MEANING AND PURPOSE IN THE 4TH QUARTER

After you have fulfilled your obligations to your family, retired from your job, done most of the things you've looked forward to doing like discarding your alarm clock and traveling wherever you want to go, then what do you do, and why? Thinking about this topic is a good thing to do before you find yourself faced with some of the serious challenges met with in old age.

Psychologist Erik Erikson designated late adulthood as "a time of struggle to develop a sense of integrity and an appreciation of your life experiences, as opposed to becoming increasingly despairing over what is and what has been and what will be." Yikes, easy to say, harder to do! And we all know older people who are pretty depressed and despairing about their own situations, and will tell you all about it whenever given the chance to do so. Is that really what you want to look forward to in your own old age?

Gaining an appreciation of your own life experiences is a good foundation for doing the needed thinking about finding meaning and purpose in your later years. Wherever you find a group of elderly people around a table, usually with a cup of coffee at hand, you hear "life review" taking place in their conversations as they tell stories from the past and laugh at good memories and stoically recount hard times. And make no mistake that they are just socializing because what they are also doing is recalling important parts of the past that need to be both remembered and appreciated. And while this form of life review is most common, it is done sporadically and unconsciously, and therefore it is not as helpful as it could be.

Undertaking to consciously look back over your life with the intention of developing an appreciation for all you have done and been can be a most useful activity, and a real help in thinking about the meaning and purpose of life in the 4th Quarter. One of the most useful ways to think about your life experiences is to undertake your life review in a group that is formed to do just this. You could be the person who forms a group to do life review. It can also be done on your own by working with a book of questions and memory joggers such as my own book, Ask Yourself! Question that Guide you Through Life's Transitions.

For starters, in thinking about meaning and purpose in the 4th Quarter how about reviewing what your obligations are at this point in your life, and asking yourself the question: What in your life at this point has real meaning for you and why? And then go on to think about what you can do that will now give you a purpose in life? Maybe you have the ability to volunteer in some way, or perhaps you can offer to be a friend to someone who needs one, or to be a good listener for any of your loved ones who need one. Of course you can think of tons of other things, and that is just what you need to do!

 

Your Life after Retirement

Wait a minute, you say to yourself, when will I really have to think about retiring? Surely not yet! I can’t afford to retire anytime soon and when I do I’m just going to travel and have a bunch of fun, and then worry about problems when they arise. Sounds like a realistic plan, right? Sure, but commonsense tells you that if you had at least a general idea of what most people experience during this stage life it could help you out.

 In fact, the average person is best served when they review the available information about post retirement years before they retire, and make some plans based on what they have learned. Oh, I know you’re not average, and that likely you will live independently for a very long time, just like your Uncle Harry who died at 98 while sawing wood. But just in case you aren’t, and you don’t, perhaps you should gather a bit of information about what happens to most folks. At least you could then be knowledge about what others will have to experience. And wouldn't it be better, and more fair to the people you care about, to do so before you’re faced with problems created by not thinking ahead?

Okay,okay, you're thinking, what does everybody need to know already? What's the formula here? And oops, right off there's some not such good news:  It seems our culture has not formulated a generally agreed upon picture of the purpose of living beyond retirement age, or just how to do it. This is probably because previously not nearly as many people were living very long beyond retirement age at all!  However, life expectancy has expanded a great deal during the last century.and many people can now expect to live into their 80s and 90s. Some will even make it to 100 and a bit beyond. Chances are fairly good that you too will reach old age, and it is worth thinking about before you get there, even though you kind of have to figure it out by gathering up information for yourself.

Not to fear, we are going to work on this together:  Let us begin our thinking about life after retirement by examining the beliefs that we carry around with us, either consciously or unconsciously, about what it means to be old. Yes, probably old age will be different now than when your ideas about it formed, but you need to consciously acknowledge this and look at your beliefs as they are right now.

When you start thinking about it, your closest examples of aging and what it means, may be your own parents or parents-in-law. You need to take a careful look at these folks because how the people you are closest to do in this stage of life, and what they have believed about being old, has had an impact on you. Your beliefs about old age, even though you don't think a lot about it, very likely will contribute to the experiences you have in this stage of your life. So take a good look at the things your parents believed about getting old, and ask yourself if you agree with them or see things differently? And then think about all the older people you’ve met and what they taught you about the aging process. If you look at the current representations of old people on television ask yourself what they are conveying about aging? Do you think those images have impacted you on some level?

Perhaps you could make a list of the things you now think are good or bad about aging, or being old. Keep it and go back to it now and then to update it. You may eventually be surprised  about some of the things on your list after you have more experience in being older. 

GETTING STARTED!

HERE WE GO!

The good news is that we are getting older by the minute! Don't you think we should all get kudos for just staying on the planet, in whatever shape we are in, as long as we have? And rather you see life as the great adventure, or as a duty to be performed to the best of your abilities, you've made it this far and you should get credit for that alone! How about giving yourself a party to celebrate just being wherever you are just now. You could invite other folks to cheer you on if you'd like, or you may prefer to do your celebrating all by yourself. Just remember to acknowledge the efforts you've made to accomplish your current situation, and give yourself some sort of reward - like a Thai foot massage!

As we begin our exploration into what in my book, Ask Yourself! Questions that Guide you Through Life's Transitions, I've called "Facing up to Aging in our Society." I particularly want to bring to your attention these wise words by author and sociologist Mary Pipher about the next part of life for many of us:  "Soon our country will be avalanched by old people, and those people will be us.  In a few decades, our solutions to the dilemmas of caring for our elders will be applied to our own lives.  The kindness, the indifference, the ignorance, and the wisdom will be passed on.  The more we love and respect our elders, the more we teach our children to love and respect us.  The more we think through problems today, the more organization and cultural structures will be in place to handle our generation's needs."