Stay Fresh and Green

I recently turned 65.  I celebrated my birthday by building a long, low dry-stack stone wall as a landscaping feature in our back yard.  I’ve never attempted to build a dry-stack wall before but I watched a few Youtube videos and got some tips from a friend who used to own a landscaping business.  The wall isn’t quite finished yet but my friend says I nailed it.

For me, the wall is a symbol of how I plan to approach the next season of my life.  Clearly, this year is a time of change and transition for me.  I am ending an employment relationship with IJM Canada that has stretched over 12 years and has brought me great fulfillment and purpose. I would have the option of “retiring” but that is not what I choose.  I choose instead to seek personal renewal by embracing new challenges and engaging in new pursuits.  The precise nature of those challenges and pursuits is still largely unknown, because I am being careful to allow space for reflection and retooling between the thing I am finishing and whatever comes next.  But I am aware of many possibilities: I could build an off-the-grid cabin on the family bush lot on Manitoulin Island.  I could learn a new language.  I could teach English abroad. I could launch a new not-for-profit organization.  I could run a marathon on Antarctica.  But I will not spend my next ten or twenty years in quiet desperation, nor in regret over what might have been, and not even in a prolonged savouring of my accomplishments of the past thirty years.

I will not spend my next ten or twenty years in quiet desperation, nor in regret over what might have been…

My vision for the future has been influenced by an out-of-print book by a Canadian educator: The Ulyssean Adult: Creativity in the Middle and Later Years by John A.B. McLeish.  McLeish’s thesis is that, rather than submitting to the prevalent notion that later adulthood is a time of inevitable decline, men and women have access to regenerative and creative powers over the course of their lives, enabling them to live actively and creatively—rather than reactively and listlessly—late in life.  The title, of course, is inspired by Ulysses, the hero of Homer’s ancient Greek epic poem The Odyssey, who would have been about 50 when the great series of adventures described in the poem came to an end.  Other poets, notably Dante and Tennyson, imagined that Ulysses “set out [once again] on the open sea with but one ship” (Dante’s Inferno) late in life, perhaps when he was close to 70.  In Tennyson’s Ulysses, the protagonist says, “Come my friends,/ ‘T is not too late to seek a newer world.”  For McLeish, the Ulyssean person in later life is identified by the governing qualities of quest, courage and resourcefulness.

In the Book of Psalms, we read that the godly “will still bear fruit in old age, they will stay fresh and green” (Psalm 92:14).  It is this promise and this opportunity that the Ulyssean Adult pursues—the potential of a life that is vital, flourishing, adaptive and productive until the end.  From a young age, I have looked to the Biblical character of Caleb as a role model: someone who when he was 85, asked his leader Joshua to give him the opportunity to conquer Hebron, a heavily fortified city reputed to be occupied by giants.  He said, “I am still as strong today as the day Moses sent me out; I’m just as vigorous to go out to battle now as I was then. Now give me this hill country…”

“The will is the critical element—the will to search, to discover, to accomplish dreams—in the continuing creativity of… later years”

A person who wishes to embark on a voyage of discovery late in life should be ready to honour the experiences he has accumulated up to the point of transition, yet be willing to leave them behind without regret.  Tennyson’s Ulysses says, “I am a part of all that I have met;/ Yet all experience is an arch wherethro’/ Gleams that untravell’d world… ”  The past is preparation for adventures and discoveries yet to come.  Yet Ulysses is also realistic enough to acknowledge that the years have taken their inescapable toll:

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are:
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

McLeish writes, “The will is the critical element—the will to search, to discover, to accomplish dreams—in the continuing creativity of… later years”.   The firm desire to pursue the adventure of life in later years will enable to adventurer to overcome many of the limitations imposed by age and tradition.

I am writing this as a person who is undergoing transition in two significant ways—from middle age into old age, and from a full-time professional career into a still-to-be-defined role in society.  I am setting my will to stay “fresh and green” as I move forward, but I encourage my fellow-travellers of all ages to make a similar determination.  I see around me far too many men and women who are living lives of quiet desperation, putting in time in occupations and preoccupations that bring them no joy, and yet are limited by fear and obligation from venturing into an unexplored space where their innate, God-given creativity and adaptability could bring them to a new shore of flourishing.  For us all, I share this final, lengthy, quote from McLeish’s The Ulyssean Adult:

These are the attitudes toward life and the later years which are typical of Ulysseans: that life is a process of continuous growth, as much through the later and very late years as in any earlier period; that the capacity to learn is fully operative among human beings across the entire span of life, and that one simply goes ahead and learns, and grows; that human creativity comprises, apart from the splendours of genius, thousands of manifestations of the mind and imagination which transform an individual’s own self or his or her environment; that creativity cannot be taught and learned as one can teach and learn a language—but that certain conditions, all of them potentially available in the later years, can be fostered so that the creative attitude and powers, on whatever scale, can be liberated.  The most important of these conditions are maintenance of a sense of wonder toward life, openness to experience, the sense of search, and scope for the best of the child-self which is present in all of us (my emphasis).

As a final reward for those of you who read to the very end of this lengthy blog, here’s Helen Mirren reading a portion of Tennyson’s Ulysses on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.