Chapter 11
How Will I Know When I’m Done?
THE DONE TEST
There is a very simple and easy test for this. If you are dead, you’re done. If you are still alive and managing your affairs and life (even with a bit of assistance), you aren’t done. Just check your pulse, respiration, and who is primarily responsible for your life. That will tell you whether you’re done.
Of course, this will require letting go of the illusion that there is such a place as a permanent and irrefutable life destination at which to arrive.
LEARNING NEEDS TO BE LIFELONG
I also think the decisions and efforts we make in the period between age 50 and elderly dramatically affect the quality of our lives not only during that period but during the elderly period also. A great 60-year-old existence doesn’t begin at age 58. A great life for a 90-year-old doesn’t begin at age 88. They are called Lifelong Learning and Human Development for a reason. Learning absolutely must be a lifelong activity, given everything going on around us and the inevitability of it affecting ourselves or our loved ones.
Argentine Saunders Craig, PhD, now 80, was and is a significant mentor for me. She was the chairwoman of my doctoral dissertation committee when I was getting my PhD. She famously stared down the rest of the committee at the very end, when some wanted late changes in design, by using a deeply understood Peace Corps village and drinking water metaphor. She quietly looked toward them and asked, “Whose well is this, anyway?” As a lifelong learner she has endless stories to tell. Should you see her, ask her how she helped Nelson Mandela to be elected the first time. And then there was the time she and I went to lunch in San Francisco. As we were being led to our table, she and Bishop Desmond Tutu greeted each other warmly. When I interviewed her for this book, I was yet again reminded of the learning power of stories.
Nominally retired, Dr. Craig continues to demonstrate the power of lifelong learning.
George: So you’re retired. Uh-huh!
Argentine: You know; I say that I’m retired but I . . . I’m retired from the university. As you know, I retired in 2000, the year my granddaughter was born. However, I continued to consult in the field of my expertise, Applied Behavioral Science and Human Development, because of contacts and contracts. I just wasn’t officially connected with the university anymore. I did participate as an instructor in a course—Diversity in International Consulting—and we took the group to consult with the government in Bermuda. And then there was another international consulting course that involved a university, connections with the Trinidad and Tobago governments, and taking students to Amsterdam for an international consulting experience. My academic title all this time was Professorial Lecturer. Who said retirement means the end of learning? I think I learned almost as much as the students because every situation and context is different. You have to be on your toes the whole time. I learned and they learned. Now, this is after I retired, you know, from the university. I didn’t stop working in my area of expertise. But it was at a pace and in places that worked for me. And lifelong learning is a part of it for all of us. Yes!
THE GOAL AND ROLE TRAP
I touched on this topic earlier, but want to emphasize it here.
We’ve grown up in a diverse (even if we weren’t exposed to it) and significantly goal-oriented nation that often employs opposites such as Yes or No, Democrat or Republican, Black or White, Win or Lose, and short-term problem solving rather than employing deeper, more difficult, and more time-consuming thinking that requires perspectives, trying short-term alternatives, and changing our minds.
Many of us, given the culture we’ve grown up in, are deeply suspicious of NOT having goals, even if that goal is a goal-free life of leisure. There doesn’t seem to be much happy medium ground. Either we’ve got goals galore or we don’t want anything to do with them for now.
Upon traditional retirement (think pension, leisure, far fewer responsibilities) it’s fairly easy to set goals and roles aside because it’s a highly ritualized transition in which we are giving things up anyway, so why not goals and roles? If our lives aren’t about goals and roles, what on earth is left?
I’m not suggesting you throw out all your goals and roles. I am suggesting, however, that as we age we will need to move to another core by which to evaluate and validate ourselves and our lives. And now, when we’re considering which faces of retirement we want to create for ourselves in the short-term, mid-term, and long-term ranges, is a great time to develop our facility for knowing and validating ourselves outside of goals and roles.
Much later in our lives, let’s be honest, the number of and size of achievable goals we can set for ourselves will be more limited. Also, the number of roles we can fill (and are asked to fill) will also diminish. It was a really big deal when a friend’s mother, age 79, finally gave up on having Christmas Eve at her house every year complete with sit-down dinner for 14. This had been both a goal and a role for her since her kids were adolescents. It gave her pleasure, identity, a sense of achievement, and an anchor for her identity as mother, grandmother, and aunt. It also had come to give her anxiety, exhaustion, and a kind of peevishness her kids had never seen before.
What are the tools and processes for adding a better long-term possibility to our way of knowing ourselves and judging our value?
THE BENEFITS OF LIFE CHARACTERISTICS
My answer to that question lies in the list of characteristics you chose as representative of your future life. You chose them. You can update and improve them as you go along. They are less likely than goals and roles to depend upon others for fruition. They are essential indicators of how on track your life and your plan are. They are also key indicators that you and/or your plan need adapting or updating.
Comparing your Life Characteristics List to your actions, decisions, relationship interactions, intentions, and patterns will give you immediate feedback. You don’t need anyone else to do this, although you may want to use a friend as a sounding board (much as I’ve suggested several times in this book) or you may prefer to speak with a professional advisor.
Some people orient themselves and their lives based on a values framework, a value-based life. I applaud this, as well as remembering our values in all intentions and transactions. From my standpoint, values answer the question HOW as in, “How am I treating others?” I totally support that framework as a part of what we need BUT I don’t think it takes us all the way to where we need to go. Values, in my experience, always require that you interact with others. For example, you show kindness to others, loyalties to your families and nation, and honesty in your business dealings with others. It’s hard to practice them all by ourselves when their intended purpose is to inform our interaction with others. I am not dismissing values here, nor am I suggesting they not be a valuable subtext for life characteristics.
What I am saying, however, is that the characteristics you have chosen will be the gold standard against which you measure your progress and success. From my standpoint, the characteristics serve as your life’s North Star. They are the WHO and WHAT, as in “Who am I becoming?” and “What is my life like/what will it be like?” No one else owns them. You don’t need anyone else to measure them. They are highly shareable with your family and friends, yet they remain irretrievably yours. It’s called your life for a reason. Only you can decide what you want it to be like or characterized by. And only you can change your life characteristics as appropriate. In the meantime, like a list hung on the refrigerator, you can use the list in your head in anticipating upcoming opportunities and making congruent/beneficial choices.
A CHANCE TO PRACTICE
Willa Bernhard is a friend of mine. She is in a women’s organization with my wife, Linda, and that is how we met. How we really got to know each other, however, was when we were doing some volunteer work together and agreed we didn’t like the approved process. She’s a New Yorker transplanted to Sarasota, FL. At 88, she still claims she has had a lot of happy accidents that have guided her life. After having kids, she got a masters in guidance and counseling, taught at Sarah Lawrence, then earned a PhD and became a psychologist-therapist, eventually dealing in sexual disorders, which all began with “meeting a woman doctor who had just written a big book on sex therapy” who ended up taking her into her practice at New York Hospital. And that ended up with Willa doing some teaching at Cornell Medical School. I mean this woman is amazing. What does this all have to do with a Chance to Practice? Willa and her husband, Bob, age 90, moved from a beautiful beachfront condo to a “retirement community or whatever you want to call it.” When she retired early in her 70s, Willa wanted to know, “What do women do when they retire?” So she made a list of questions, networked through her friends (everyone knew a “fantastic woman” for her to interview), and ended up doing 100 amazing interviews that became an article published in journals and that turned into—again by accident—being picked up by a woman who was running “Women on the Web.”
When I interviewed Willa, we discussed the important themes of her retirement investigation and what she learned from making the move from the condo to where she and Bob are now.
George: What were the dominant themes you discovered?
Willa: Every one of the women felt that they were feeling far better about themselves than they had when they were younger.
George: It’s all right, I was really looking for what the themes were that impressed you, or struck you the most. Specifically, that would have informed your own decisions. You went back and forth a lot between Florida and New York for a long time, almost as if commuting between segments of your life.
Willa: What would have informed my decisions . . . It was certainly that life does get better for women. And that was certainly true for me; from my mid-40s on, my life really opened up. So I used that when I was treating women for therapy. Women would come in and say, “I’m turning 60!” and I would say, “It’s the beginning of the best time of your life.” And I really believe that.
George: So in all this coming and going and the transitions . . . I’m interested in how you re-crafted your sense of yourself.
Willa: Everything in my life . . . well, it was planned that I would go back and get a degree. But other than that, everything in my life really was that a door . . . sort of opened for me, and I went through it. So I did not have the kind of plan where you decide early on you’re going to be a lawyer and you follow that kind of path.
George: So here you are at 88. I get how you made the transition to your condo here. How about making the transition into this “retirement community or whatever you call it” a year and a half ago?
Willa: That was a big surprise. Bob and I really were happy with our life. We had a beautiful apartment and we liked it, but we knew that at some point in your life you should probably transition. And everybody said you should do it before you have problems. And we very reluctantly did it. We had a lot of “Will we?” “Should we?” “No, we don’t want to.” Bob would take one position and I would take another. And then finally we decided that, I mean, what am I now, 88? I was beginning to be 87. Bob is two years older than I am. And so we made the jump. I knew that it was really important, if you’re going to a retirement facility, to be in the middle of things, because to be way out someplace is a disadvantage. It wouldn’t be so much of a disadvantage right now, because we drive. But at that point you don’t drive anymore; you’re cut off from this community. So here we are about two blocks from everything. And not only do they take you to things if you need them to, Bob has been to three meetings today and I’ve been to one meeting today, it’s very accessible and I think that’s really, really important.
Paula and Joe, both age 84, had a lovely home overlooking the Pacific Ocean in Southern California. They were perfectly content. They both still drove and they had two cars, so coordinating schedules and getting in and out of their steep, hillside community was no problem. Joe was retired but Paula still worked part-time on her long-standing TV show on which she interviewed politicians, artists, authors, and officials about their work and how it was changing. Happy as they were in their home and life, the couple had begun to run hot and cold in their conversations about letting nature take its course and forcing them—with the assistance of their grown kids who would probably shoulder much of the burden—to move when they had no choice OR being proactive and making the majority of their own decisions now, even though it meant all the work of finding a new location, way of living, figuring out what to keep from the house, allowing for transportation that didn’t have to involve driving, and making the best of it as a good thing to do at their age and stage.
Pretend for a moment that you are a professional advisor to Paula and Joe. When will they be done? How would you help them choose characteristics for their future based on making good choices and establishing priorities instead of the more common route of making the move and then naming characteristics that would now be true?
Kim is 88. Twenty years ago, when her husband died and she was face-to-face with her future, she went back to school to take writing classes. It was her plan to develop marketable skills she could use wherever she was for years and years to come. Kim is now working on her 11th book. She is especially fond of the spy and the private detective genres and still has the same agent she sought out when she was much younger. Six months ago, she took a major fall. Her biggest fear is of falling again.
Pretend for a moment that you are a professional advisor to Kim. When will she be done? How would you advise her on a smart combination of characteristics, goals, and roles?
Sixty-eight-year-old Bill retired eight years ago following an injury to one of his legs. An extroverted salesman, he has never learned to be alone with much grace. His mornings are spent at the local coffeehouse with his buddies discussing sports, restaurants, and health. They all bring their dogs. Then Bill goes home to take a nap until lunch. His afternoons are spent puttering around the house until cocktail time and dinner at home or at a restaurant with friends. Each day is similar to others. He is embarrassed by his limitations and recognizes that he needs a challenge. Pretend for a moment that you are a professional advisor to Bill. When will he be done? How would you advise him on a smart combination of characteristics, goals, and roles?
Although they are only in their early 70s, Fred and Callie, who retired seven years ago, have in many ways retired from life and are coasting to the end. For some people, “done” begins with retirement. For them, the difficult work of life is completed, it’s time for Golden Years, coasting, and a well-earned extended vacation. What do you think? They are completely unaware that anyone else would ever see them as coasting. They think their lives have taken their natural course, and perhaps they have. When will Fred and Callie be really done?
Suzanne is 90 years old. Her husband died several years ago. At some point she gave up and let her daughter do her thinking and planning for her. Her daughter has now placed her in an extended-care facility because of her limited mobility. She cannot navigate going to the bathroom by herself. Physically cared for but dramatically understimulated intellectually, Suzanne spends her time watching television and receding into her memories. She is in one of those facilities that are apparently the last stop, a kind of warehouse euphemistically called “God’s Waiting Room.” When visitors come to see her, it takes a few minutes for the “real Suzanne”—known for her spunkiness and her humor—to come forward and join the guests. What do you think? When will Suzanne be done? Suppose Suzanne came to you for counsel and advice. Where would you start?
Barbara is 66. She and her husband recently retired at the same time with grand plans for having at least 20 years of play time together after all those years of hard work juggling careers and several children. Six months after their retirement, her husband was diagnosed with lung and brain cancer. Within a year, he was dead. Fortunately, several of Barbara’s kids and grandkids live nearby. She has crafted a temporary life that’s about them, knowing full well she’s going to have to develop a bigger life on her own.
Pretend for a moment that you are a professional advisor to Barbara. How would you advise her on a smart combination of characteristics, goals, and roles? When will she be done?
VISITING DONE ONE MORE TIME
As a society we are in wide disagreement about when Done happens. Which is the definition of Done you are consciously or unconsciously choosing for yourself? How do you expect these decisions to affect your long-term future?
On this journey between 50 and elderly, I know I’m not alone because you’re there reading. You aren’t alone because I’m here researching and writing and speaking. This is a pioneering era full of transitions. Together we can figure it out individually and collectively. I sincerely hope the content of this book will make a big difference for you.
And thanks for reading to the end.
None of us will be done until we’re done.