Composing a Further Life

opening their doors to students in their sixties and seventies and beyond, sometimes seeking further degrees or skills needed in the contemporary marketplace and sometimes seeking the stimulus of exposure to other worlds of learning. The search for new learning complements the need to understand the most important continuities of each life, the strands that we might pick from the complex weave and say, This is who I am and what I stand for. I have argued that the longer lives in today’s world mandate a process parallel to the consciousness-raising that women undertook in the sixties and seventies to free themselves from limiting stereotypes of who they were and what they wanted out of life—and above all, what they have to contribute to those around them.
    “We have not yet really grasped what is happening demographically,” I said to Jane, “because the discussion of demographic change has focused so much on costs and entitlements instead of on trying to understand what it means to have this additional healthy time, actually a new stage in the life cycle. The whole way people think about their lives is going to have to change. The question is, Can we contribute to the processes of change already under way so as to really enrich the entire community? My hope is that healthy longevity will mean not only longer lives but rather richer and deeper lives for people of all ages. We’re becoming a different kind of human.”
    “We’re still of course living with the paradigm that says that old people are a drag,” Jane commented. “You know, that we’re greedy geezers who are taking away what should be going to the young people.”
    “Sure. That’s the American paradigm,” I said. “But it hasn’t been true of all cultures through history. I think greedy geezers has to do with rising health-care costs and entitlements, but that’s just an overlay on the more basic but equally negative notion of older adults being obsolete, opinionated, inflexible, not understanding the needs of today. In fact, research shows that as people get older they become more open-minded, more tolerant of ambiguity, and less inclined to sharp black-white distinctions. 11 But the way to maintain that is ongoing learning, which is more and more coming into people’s awareness in the culture. That’s changing. But as with feminism, you have to internalize it and deal with your own stereotypes.
    “Older adults have prejudices about each other. My godmother moved into assisted living in her eighties, and I asked her if she’d made friends, and she said to me, ‘Oh, my dear, most of the people here are
so
deteriorated.’ Well, many of them weren’t any more deteriorated than she was, and she was very much herself. The point is, just as women have had to unlearn their stereotypes about other women as well as about themselves, so older adults have to unlearn the ageism that they learned thirty, forty, fifty years ago, because the condition of older people was literally different at that time. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot in what they’ve learned in the course of a lifetime that’s worth keeping. When I use an evocative term like
wisdom
, it has to include what I’ve been told, what I’ve experienced, what I’ve reflected upon, and also the world I live in now, looking and listening and continuing to learn. To be wise is to know that you have more to learn and to have spent a lifetime coming to terms with new knowledge. That, after all, is the place to start thinking about the needs of tomorrow.”
    The gathering at Upaya in 2007 where Jane and I were talking was in itself an exercise in the recovery of lost knowledge, for after the Long Island property was lost, the Lindisfarne community went through a series of metamorphoses. As the original group grew older, younger fellows and sometimes the children of fellows were brought into the circle. For a number of years, in the early twenty-first century, the fellows ceased to meet. Some of us are still exploring new territory, while a few are mourning the loss of projects that have stagnated or withered or been absorbed in a reduced form into the mainstream.
    Still, I always find something to learn from these gatherings. Perhaps the most important element of Lindisfarne was the conversation across disciplinary and professional lines, conversation that has always been rare and that has weakened at universities in the same period. Conversation in which minds leap from