Later Life years are not a time to keep our life-long learning process going. It is a time to accelerate it. We speed up our learning as we age, not because we make it happen so much, but by allowing a new kind of learning to happen. We do this on two levels or planes: the outer and the inner lives we enjoy; the material and the psycho-spiritual.
Society with its age-ism—wrinkles are bad, pretend you aren’t aging; keep producing, career people; and women, whatever you do, stay young looking—society doesn’t get development that happens in aging. Having a materialistic bent, cultural lenses look at our bodies and the outer plane of matter and thinks that if it is not the only, the physical plane is certainly the primary plane of existence. What we see in the mirror, our bank accounts, our travel life and the finer things, like bottles in the wine cellar, are the main thing… stay busy, consume, be happy.
If this sounds like mid-life measures and social roles extending into later life, it is. And yes some of the fun of later life with these extended lives we live, is continuing the things we used to love to do and still do them. But the main measure in the elder years is on a different plane, the inside and psycho-spiritual. The outer is nice to have and is of course connected to the inner plane: the inner is essential as the outer plane slip slides away, little by slow even with botox and more Amazon purchases.
Certainly society reveres grandparenting and mentoring by elders, and elders working on that very material plane for social justice, job creation, and more. It is not all Amazon purchases. But by and large, as activist M.D. Bill Thomas says, there is a “cult of adulthood” that has invaded both older and younger life stages: youngsters lose their free time so they can learn to perform sports and perform as adults. And the invasion into the later years is easy to see and must be replaced.
The cult of adulthood is insistent in its claims that old age is irrelevant and possibly on the edge of its own extinction (given sufficient progress in pharmaceutical laboratories). …Many find refuge in treasured illusions about traditional aging. In truth, the old way of growing old was never as good as we like to remember it…. We really have no choice but to look ahead. The times demand that we create a new elderhood—one that fits the way we live now. We need this new elderhood not only for ourselves (we all deserve a better, richer, more meaningful old age) but for people of all ages.
What the cult of adulthood really misses is the inner life that can grow so rich with wisdom, the heart joys; love for self and others, the relational and service joys; and connecting to the mysterious web of life from which we come and to which we return, the spiritual joys. All this is the grace of the inner plane of existence that parallels the outer plane which can still happen, but is secondary now. The inner learning is the soul growth that rushes on if we but allow it, and stop concentrating on the outer learnings so exclusively.
For me, I am still enjoying rich connections, some of them quite new, to clients and learning communities of all kinds. But the inner connections are the ones fueling me to a daily appreciation I have not known before.
How is your aging/eldering/later life process going? Are you still finding enriching new opportunities to pursue outer learning? They are all over the place with travel, and garden experiments, and classes and book clubs so you read about things, and experience important life pursuits, of which you never knew you had so little awareness. Travel teaches how big and various the human family really is. There are new people to meet and social and neighborly bonds to form. As elders we can still feed our heads. (thank you, Gracie Slick). We can add concepts and facts and see patterns we have never seen before.
Are you finding new ways to pursue the inner learning that is trying to take place within you? How is the mystery of life making its way into your heart? New feelings, meditations, prayers, or new ways of being in the world, as you sit on the porch and see that blue sky, with sensorial-spiritual lenses that were largely unavailable with simpler mid-life brains, minds and hearts.
The special learning process of the elders is the inner matrix that holds and sees the external and outer plane with fresh hands and lenses. We add new perspectives, and deeper more nuanced, feelings and more love and connection to life than we have ever had before.
As Joan Chitester says: “The goal of older age is to live life the way you have never lived life before.”
How we approach this goal depends on two levels of learning. One, the outer learning, we know for the most part. The other, the inner curriculum, we are learning as we go.
“Tilted Spheres” by Ken Mist Licensed under CC-BY 2.0 Original source via Flickr
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Imagine walking through the rainforest, the green canopy overhead, macaws flying back and forth, a deep, black, still pool far below. I admire the magical reflections in the smooth surface of the pool’s water. I grab a small rock, following the deep male instinct to make a mark, curious to see how the reflected images will change with the rock’s impact. I wing the rock out into space, watching it fall towards the pool, anticipating what will happen.
