Composing a Further Life

demand for equal rights into the fulfilled promise of new contributions.
    Forty years ago, looking at their lives with the newly developed possibility of planning their childbearing, young women discovered the need to break out of inherited assumptions about who they were, what they could do, and what they should want in their lives. They had imagined their futures in terms of a set of culturally imposed stereotypes and had been trained to desire what society was ready to give them. Just as those women found they could not follow the model of their mothers, today’s sixty-somethings remember their own grandparents as elderly without feeling elderly themselves. They are beginning to understand that they will not age in the same way and at the same pace, and above all that they must discover or invent new patterns for the years beyond traditional retirement, often as much as three decades, far too many years to spend on golf, television, and bridge, far too valuable to be expended on kinds of volunteerism that do not fully engage their skills or benefit from their perspectives.
    Today, men and women approaching retirement (and the cohorts that will follow them), with newly achieved health and longevity, face the same challenge that new-wave feminism presented to women: to develop a new consciousness and to free their imaginations for the future. The same kind of process that occurred in liberation movements in the past is needed as older adults learn to discover and affirm who they are, the wisdom they have to offer, and how to make it effective in the world. I believe that, like the consciousness-raising of the sixties, this process of discovery must rest on learning, reflection, and conversation, leading to engaged action, and that consciousness will embrace responsibility as well as entitlement. To know what they will need and what they need to offer, both men and women must explore who they are.
    This is the process I hope to simulate and stimulate with this book. One of the most insightful comments I received about an earlier book,
Composing a Life
, first published in 1989, was from a reader who said she had felt engaged in an unfolding conversation with six participants—herself and the five women portrayed in that book—although the actual words were drawn from separate interviews and then woven together. 10 We do not need formulas or rigid models to follow; we need to be drawn into a common process of search that will suggest new ways of being. We need distinctive individual voices rather than case studies. Particularly in an era of transition, the story is ill told with statistics. Both men and women have anxieties about losing their work because of age, and both need to articulate the meanings of love and work in their lives, what they would like to extend and what they would like to leave behind, so this book includes the voices of both men and women, sometimes individually and sometimes as couples.
    Thus, the method of this book is an exploration of material from extended, open-ended interviews with thoughtful and articulate individuals—conversations with friends or with strangers who became friends—combined with my own commentary and introspection, and organized around emerging themes. A longer life span suggests a number of adaptations, all of which are occurring simultaneously. For some people, every stage is stretched: longer years of education, longer experimentation before marriage, late childbearing, and often deferred retirement. For others, life is started up again at midstream as if it could be repeated, a fairly common pattern for men with second families. For a third group, often women who have had a first career as homemakers, a new start on an autonomous career is involved. Some want to use an undeveloped talent, perhaps benefiting from emerging capacities to combine right- and left-brain functions by studying painting or dance or learning to play a musical instrument. Some want to build a legacy. Some go on to teach what they formerly practiced. Some want to focus their energies and passions on an area that received only a fraction of their attention in the past. For some there is a discovery of freedom. For others there is a chance for new or renewed dedication. And because we have not yet become fully aware of the possibilities, there will be for many an era of boredom and futility as the open doorways remain unexplored or are prematurely closed. These different approaches should