Growing older is an important element in the second half of life. Your attitude and perception about "growing old" can have a significant effect on what you believe is possible and desirable. The life visions, which help guide your second half are seeded in the soil of your earlier vision of aging. It is important to turn the soil and examine how your view of aging may be setting limits or providing opportunities in your second half. The following sections describe some alternative views of aging, which may encourage you to make this examination for yourself.

The Archetypes of Aging

How do we age? Is the process predetermined by an aging gene that tells us how to do it? Or do we have a choice? If we do, does the choice matter- to ourselves or to society? And if it matters, then doesn't this raise the question of how we should age? And who do we want answering that question- moral philosophers, governments, religious institutions, educators? These questions have long interested artists, physical scientists, philosophers and religious leaders. Recently they have begun to interest social scientists, psychologists, politicians, journalists, popular writers and even the marketplace.

Two very different archetypes have emerged from opposing views of the aging process. In one, aging is seen as simply the last step before the final act of dying. Thus, older people, the aging, are seen as enfeebled, in decline, depressed, without mental stimulation, with disappearing physical aptitudes and enjoyment, unmotivated, egocentric, increasingly living in the past and so on. This archetype comes from a deficit view of aging. In the opposite view, aging is seen as a continuation, the next step in an individual's developmental process. The archetype is a wise, compassionate, optimistic teacher of the tradition, the repository of customs and legends, a guardian of values, a curious, mentally agile, introspective elder. This is the vital archetype of aging.

This vital archetype has been celebrated in many traditional cultures and is not uncommon in some non- western societies today. Compassionate societies and compassionate families take care of their aged - more or less- and they expect nothing in return. But in 20th century western industrialized societies the deficit archetype reigned. It is not difficult to identify the reason. In industrialized countries, if the aged have no productive services to sell, they have outlived their usefulness. They are a burden to society and to their families. How better to justify this attitude than to ascribe to the aging all those deficit archetype characteristics.

In the 21st century, there are two factors creating conditions for change. We are beginning to move beyond the industrial society and its strictly market view of usefulness. Secondly, better nutrition, better medical care and science are helping people to live longer, healthier lives. Because the deficit view no longer describes reality as we see it, the vital archetype of aging has re-emerged in our culture. We can expect and demand much more from aging people because we perceive at least some of them as embodying the vital archetype. However, in this period of transition, this potential must be developed and nourished. The vital archetype is not yet the expected model. The deficit view is still common in our culture and the enfeebled older person remains the archetype of aging. Your purpose in joining Journey Beyond Business, and our purpose in providing this program, has something to do with the development and nourishment of vital elders.

The Start of Aging

When does aging begin? The deficit archetype benchmarks are: when you retire, when you collect social security, when you have grandchildren, when your hair gets grey, when you lose sexual potency, when you need a daily nap, when you occasionally forget things, when your hands begin to shake, when you delegate some of your responsibilities and so on. From this perspective, all people who are aging are labeled the old. Social scientists, in an effort to account for some of the differences among older people, distinguish between the young old, the middle old and the old. But, basically, everybody of a certain age is old. There is little personal choice about when that label applies.

A person who embodies the vital archetype has more control. For vital elders, aging starts whenever they decide to do the work - mostly, but not entirely, inner work- needed to develop their own vital signs of aging. Elder is the label applied. There are no young elders or old elders, although there certainly are experienced and inexperienced ones. The choice as to when, or if, you become an elder is yours.

Elders arise because society needs them, not simply as a result of longevity. In traditional societies elders are given great assignments and often face great dangers. And so it should be in modern societies. We do not have elders because we are human and humans grow old; we are human because we have elders who pass on the meaning of our humanity.

The Inner Work of Becoming an Elder

There are at least three important ideas that help us to understand the inner work we need to do in order to become an elder: life stages, character and mid-life crisis.

Life Stages

In the life cycle view, the individual develops through a series of stages and the last one - the stage before death - is where the elder resides. In the developmental view of Eric Ericson, there is a biological imperative for people to go through the sequential stages. Inherent in each stage are two opposing predispositions- one adaptive and the other malignant. The individual experiences a tension between these two opposites and the balance that emerges from this tension determines whether the goals of a particular stage are reached.

The two opposites for the final stage are integrity and despair. Integrity is the sense of being true to yourself: conducting your present life in a way that is congruent with the rest of your life experiences. Despair is an unrealistic sense of dread and hopelessness, the feeling of living out a false self. When the adaptive dispositions outweigh the malignant, when integrity trumps despair, an individual is wise. Wisdom, according to Ericson, is the ability to maintain and convey the integrity of your experience, to have a detached yet involved concern with life itself. Being an elder is synonymous with having and dispensing wisdom. But wisdom does not mean possessing particular skills or information or cognitive capacities or empathic insights. What it does mean is being true to your self and your own life experiences.

Character

James Hillman uncouples aging from death, life stages and a developmental process. Instead, he sees aging as a state of being, an expression of character, which represents the distinctive qualities of the individual. According to Hillman, wisdom, compassion, understanding and all the other qualities assigned to elders serve mainly as calming, counter-phobic idealizations. In other words, although all those wonderful qualities we like to attribute to elders may make us feel good, reality relates to the development of the character of each individual. A person's uniqueness often emerges during the later years as he gives up on the struggle to conform, facilitating the task of finding his character.

However, her important inner work has just begun. This work relates to the way in which she deals with the challenges of later life. What are these challenges? You might immediately think of physical, mental and emotional changes but they are even more basic than these. The first challenge is remaining true to form, holding on to one's character despite the changes occurring in one's world or even in one's body. Hillman calls this lasting.

The second challenge is leaving- moving from an attitude of holding on to one of letting go. If you are committed to holding on to those attitudes that belong to lasting, then leaving will be experienced as a defeat. But what are you leaving? It is not your character or uniqueness that you are leaving, but a set of attitudes, interpretations and expectations regarding that character. You are being forced to leave them precisely because they can no longer sustain your character, not because you are getting old but because they are getting old.

The final challenge is to produce a character of such force that it is left even after you leave. Since your character is your uniqueness, that uniqueness goes on after you depart. It goes on in the images and memories of those you leave behind, even though you might never know the impact that that character has had. So what is left, after you have left, is character, the layered image that has been shaping your potentials and your limits from the beginning.

Mid-Life Crisis

All of life is a psychological, as well as physical, process. We are always subject to internal turmoil and change. Carl Jung pointed out that mid-life, in particular, is a time when people go through a fundamental shift in their relation to the world as well as to their inner spirit. A psychological emergency, a crisis, signals that this shift is in process. Note that the crisis is not the cause of the shift. Rather, the crisis simply makes it impossible for the person to avoid noticing that the shift is going on.

Jung had his personal mid-life crisis in his thirties. But, for many people in our time, it occurs in the fifties and sixties- a period, incidentally, when most people think of themselves as being middle aged. The inner turmoil occurs because the self is going through a transformation, crossing over from one psychological identity to another. The mid-life crisis is a crisis of identity, when old selves are discarded and new ones come into being.

There are three phases to the inner work required for navigating the long process of psychological change that occurs at mid-life. Separation is the first phase. Separation may or may not take an external form such as separating from a spouse, a job, a friend or a religion. The real separation occurs internally: separating from one's own then-existing identity. After separation occurs, there is transition. Having lost one's earlier set of goals, values, attitudes and sense of who one is in relation to others, most of us feel disconnected, ungrounded or floating. During this state of transition, pieces of the personality, which had been ignored or pushed aside in the past and simply left undeveloped, now come to the surface and clamor for attention. It is these pieces that often disrupt life and alarm family members. They cannot be ignored. It is the work of the third phase to incorporate these pieces into a new identity, integrated around a new core personality.

Retirement and Being an Elder

Are retirement and aging linked? Some people retire when they get old, either being forced into retirement or delighted to take advantage of the opportunity. Other people get old when they retire, having lost their purpose, the meaning they have attached to their life and a regimen that dictates how to spend their days. Still others may never choose to retire. Warren Buffet reported in the Wall St. Journal that his succession plan consisted of telling the doctor to take his pulse again.

Many seniors retire into an empty space of trivial pursuits. For these people retirement is the vast wasteland. Increasingly, the newest generations of seniors are rejecting this wasteland and finding ways, primarily through volunteerism, to do socially useful and personally satisfying work. The Third Sector refers to the sum total of volunteer work outside the market place. It pays little in wages and what it produces is not measured in the GNP. Yet, it encompasses most of the funds, most of the resources, most of the work needed to produce the compassion that holds communities together. From the deficit archetype perspective, the Third Sector is seen as a place where the feeble and unproductive can waste their time. From the vital archetype perspective, the Third Sector is viewed not with disdain, but as an equal and worthy partner of the public and private sectors.

The nature of the linkage between retirement and aging raises all sorts of political, social, and even scientific issues. But for now we ask a different question, one that raises psychological issues. Are retirement and becoming an elder linked? To put it differently, can an older person become an elder, or even work towards becoming an elder, while still in the workplace? Mercy, justice, charity and understanding are what we want from our elders. But these are words not often found in the workplace. Achievement, image, success, winning and control are workplace words. Does a person need to get away from the workplace words in order to embody the elder words? The answer is no.

First, those workplace words also resonate in the world of elders. One does not give up ambition, the desire to look good or the wish to win, simply as a result of growing older. Secondly, those elder words do have a role in the workplace and it may be that the next step for some of you is to stay exactly where you are. At the same time, others may prefer to take their next step from the wide-open spaces of retirement, where they may experience more freedom and greater access to opportunities for experimentation and the pursuit of new goals. But common to both groups is the need to undertake the inner work needed to develop character, gain integrity, and achieve wisdom

Triumph of the Old

There has been a gentle revolution going on, the revolution of longevity. We are in the process of adding 25 years to life expectancy. Add all those years up. In the United States alone it is the equivalent of more than 50 million people. More people than there are in California, New York and Texas combined. And they are all old people. What does society do with all those years? More to the point, what does each person do with his or her own added years?

The trends seem unmistakable. Old has won. The old of this generation have surpassed the old of previous generations in terms of number, wealth, entitlements, health and vitality. And beyond that, the old are on the way to surpassing the young in terms of their moral and political influence. Theodore Roszak, speaking for the old of this generation says, "With us history shifts its rhythm. It draws back from the frenzied pursuit of marketing novelties and technological turnover and assumes the measured pace of humane and sustainable values.

But what is it that has been won? Let us look at three of the battles being fought.

Burden v. Resources: An Issue of Wealth Redistribution

Are older people a burden or a resource in our society? At first glance, they are clearly a burden. They are a burden to their families when they need to be cared for. They are a burden to society when they draw on social security and Medicare. Even if they pay their own way, they redirect our national wealth away from productive activities and more urgent societal needs such as education, childcare and national defense. They are able to achieve this mostly because of their political power and an overgenerous sense of responsibility on the part of the rest of society. Worst of all, they only take and give little in return.

Is it true that they give little in return? What is meant is that they give little of market value in return. Older people have always given much to society, particularly in the area of care taking, but this is generally not recognized by the market and therefore has no measured value. Furthermore, unlike other energy resources, senior energy is an increasing natural resource, not only because of the growing number of seniors but also because of the increased vitality of each senior. That energy, largely untapped in the past, can be spent for production and volunteer purposes as well as leisure. As these trends continue it will become increasingly apparent that senior resources far outweigh senior burdens in our society.

Old v. Young: An Issue of Generational Warfare

Seniors compete with younger people for resources, finances, work, attention and influence. With the number and influence of the young diminishing, in relative terms, it is tempting to project a life of serfdom for them, to be ended only when they become old. While that projection is extreme, the competition is real and is increasing, in part, because a growing number of seniors pursue what has come to be called productive aging. Productive aging refers to those people who keep competing and achieving in their later years just as they had in their earlier years. Many even try to look as they used to look. These are people who think the goal of being old is to be young. Rather than acceptance of age, there is a defiance of age, a worship of youth.

In the past, elders were few in number and ambiguous in status. What they had to offer was wisdom. They were valued for that wisdom but they did not wield power. They were deferred to for their age, but this was based on respect and appreciation, not power. Now, with productive aging, seniors have power. They can compete with the young in the arena of the young. If they refuse to leave the stage and crowd out the young, generational conflict becomes bitter.

What is the answer to this generational warfare? One answer is for seniors to engage in creative rather than productive aging. This means that elders would willingly leave the stage and move on to the Third Sector where they do not compete with the young but do the work that the young leave undone.

Productivity v. Service: An Issue of Values

Carl Jung has said, " For a young person it is almost a sin, or at least a danger, to be too preoccupied with himself; but for the aging person it is a duty and a necessity to devote serious attention to himself.

The danger Jung sees for young people is that they will be diverted from their main task of that part of life - the task of being productive. Not only productive on the job but also in terms of creating and nurturing a family and taking on other social responsibilities. Such productivity often requires an ability to be competitive. It might even be said that those who are successfully productive have a competing instinct.

What is the serious attention to self Jung recommends for the aging person? We have been calling it your inner work. Zalman Schacter-Shalomi calls it the completing instinct, the need that elders have for drawing together and arranging in patterns of meaning all that we have begun in our lifetimes. Paradoxically, it is this very attention to self that leads elders to find value and satisfaction in providing service to the community. Thus, it is, in part, the difference between the competing instinct and the completing instinct, which leads to an inter-generational difference in values.

What are these elder values? Most elders are natural conservationists. They keenly feel the destruction of nature because they remember its beauty. Long memories and wider perspectives fuel their concern for maintenance of the natural world. Elders are natural mediators. They have had the time and the experience to develop tolerance and appreciation for others and the capacity for weighing more than one side of the question. Elders are natural peacemakers. They have witnessed the effects of devastation and aggression and know that violence and hatred destroys community and the interconnectedness of life. Elders are natural artists. They have the urge, the time and the drive to understand the meaning of their experiences and the patterns of their lives and to communicate those meanings to others.

Although they share many of these elder values, the competing instinct may mute them in the young. However, the completing instinct makes them loud and clear for elders.

Appendix: Further Reading

From Age-ing To Sage-ing, by Rabbi Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, is both an inspiration and a guidebook for finding meaning and passion in your elder years.

As he approached his sixtieth birthday, Rabbi Shacter-Shalomi felt that "a feeling of futility had invaded my soul." Like many of us, he became depressed as he realized that he was growing old. Although his spiritual studies had taught him that old age could be a blessing and need not be a curse, he was dismayed that he did not know how to bring this about for himself or offer answers to others. He came to believe that what is missing in modern times are role models, people whose lives demonstrate that the elder years are a time of continued personal growth, of wisdom, of service to others - a fulfillment of life rather than a decline.

Rabbi Schacter-Shalomi calls these role models "sages" and the most important parts of the book deals with how to become and live as a sage. Where age-ing is a process of physical, emotional and mental diminishment, sage-ing is a process of expanding consciousness, wisdom and service to the community. Where age-ing simply makes you old, sage-ing makes you a "wise elder."

References on Aging:

• Tuesdays With Morrie, Mitch Albom, Doubleday, 1997
• The Coming of Age, Simone de Beauvoir, W.W. Norton, 1996
• Aging As a Spiritual Journey, Eugene C. Bianchi, Crossroad, 1982
• The Fountain of Age, Betty Friedan, Simon and Schuster, 1993
• The Force of Character and The Lasting Life, James Hillman, Ballantine Books, 1999
• A Year To Live, Stephan Levine, Bell Tower, 1997
• America The Wise, Theodore Rozsak, Houghton Miflin, 1998
• Still Here: Embracing Aging, Changing and Dying, Ram Dass, Penguin Putnam Inc, 2000
• From Age-ing to Sage-ing, Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, and Ronald S. Miller, Warner Books, 1995

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