The Pilgrimage of Aging

My thanks to Lori for letting me borrow her blogging platform for a week.  Over the coming days I’d like to offer a possible blueprint for a book on aging I’m considering writing.  I would appreciate hearing your thoughts about my thoughts. Do you find some of my ideas intriguing and deserving of more lengthy development?  What do you think I should include that is not mentioned?  Do you know of writing that already does what I am thinking about doing, or are there sources I should include in my study?  And most importantly, do you believe this is a worthwhile project?

I am interested in this topic, in part, because I just retired and I am trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.  In my recent book Becoming Real: Authenticity in an Age of Distractions, I proposed that we are our stories, and the stories of our lives are continually under revision.  At the very least retirement is an opportunity to add a chapter to our stories, but it can also be a time to recast our entire lives, to create a different identity.

In my book on authenticity I offered an “in-between” view of the self, one that refuses to reduce us solely either to our interior or our social dimensions and ignore the complex interactions that form the dynamic beings we are.  I believe that a similarly rich account of aging would be a valuable addition to the rather large and expanding body of work on growing old in our culture today.

If you are a student of pilgrimage, as I suspect most of you are, you realize that preparation is crucial to the journey.  Recently I talked with a former student who just returned from a trip to Costa Rica with his family.  They had a pretty good time, but he realized they could have had a much richer experience if they had done some thinking and planning.  Instead, he felt they spent a lot of money in ways that seriously limited where they went, what they did, and what they got from their trip.  While they were in Costa Rica they managed to make some modifications in their itinerary, but by booking accommodations and lodging the way they did, the die was cast.

And so it is with aging.  If you reach your destination without having done the proper preparation, you’re not likely to be able to do much to redeem yourself when you’ve reached a ripe age.  There’s a line in an essay by Stanley Hauerwas and Laura Yordy that I like very much: “The problem … is that when we are old, it is too late to learn how to grow old.”

A second reason I am thinking of writing this book is because of how a loved one in my life is aging. She is having a rather miserable time growing old (she’s 89) in part because of physical ailments, but in large measure her difficulties have to do with her lack of preparation.  She has been a devout Christian her entire life, but somehow she did not acquire the spiritual practices and strengths that help others deal with greater equanimity the vicissitudes of aging.  Instead, she grows ever more anxious, ungrateful and ungracious, and I believe it is too late to change her trajectory.  I am most anxious to understand what was lacking in her spiritual journey that has made her so unhappy with her life despite the comforts and privileges it has contained.

So please tune in during the coming days to ponder with me what is perhaps the most important pilgrimage we all take—the journeys of our lives that culminate, if we are fortunate, in old age.