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Epilogue
Keeping the Fire Alive
ClaimYour Place At the Fire

There are at least three times in life when we ought to be required to go off on a retreat to sit by a fire and reflect on the next stage of our lives. One is when we choose our vocation, another is when we choose a life partner, and the third is when we contemplate retirement. Something happens to us when we sit before fires. New feelings come up within us, and new visions come into our eyes that were not there before. A fire shifts the mood to one of purpose and possibility. No matter where a fire happens to be, it always weaves its spell.

At one time in our history, fires were our homes. We slept circled around them at night. We gathered for councils. Around fires, lives of hope are created and unwritten vows are made, which differ little from our ancestors. Around the fire we feel a sense of our place in the universe. And we feel the whole world is our home and all who are gathered are our partners on life’s journey.

Once we feel the warmth and connections around a fire, we make contact with our stories and with the universal stories of our ancestors. So core is this feeling that even the building of a fire has symbolic significance. Each step in building a fire evokes our stories. Although we may not need the fire today for warmth or cooking, it is still a human necessity. It gives us an opportunity to participate in a sacred act. The fire is a living thing.

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Whenever humans have been on the move, the fire at day’s end has always been the goal—a place of gratitude and reflection. No matter the era, this has remained true—our ancient needs for fire are still very much alive. Keeping the fire alive is essential to the magic of living on purpose. It helps us to feel part of an ongoing, ancient story, an evolutional act. The fire serves as a benediction to the adventures of the day and ultimately of a purposeful life.

When you go to the villages of indigenous peoples, like the hunter-gatherer Hadza in East Africa, and you participate in that most elemental of human experiences—sitting around a fire at night, talking, trading stories, sharing wisdom—you come to notice a certain arrangement of the group emerge naturally. Certain people find places closer to the fire; these members of the group tend to be the primary participants in the discussions and storytelling. Behind them tends to be a larger group—not excluded, but at a respectful distance—listening.

The spontaneous arrangement is determined in part by age, but more so, by wisdom. Those who have a wise voice to offer, those who from life experience, reflection, and choice, are sources of wisdom for their people are those who naturally claim a place close to the fire.

We view new elders—people living on purpose in the second half of their lives—as much like this. Becoming a new elder means finding one’s voice and claiming one’s right and responsibility to speak. And like the arrangement of individuals around the tribal campfire, it does not depend solely on a physical state like white hair or wrinkled skin. Rather, it is typified by states of minds and heart that are common to those upon whom we rely for guidance in the long term.

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There is no universal path for becoming a new elder. But the four flames of vital aging we have explored in this book— identity, community, passion, and purpose—can help light the path.

Becoming a new elder is a choice: It’s a way of relating to the world and the people in it that, though it generally bears a relationship to getting older, is neither guaranteed nor prevented by one’s chronological state. It is characterized by a willingness and desire to continue deepening the experience of living, knowing that life is about ongoing development at every age. New elders recognize and accept their own mortality while still continuing to grow.

There is an evolving elder within each of us, and there is a danger of losing contact with that story in ourselves. As C. G. Jung put it, “Every human being has a two million-year-old man within himself, and if he loses contact with that two million-year-old self, he loses his real roots.” The elder within is an essential part of our genetic hardwiring. When we cease growing, we die. And even if no one else notices the deadness in our souls, we notice.

Becoming a new elder means becoming a nurturer of life—human life and all life on the planet. It involves a kind of paradoxical power—one that comes from relinquishing external power but which requires us to take ownership of our internal power. It means claiming our voice, speaking softly, yet with conviction and strength.

The archetypal elder has been the critical force in most cultures over most all time. Individually and collectively, we need to reestablish that role, now. Yet, venturing into the experience is paradoxical. It’s a new idea for our culture based on an ancient tradition from most other cultures. Consequently, defining what it means to be a new elder requires us to look both forward and backward simultaneously, to draw from the past while advancing confidently in the direction of the future.

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Becoming a New Elder Is Spiritual Work

Much of the everyday literature on aging focuses on health: bodily health first, mental health second. Little is said, though, about what new elders recognize as the critical component: spiritual health. Being a new elder is spiritual work. It is work that acknowledges yet transcends the day-to-day mundane concerns of everyday life and helps forge a connection to something beyond. It involves understanding the temporal in light of the universal. It helps us see our place not just in the world, but in the full universe of possibilities.

As a consequence of this, new elders are easily amused; they see the essential absurdity of it all. Moreover, they have the ability to help others see this absurdity and laugh at things, and themselves, as well.

They see and appreciate the paradoxical nature of life: They realize the more that you know, the less you know; that happiness cannot be pursued directly; that getting love means giving love. They’re still growing. They have great curiosity about things and realize they haven’t got it all locked up. They accept that there’s some stuff they don’t know and may never know.

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New elders recognize they won’t be around forever. Consequently, they have a somewhat paradoxical outlook: On the one hand, they see each moment as precious; on the other hand, they recognize that the time they won’t be on Earth is infinitely longer than the time they will be. And so, while they are deeply concerned with the here and now, they are also powerfully in touch with the eternal.

New elders recognize that death is our most profound teacher. Without death, our lives would have no meaning. Death frames an end for us and also puts a value on things. New eldership is, in part, a state of coming to terms with oneself and one’s life. It isn’t a matter of accepting everything, or of not wishing some things couldn’t have been or are not different. But still, it is a matter of accepting things more or less as they are, of realizing that the best that one can do is the best that one can do. New elders don’t settle for less than their best efforts, but they do realize that their best efforts may also not achieve the best results. And rather than agonize over what might have been, given how things were, they tend to focus on what may be, given how things are.

One of the most useful practices we have found in the ongoing development that leads to becoming a new elder is to commit one’s thoughts to paper in a journal. Journaling allows us to find and express our inner voice in a manner that helps us better understand who we are, where we belong, what we care about, and what our life’s purpose is.

The following examples are not meant to be models of the form, but rather, simply to illustrate that if we can do it, so can you.

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Richard’s Journal Entry

Forget about retiring! I don’t like the word retirement. Retirement is a modern invention and my friends in the adult development field are suggesting it may already be obsolete, becoming more rare in the next decade. For me it has come to mean permanent loss of work, a loss of engagement and purpose. I think retirement is a bad idea, anyway. At 59, I established as one of my goals: “to be a productive 80-year-old.” As I move through my 60s, I may want to change the pace of my work but not the nature of my work.

At age 70, I see myself casually stretched out in a chair in my Africa-adorned office. On my wall is a quote by T. S. Eliot: “Old men ought to be explorers.” And I’m an explorer. Dressed in my trademark black shirt, jeans, and sandals, I’m recounting my thirtieth year of trekking in Africa. At 70, I see myself as a “new elder explorer.” I’m exploring a retirement in which age does not matter. In fact, I’m burying the whole notion of retirement. I am a student of and in the process of becoming a “new elder.” I see myself just unpacking from a hiking trip in Montana and I’m repacking to speak at an international conference on “The New Elder” in Oslo, Norway, to be followed by a one-month stay in the Bergen, Norway area.

Sally and I “bagged” 30 sleeping-bag nights this year. And this is our goal, 30 nights a year sleeping out—in a tent or without one. At 60, I made a big change. I committed my professional life to studying and living in the radical questions: “What is eldership?” “Who is the new elder?” The field of gerontology and aging has held my interest since my Bush Fellowship in 1973, studying the adult life cycle. Now, as I have become a dedicated student and spokesman for the need for the new elder in society, my work has become increasingly important, not less so. My work now focuses on speaking and writing. I see my vocation now as enlarging the possibility of eldership, not retiring from it. I’m often invited to speak at significant conferences around the world as a model and advocate of the “new elder” in society. Sally and I live a simple, debt-free, uncluttered life. We have a passionate, interdependent partnership based on our shared purposes and our love for each other and for the natural world. My strong voice for the new elder has allowed me to claim a place at the fire. “How do you discover passion?” I’m often asked. “In dreams,” I often reply. We all dream in our sleep, but some dream in the daytime.

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Passion is not born of vague dreams. My passionate dream is to transform retirement. It is to create a wholly new vision of the new elder in society.

Dave’s Journal Entry

I’ve long had this idea that I will live to be 112 years old. I’m not sure where this notion came from, but I’ve tried to live my life as if it’s true. This has done a couple of things. First, it’s made me a bit more patient with my own development. So what if I don’t finish my undergraduate degree until I’m 36; I’ve still got three-quarters of a century to build a career. And big deal if I don’t start a family until I’m almost 40; even if my daughter is as slow to get started having kids as I was, I’ll still be able to see my grandkids graduate high school.

Second, imagining that I’m going to live to such a ripe old age has completely disabused me of the idea that I’ll be able— or even that I would want to—retire at age 65, or even 72. After all, if I’m going to be around for another 60-some years, I’d better have something more interesting to do than sitting on the porch, whittling.

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Of course, I have no real idea whether I’ll live to be 5 score and 12; it’s probably fairly unlikely, to tell the truth. Still, I have every intention of continuing to live as if I will. That means that, as I approach 50, I’m only just beginning middle age. I won’t be old until I’m in my 90s. It’s not as if I’m going to try to remain a kid forever, I’m just going to slow down the process of growing up. My dad had a quote in his office when I was growing up: “We grow too soon old and too late smart.” Perhaps I can’t do anything about the latter, but I may be able to delay the former. I’ll try to keep from being set in my ways; I’ll always see myself as a work-in-progress. It will be a long time before I’ll accept that it’s “too late” to learn something or try something new.

I suppose the danger in this is that I’ll never get around to being fully grown. I might keel over and die before I’ve ever had a chance to retire. To paraphrase The Who, I could die before I get old. Oh well, it could be worse . . . I suppose I could get old before I die.

Growing Whole, Not Old

The primary intent of this chapter is to offer a manifesto in praise of growing whole, not old. This will seem strange only to those unable to recognize the widespread societal antipathy toward growing old. But given the inevitability of the aging process, it’s clear any intractable aversion is wrongheaded.

Growing older offers distinctive opportunity for growing whole. If this opportunity should be denied, as it is for many people, both the individual and society as a whole lose. If people in the second half of life are not encouraged to deal with their aging as a vital stage of growth, the rest of us are cut off from wisdom that only the most experienced among us can provide.

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Thus, we need a manifesto for growing whole—for bringing forth the wisdom long thought to be a mark of elders. We think of this as a manifesto for the new elder. The dignity inherent in aging is to be seen in the way new elders relate to themselves and the world.

Inevitably, we all have assumptions about how aging is likely to go for us. Most of us tend to have an anachronistic picture of what it means to be elderly. One of the important points we have tried to make in this book, though, is that new elders and elderly are not the same thing.

Through our research and interviews with new elders, we have come to realize that we are living on the boundary between the elderly and the new elder. We need to challenge our outmoded ideas about aging and replace them with bold new ones. Insights are needed and choices must be made.

At the time of the writing of this book, statistics say that, in the United States, 10,000 baby boomers a day are turning 50 years old. That’s approximately four million a year for the next 18 years. Two-thirds of all the people who have ever lived past 65 are alive today. Never before in history have so many people entered into this later stage of life so vital, so healthy, and so free. And never before have so many had such a hunger for direction in how to live this stage in a purposeful way.

New elders today have a lot more time to age before they become elderly. With that time, we believe that their biggest personal challenge will be to reinvent themselves for what this longevity could mean.

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Carl Jung’s observation, “That which youth found and had to find outside of itself, in the second half of life must be found within,” rings increasingly true for many people in the second half of life

It’s time for a new manifesto for growing whole, not old. This manifesto is illuminated by the four flames of vital aging—principles that can transform the second half of our lives.

Growing whole can free us, personally—and our aging society—to discover a more powerful sense of calling in the second half of life. Becoming a whole new elder can lead to a stage of evolution in our own lives that can also be the key to the evolution and survival of our aging society.

The huge new wave of “seasoned citizens” has to have some function in the survival of the community and our species. It has to go beyond our personal future to the future of the whole. There needs to be a new elder movement that will rekindle the fires necessary for society to productively use the wisdom of age.

Evolution, however, must first come from within. We must claim our place at the fire. Claiming means growing and giving in the elder years of life as whole persons in society. It means using our unique gifts and our stored wisdom to help society move in new, life-affirming directions.

And through our courage, we will create a new elder society. By claiming our place at the fire, we will give voice to what we really think and feel at last. We will move with dignity and presence into that unknown future that we are helping to shape for generations to come.

Here then, is the manifesto by which we will claim our place at the fire.