Composing a Further Life

left the education fund in 1990. She had turned sixty and had surgery for cancer, and eleven years seemed to be enough. “But all this time another thing was incubating—you know how things do—here you are over sixty, but where are you? What’s the next …? You know? There’s supposed to be retirement, but there seems to be no expectation about what that means, except that you not get sick and cost money to the taxpayers.” Glady was also noticing what was happening to others her age as a result of downsizing during a period of economic downturn. “Aging workers who’d been there a long time were being kicked out under various guises and new technology was coming in.”
    For Glady, as she moved into Adulthood II, spiritual exploration became important. “I guess I needed a time for myself to kind of ruminate on where I was. I had been introduced to the Zen center in San Francisco in the eighties and Green Gulch [Farm]. That immediately became a spiritual home for me when I was doing the Ed Fund, so I’d get up very early in the morning and practice, and I used my vacations to go to Tassajara [Zen Mountain Center] and deepen my practice with the community. What that did was to make me realize that, at sixty-one or sixty-two, anything that I might start to help with a later-life transition needed to have a quality and dimension to it that acknowledged the need for purpose, that it was a time for many people after their first active careers to develop other ways of working, for profit or whatever, honing in on a kind of spiritual longing, to think, Well, I’ve lived this long … a need to find my own integrity.
    “I had a vision of that when I was in the Sierras, walking with a group, going up a trail and suddenly looking down on this expansive landscape below and at the horizon. I was standing there alone, and it was like a reality shift. I saw it as a metaphor that life was final. I realized there was a finality in this landscape. It didn’t mean that my demise was in the offing but that each of my steps down from the peak needed to be made with a sense of my own integrity. I needed to find myself. That stayed with me, like images do, and became the basis for starting what I call the Life Plan Center, which was for people of fifty or above, again a transition, with the same components of self-assessment, counseling, information on job finding, and workshops.
    “There was another component, which became the Spirituality Workshop, that really put it out there that this was the ingredient that we all need in our life, a sense of meaning. I was trying to start something like right livelihood that expressed this urgency to incorporate a spiritual path in my life, and have people feel that they could talk about that, not in a religious way. Anyway, that survived for about six or seven years, and then it merged back with Alumnae Resources. Both organizations had to close in about 1999 because of the decline of the stock market, when companies and corporations were no longer using Alumnae Resources to recruit or find employees and people began to use the Internet to look for employment. Anyway, that moved me on again, luckily. Serendipitously. It was a bold step for me and opened up a larger dimension of thinking about life choices and life careers.”
    One of the keys to starting new things is the ability to sense what is happening or about to happen, to tune in on the ways people are beginning to speak about their experience. I found myself connecting with words and phrases that Glady used that had been landmarks in the shifts of consciousness taking place over the last fifty years. She used the words
empowerment
and
disempowerment
(and her own special twist,
unempowerment)
, which were so much a part of the contemporary rhetoric of efforts for social justice, for instance, and she spoke of the need to “find a voice,” which had been important in the women’s movement. 8
    Glady’s thinking about youth also seemed to fit very neatly with Erikson’s stages and the need to develop a sense of identity as a precondition for making commitments rather than using commitments as a substitute for a sense of identity—a common problem for women in the past, when women were defined by their marriages rather than entering marriage as free individuals knowingly pledging their lives. And I found myself remembering the whole movement toward communes, a reaching for a way to express interdependence.
    I also