do with Ourselves

---

Second Journey sponsored a one-day seminar, Spirit, Service, and Community in the Second Half of Life as part of the Positive Aging Conference. I found this introduction, written by director Bolton Anthony, so interesting that I asked his permission to include it here. SecondJourney.org.“Retirement” is a relatively recent phenomenon. So, for that matter, is old age. In Barbara Kingsolver’s best-selling novel, Prodigal Summer, Nannie Rawley - a feisty septuagenarian - bristles at criticism that she doesn’t act “normal” for her age:“There isn’t any normal way to act 75 years old…people are supposed to be dead and buried at our age. That’s normal. Up till just lately, the Civil War or something, they didn’t even know about germs. If you got sick, they slapped leeches on you and measured you for a coffin.”

Medical advances are the culprit according to Nannie. Along comes somebody inventing six thousand ways to cure everything, and here we are, old, wondering what to do with ourselves - not for the next 5 or 10 years - but for another 30 or 40, a veritable second half of life!“

The siren song of a “second childhood” is one response: immerse yourself in leisure and consumption. Live here, one “active adult community” promises and you’ll feel like you are on vacation 365 days a year!” What an exhausting prospect!

If this response represents a regression to an earlier life stage, another response - what researchers John Rowe and Robert Kahn dub “successful Aging” - simply prolongs mid-life by maintaining its frenetic level of activity and engagement. It is as if you found yourself in a falling elevator and took poet Chuck Sullivan’s advice to “jump up and down like crazy (hoping) with luck when it lands you’ll be caught up in the air, alive and well.”

But what if rather than maintaining or intensifying our engagement, we are actually called first to the kind of discernment that allows for deep reflection and soul-searching. Who am I NOW - after the children have left and the first half of work is winding down? Then after we have done that inner work - after we have, as Sue Monk Kidd writes, confronted “the lost and counterfeit places within us” and “come home to ourselves” - we will find ourselves opening again to a call to work in the world.

If these “six thousand ways to cure everything” have added years to our lives; the challenge now is to add life to those years. How?

by exploring new avenues for individual growth and spiritual deepening by opening ourselves to new opportunities for an “Encore” career and meaningful work that speaks to our hearts desire and by gathering about us companions for the journey and creating new celebratory models of community I, for one, sometimes forget that The Erickson Tribune’s audience realizes their age and that sometimes we, as reporters and editors may think they want to forget it and feel younger. I have to constantly remind myself that our audience embraces their age and it’s not as scary as I, as a 25-year-old, might perceive it to be.

I think the line above, “’Live here, one ‘active adult community’ promises, and you’ll feel like you are on vacation 365 days a year!’ What an exhausting prospect!” really sums it up. Particularly in the Tribune’s local pages (3 and 10), I sometimes read too quickly over statements in which people say what they think the reporter wants to hear instead of their real feelings. Sometimes I see quotes like, “Living here is like living on a cruise ship” or something along those lines. I forget that on the surface that may sound great, but aren’t we all glad to come home after a few days of vacation?

So what are our readers doing with themselves after they retire and have 20, 30 years to themselves? Kimball’s newsletter also noted an organization called The Transition Network (TNN) . Two “retired” businesswomen started the TNN to help women from their 50s to their 80s connect on another level and in a way, reinvent retirement. According to the organization’s website, it “provides education and information about post-career choices,” is a “catalyst for paid and unpaid work opportunities and developing new talents, new careers, and new ways to volunteer,” and a “voice for our generation of pathfinders who seek to change society’s images and institutions regarding women over 50.”

Wow! How refreshing! I’ve been reading more and more articles about this new wave of retirees, who want (and may very well need) to continue working after age 62/65. But this generation of retirees are ready to do something more fulfilling. Check out this article from the Washington Post, January 21: No country for Old People? You’ll probably need to sign up for a free subscription to the online version of the Post, but it’s quick and well worth it.

That said, when I say “this new way of retirees” or “this generation of retirees,” I have to step back and remind you that we cover people like this every month in The Erickson Tribune whose ages run from 62 to 100. Even though there may be more people looking for a more fulfilling retirement today, it’s certainly not a new concept.

These are my thoughts; what are yours?
 

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.