Hey, baby boomers, face it: like every generation before us, we’re getting old. The accumulated years have begun to reconfigure body, mind and spirit, and the hands on this clock cannot be turned back. Awesome, scary, relentless and mysterious, aging will not be denied.
Yes, our bodies are changing, energy is lagging, and youthful looks are fading (or long gone!). Ever notice that you're often one of the older people in a room now? Yet we are also living in an amazing time. For nearly all of recorded history, only one person in ten could hope to live to the age of sixty-five. With the medical advances in the last one hundred years, nearly eighty percent of us in American will live to be past that age, often into our eighties and nineties. In the last one hundred years, the percentage of people in the United States sixty-five and older has more than tripled, representing thirteen percent of the total population. We now have some seventy thousand centenarians living around us.
What was once reserved for a tiny fraction (no wonder elders were honored!) is increasingly available to us all. It's absolutely incredible. But what is this revolution in longevity for? Is it just to grow old?
The Challenge of Getting Older
I was born in 1946, the first official year of the boomer wave, so I may be further down the road than some of you. What I and my older friends are experiencing is startling: physical energy, athletic skills, and sexual drive have diminished considerably; we play hide-and-seek with car keys, everyday words, the names of family and friends, and even simple intentions (“What was I looking for?”); soft voices disappear in noisy restaurants (“It’s not my hearing, you’re mumbling!”); signs are harder to read (“When did the print get smallar?”), and prescription medications are now a daily fact (“I’m up to three at the moment, how about you?”).
To make matters worse, the values, dress, and vocabulary of the young seem ever more inexplicable to us (“Have we been invaded by aliens?”) and the sheer number of young people rushing God-knows-where astounds me.
I never expected aging to be quite like this (though I don’t really know what I expected), and my older friends hint at much more to come. Boomers, I can tell you, aging is beginning to happen for real.
The Disguise of Age
Staring at myself in recent photographs with shocked disbelief, I wondered, "Who is this person that looks so old?" When did this "old man" disguise appear and who put it there? How could some Hollywood make-up artist sneak into my room unnoticed while I was sleeping and make me look so different? I know the disguise is not the real me, but where did that person go and how do I remove the makeup? Worse yet, younger people (and they all seem younger now) only seem to see the disguise, so they call me “sir,” watch intently for signs of senility or incompetence, then largely ignore me as another species irrelevant to their life.
It all seems so unfair. Inside me, I feel no more than 30 years old (despite those now-familiar aches, pains, and physical limitations that apparently came with the disguise) and should be easily understood and accepted by—and even attractive to!—all those other 30 and 40-year-olds. Yet all they see is my disguise; they resort to that respectful and polite behavior that renders me invisible and insignificant.
Does this sound familiar to you?
The Miracle of Life-Long Transformation
Still, something very different is going on behind the disguise of age: life's never-ending miracle of transformation. Notice how your appearance in photographs changed every year from birth on. Do you look or feel like that 3-month-old infant, 7-year-old scout, testing teenager, determined young adult, or middle-aged worker?
In the past, you thought these changes cool. Well, this same miracle is still changing your body, mind, identity, and beliefs, and it's now called 'aging'. You are being changed yet again. Maybe it's still meaningful and exciting. The real question is, "What’s going on behind the disguise?" The answer is, "A lot!"
Behind the “old-person” disguise hide three secret and powerful psychospiritual processes: initiation, transformation, and revelation. Aging is an initiation into a new and extraordinary stage of life, a profound transformation of consciousness, and the revelation of a new and sacred world. Each of these change processes brings profound challenges but, to the prepared, equally profound gifts. These three secrets of aging can completely rewrite your story of growing “old.” Why should the miracle of aging be any less amazing than the miracles preceding it?
We begin with Secret 1...
Aging as an Initiation into a New Stage of Life
With tears in his eyes, a seventy-year-old man in one of my classes on aging lamented, "All I am is behind me now. How do I live until I die?" It was a poignant request for initiation. With youth, career, and parenthood behind him, and no vision of a meaningful future, Ed had lost his bearings. He felt worthless and forgotten. Worse, he had no way to embrace his suffering as a process of initiation.
The unhappiness of the old—their complaints about aches, pains, and the unfairness of life, their "Why I am still alive?" questions—often represent such an implicit longing for initiation into a new stage of life, for they are languishing in the emptiness of the old one.
Initiation is a rite of passage that guides the transition from one social status or state of being to another, usually more advanced one, and often involving formal religious or secular rituals. As such, initiation implies a major shift in identity, role, and purpose. Our current experience of aging, however, represents a profoundly incomplete initiation. Though we are surely beginning something new, its personal, cultural and spiritual significance remain severely underdeveloped.
Joseph Campbell explained that initiatory experiences commonly involve three phases:
1. Departure from the familiar everyday world
2. Surrender to an ordeal or transcendent mystery
3. Return to the conventional world forever changed by the experience
Implied in the above description are two additional elements central to major initiations: suffering and meaning. The most difficult initiations tear us apart, bringing intense pain and grief in their wake. Unless we find meaning, the suffering can become unbearable and reap even greater destruction.
How is aging an initiation? With the ending of career and its schedules, goals, and social status, your world begins to empty. Even your greatest contributions eventually become dated and stale. As the kids grow up to pursue their own lives, parenting responsibilities and roles disappear, and your relationships with busy adult children soon takes place mostly around holidays.
With additional changes in physical appearance, strength, energy, and sensory acuity, it is ever more apparent that you are not who you used to be. Indeed, you hardly recognize yourself in the family pictures! Friends and aged relatives die, physical disabilities become common, cultural values of the young change almost beyond recognition, and the world you once knew is no longer there.
Who are you now? What is your life for? Why are you still here?
Approached with what Jung called a “Religious Attitude,” the events of aging—particularly the losses, suffering, and disorientation—create a transcendent mystery of tremendous power and significance. Everything we once took for granted—beliefs, roles, security, and indefinite future—is stolen from us in the emptying of the Winter of Life. Unprepared and unguided, we discover that we have stepped into a world without familiar landmarks and meanings.
For many, this emptying is a "Dark Night of the Soul." With little cultural wisdom to guide us through this Late Life Passage, many struggle instead to maintain the old self-concept in a false world of gated or retirement communities, endless rounds of golf, or frenzied social activities.
What’s missing from the initiatory experience of aging is ritual.
Ritual in the Elder’s Initiation
While we have rituals for birth (baptism), marriage (weddings), and death (funerals) in America, we do not have a ritual for Elderhood, one that can hold the profound challenges comprising Secret I. As a consequence, many older people feel lost, useless, forgotten, and confused about the purpose and value of their continuing lives. Creating an elder ritual can change that.
What Is A Ritual?
Part of human social life in every civilization and era, rituals are ceremonies conveying higher meaning or spiritual purpose to the events and issues of life. By relating a person’s unique life circumstances to the history, core beliefs, and deepest values of their family, community, or humankind in general, a ritual imbues them with both personal and collective meaning, connecting the individual and community to the overriding cosmic order of things. Rituals are especially important in times of major life transition or crisis, when they provide a container for feelings and concerns too big for individuals to process alone.
While many other kinds of rituals exist (worship, celebration, healing, divination), the Elder Ritual embodies the power and meaning of initiation, a rite of passage marking the change in individual’s social and spiritual role from worker and provider to spiritual elder or wisdom figure. As an event with community-wide consequences, it cannot be performed alone, for all must experience the Elder’s change in social and sacred status.
An elder ritual can take many forms, including: two or more friends talking about aging and then creating a simple ritual to bless each other’s passage; classes on aging with an initiatory framework; religious programs designed to initiate elders in the context of their faith tradition; a wilderness vision quest with a trained guide or group; psychotherapy specifically focusing on the inner tasks of aging; retirement, birthday, moving parties with initiatory themes; or a formal initiation ritual designed by family or friends. Creating an elder ritual is not difficult, and for those interested, I can provide more specific guidelines.
Conclusions
Native peoples value wise Elders, not only honoring them with special designation and duties, but depending on them in good times and bad for practical guidance, historical knowledge, conflict arbitration, tribal mythology, spiritual awareness, and a living connection to ancestors. In our materialistic obsession with youth and technological progress, we have lost the Elder’s vision and spiritual consciousness. Instead, society looks to institutions, science, and technology for the wisdom that should also flow from the truly wise.
Because Western culture has largely forgotten the Elder's profound and timeless contribution, Elders have forgotten their own destiny, until now. Yet something interesting and utterly unprecedented is happening as a result of this very same progress: We are living longer, much longer, and this longevity is creating a vast and untapped supply of potential Elders. The first Secret of Aging challenges us to initiate real elders and learn what this new stage of life has to offer.
In sum, the Elder’s initiation, if handled consciously and wisely, creates a developmental transition that can move you from the materialistic concerns of middle-age to the spirituality of the Elder in Winter. A gradual but a profound shift, you are actually different, and your place in the world is different. For the enlightened Elder—the one who has done the inner psychological and spiritual work of aging—the gifts that blossom on the Tree of Life have enormous value to self, family, community, and the world.
If you ever wondered whether aging, with its many stresses, losses, and defeats, has any real meaning or value, stay tuned for Part II.
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As research for a new book, I’d love to hear your feedback on these ideas and your own experience. How is aging going for you? Do these ideas stir any “ah ha’s”?
The Three Secrets of Aging will be the subject of a series of upcoming ChI columns.
