Category Archives: Third Phase

Aging, Quotes, Retirement, Third Phase

the u-shaped graph

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Samain                                                                                Moving Moon

Been thinking about the U shaped graph I’ve seen in recent articles about happiness. The graph follows feelings of happiness over a lifetime. During early childhood happiness is high according to the graph. Then somewhere around adolescence and continuing through  an individual’s working life happiness declines reaching a nadir in mid-career. After that the curve ticks up, implying of course that we’re happiest again when we die. Hmm. Probably not.

(graphic for an Economist article on this topic.)

My life experience so far seems to underwrite the broad concept. Specifically I’ve been wondering about that uptick in happiness (well-being, satisfaction)-I prefer the Greek,  eudaimonia, human-flourishing. Why does it happen?

Here are a few random ideas, not proven as far as I know.  We flourish when our life has recognizable limits. We’re always being told we can do anything we set our minds to, we can be anything we want to be. Maybe so, I don’t know.  I do know that the burden of  having to choose among competing futures can make the present seem fraught and burdened. One limit in the third phase is that of diminished prospects. We no longer have the career world and its vast horizons spread before us, nor do we have the energy, the ambition we had in that time of our life. Seems good to me. Narrowing down the future and its possibilities means a less fraught daily existence.

A second limit we encounter (most of us) in the third phase is financial. We know how much money we have and what we have to do to live within its possibilities and constraints. Again, I think, good. We’re not reaching, hoping for another raise, a windfall, a lucky break. No, we can settle into the life we can afford.

A third limit is length of life. We know now that life does not stretch on well beyond the horizon. Our friends and family have begun to get serious illnesses and die. Our own body has begun to signal its intention, too. Like the other two, narrowed prospects and financial constraints, at first this seems like a horror, an anathema to the American dream of excelsior. But I think good here, too. I want my obit to start out: Ate right, exercised, died anyway.

Acceptance of all three limits encourages us to focus on those matters dearest to us, most important in our lives. Does this mean that we have no hope for a productive life? No. It simply means that we’re likely much clearer about where to spend our energy and gifts. Does this mean we give up on managing our financial affairs? Again, no. It just means that they’re easier to manage and probably take up less energy. Does it mean we abandon caring for our health? Of course not. It means that we no longer do so with the illusion of eternal physical life as our reward for it.

Just random ideas. Not proven as far as I know.

Colorado, Family, Feelings, Friends, The Move, Third Phase, Woolly Mammoths

The 25th Is the New 50th

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Samain                                                                               Moving Moon

The electrician comes today to remove the automatic transfer switch for our generator. Eric at Alpha Electric in Evergreen said they can cost as much as $1,000 to $1,200. Probably saved us the cost of the electrician today and the cost of installing the generator in Colorado.

While we decided to leave the Viking in place (so we can install an induction cooking surface in Colorado), we did decide to take the freezer with us. One less thing to buy out there.

At the Woolly restaurant meeting on Monday Stefan said, “I know you’re focused on logistics right now, but this is a big life change.” He’s right, in a way. The logistics have absorbed, helpfully, a lot of the angst. We could put our worry hats on about things we could resolve like choosing a mover, what to take and what to unload, when to buy a new home.

The larger question of whether this is a good decision or not, oddly, doesn’t really matter. We made the choice to go and accepted the consequences, positive and negative, of that choice. There’s little we can do now to effect that. As a result, the time between deciding for Colorado and now has been filled with making that choice a reality.

We gave ourselves long enough to say our good-byes and that has been a very nurturing, even healing process. It means that when we start our new life in Colorado it will not be with regrets about Minnesota, but with warm memories.

The new life will depend on us and our choices, too. We’re going open to a new place, to new friends, to stronger family relationships.  And, we’re looking forward to being with each other in a different environment. Our first anniversary in Colorado will be our 25th and for those of us of the divorce generation, the 25th is the new 50th.

 

Aging, Memories, Minnesota, Third Phase

Not Expected

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Samain                                                                  Closing Moon

10″ for sure. Maybe 12-14. A lot for a first snow. Ushering in a week of cold weather. Minnesota. Ah.

Yesterday when I visited the eye doc a couple a bit older than myself came in. They both had on black sports jackets, the same, with MSRA on the front. I didn’t think much about it until they went to the receptionist to check in and I saw MSRA on the back with the acronym spelled out: Minnesota Street Rod Association. Not what I expected.

Which brings up a regular occurrence. Trying to imagine what an older person was like during the 60’s. I know from looking at myself in the mirror that you can’t tell from a persons post medicare card appearance where they  stood in those days. Even the gray pony-tail crowd is as likely to be composed of veterans as ex-hippies and draft protesters.

Not many of us wear our enthusiasms so clearly as the hot-rodders gathered with me for our glaucoma check.

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Worthy

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Fall                                                                                  Falling Leaves Moon

 

Finished the article on Why I Hope to Die at 75. The more I read, the more I felt it revealed an uneasiness about worthiness. We are worthy only if we are productive. If we can be remembered as vital and incisive. If we remove ourselves from our children’s lives, quit being their shadow. If we don’t use resources better focused on the young or the demented. If we are not ill. If we are not disabled. If we are not operating at peak power.

This is what Christian theologians call works righteousness. You can only be saved if you do good works and abstain from bad ones. It was Luther who said, no, we are saved by grace alone. We cannot earn worthiness through good works.

Translated to this secular argument, I would say that we are not worthy because of our potential, our health status, our role as parents-no, we are worthy as a result of our humanness, because of our unique and precious life. Worthiness, in other words, is the wrong category to bring to the table. We live and have worth because of our existential situation. No one else, ever, will be the human that you are. No one. In this case I stand by analogy with Luther, we are worthy by the gracious act of our creation and remain so up to and even after our death.

 

None of this is to say that Ezekiel Emanuel can’t decide to refuse therapeutic medicine after 75. Of course, he can. Might be the right thing to do for him. I don’t know. I only know that his worth will not be any less because he’s no longer in the office at U Penn. His worth will not be less to his children and family because he may have a faulty heart. His worth will not be decided by others, nor, in fact, by himself. It was decided at the hour of his birth.

 

Aging, Faith and Spirituality, Family, Feelings, Friends, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Speaking Against

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Fall                                                                                          Falling Leaves Moon

Psalm 90:10 (RSV)

10 The years of our life are threescore and ten,
    or even by reason of strength fourscore;
yet their span is but toil and trouble;
    they are soon gone, and we fly away.

In the middle of reading this long article by Ezekiel J. Emanuel in the Atlantic, “Why I Hope to Die at 75.” The argument so far has a rationale based on increasing life being linked statistically with a longer period of disability and illness. Why suffer yourself and why suffer the costs to your family and society? Why not just die at 75? The Jews believe 3 score and ten is a full life and anything beyond that is bonus time, so from that perspective 75 is within one metrics range.

How you respond to this article is of interest to me, and I’ll reserve my final opinion until I’ve finished, but here is my first response.

Emanuel has a lot of information about these issues as Professor of Health Care Management and Professor of Medical Ethics and Health Policy in the Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania. I’ll stipulate his data. And, I’ll stipulate that all of us will have opinions on this issue whether well-informed or informed by anecdote alone or, more likely, some combination of the two.

What’s unusual, of course, is Emanuel’s bald claim that he has a limit in mind for his lifespan. The exercising, right-dieting, medically attuned crowd (put me squarely here) are what he calls The American Immortals. That is, a group of folks who want to believe in life everlasting, or at least life lasting as long as possible. This clever phrase says a lot about Emanuel, but is not so illuminating for its target group.

Here’s what I think is wrong with Emanuel’s position. He seems to have an instrumental view of human life, spending considerable time showing how creativity, cognition and overall productivity decline after peaking anywhere along a broad bell curve with its flattened top extending between 30 and 60. After 60, unless you are an outlier, (and he says American Immortals believe they are all, or will be, outliers) it’s a long slump toward vagueness and discomfort.

In other words, as I read him, Emanuel doesn’t want to go into the process of decline. He’d rather phase out before that all gets too far underway. He wants to be remembered as vital, productive, keen. So say we all. But. Life is about more than productivity, creativity, thinking.

It is also about loving, about following the journey where it leads, about mystery. The Great Wheel speaks in analogy about this exact matter, the journey from birth to maid to mother to crone, then across the veil. Or, from birth to youth to adulthood and the third phase. I suppose you could say Emanuel is a latter day Stoic. I can see him in his chair, slumped with his toga around, arms dangling, veins open. As for me, I’m following this ancientrail as far as it goes, not for immortality, not for more productivity, but for life itself.

It is, I think, too easy to make shibboleths of work, of peak performance, especially in American culture. What of the supper table around which sit mechanics and waitresses, toll-booth operators and farm hands? What of the holiday meal with its small table for the young ones, their parents and their parents eating together? What about the grandchild who still wants to hold grandpop’s hand, even though he’s infirm? Life is about more than work, more than vitality, even. Life is not individual only; life is also embeddedness in the lives of others.

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Garden, Great Wheel, Holidays, Myth and Story, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science, Third Phase

Mabon 2014 and the Springtime of the Soul

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Fall Equinox                                                                      Leaf Change Moon

Today the earth’s celestial equator (the earth’s equator projected into space) passes through the sun’s ecliptic (the sun’s apparent path throughout the year, actually caused by earth’s orbit.) You usually hear this put the other way around; that is, as the sun passing through the earth’s celestial equator, but that represents the stuckness of paleolithic astronomy that assumed the earth was the center of the solar system. From the diagram above you can see the sun’s declination (degree above or below the celestial equator) is 0 on the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.

This same diagram is very clear about the solstices, too. You can see that when the earth’s orbit tilts the northern latitudes toward the sun, the sun is highest in the sky-the summer solstice.  When the sun is lowest in the northern sky-the earth tilts away from the sun and gives us the winter solstice.

Since the summer solstice day time has exceeded night time. In theory the autumnal equinox is the point of equilibrium between light and dark, but at our latitude that day actually occurs on September 25th this year. This is, however, the day the Great Wheel celebrates and it does so because of the sun’s zero declination at earth’s celestial equator.

This week then the victory of the sun, made complete on the summer solstice, begins to wane. The dark god of deep winter gains greater and greater authority as the sun’s rays spread out over a larger area of earth, thus weakening them, and the number of hours that the sun is in our sky, even in its weakened condition relative to the soil, decrease steadily until the night of the winter solstice. Thus comes the fallow, cold time.

It is no accident that the harvest season is now. Over the 475 million years (give or take a hundred million) since plants made it out of the oceans and onto land, plants have adapted themselves to the conditions that work with their particular genetics. Key aspects of a plant’s life include carbon dioxide, soil nutrients, available fresh water, adequate sunlight and temperatures adequate for all these to work with the plant’s life cycle.

Thus, as the earth’s orbit carries it to different relationships with solar strength, temperatures change along with it.  At its maximum when the earth tilts toward the sun and the sun is highest in the sky, the sun’s rays fall on a smaller area of land. Here’s an excellent simulation. University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Plants have had the past 475 million years to refine their growing season so that it takes maximum benefit of the sun’s strength. In a very real sense the growing season is a clock, or an astronomical observatory directly correlated to the earth’s orbit around the sun–The Great Wheel.

On a spiritual level, if we follow the ancient calendar of the plants, the season of external growth, flowering and seed making, is waning now. Just as the plant either dies out and anticipates its rejuvenation from scattered seed or goes dormant and waits with stored energy below ground in roots or corms or bulbs, so we might consider this season as the one where we shift inward, away from the external demands upon us and the expectations put on us there.

Now we shift toward the interior life, the Self becomes more of a focus, our spiritual life can deepen. We can see this shift in the human life cycle if we compare the second phase of life with its emphasis on family creation and nurture and career, to the third, with its pulling back from those external expectations. The third phase is a post growing season time of life, not in the sense that growth ends, but that its focus is more down and in rather than up and out. The third phase is the fallow time.  Michaelmas on the 29th of this month is known by followers of Rudolf Steiner as the springtime of the soul.

The third phase marks the beginning of the springtime of the soul for the individual.

Faith and Spirituality, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Powerful, Scary Ideas

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Lughnasa                                                                                          College Moon

Reading an important document, a Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy essay on authenticity. Kierkegaard, the essay says, defines the self in relational terms: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself…” A pioneer in the concept of authenticity Kierkegaard defines the purpose of life as “becoming what one is.”

This definition of self and of life’s purpose make sense to me. Heidegger, the inventor of the term authenticity, makes a similar point with his concept of dasein:  “…human being is a “relation of being”, a relation that obtains between what one is at any moment (the immediacy of the concrete present as it has evolved) and what one can and will be as the temporally extended unfolding or happening of life into an open realm of possibilities. To say that human being is a relation is to say that, in living out our lives, we always care about who and what we are.” from the same Stanford essay.

What both of these northern European thinkers suggest is that the idea of Self is dynamic and by definition relational, somehow linking our past with our present and our hope or anticipation for the future. This means that our notion of who we are-and therefore who we can hope to become-lies in a web of feelings and thoughts connecting experiences in the external world and our internal understanding of them, with those experiences occurring only in our interior world and their relations with those stimulated by the external world.

Thus, in Heidegger’s terminology, what we are is always at stake. The choices we make and the experiences we have and the past we carry with us are always in vibrant collision, shaping and reshaping our Selves, second by second. I suppose you could see this as daunting, but for me it is exciting, meaning that my Self is not fixed, not bound to the past or to any particular future, and not only not fixed, but malleable. That is, I can make choices now, right now, that affect my Self. I can even alter the past by recalibrating the frames through which I view it.

As we discussed in the Nietzschean conversations below, once we understand this fluid, vital nature of the Self, we cannot help but live dangerously. Why? Because in every action, in every moment of contemplation, even lurking in the past are events, experiences, thoughts that change who we are. And who we can become. Powerful, scary ideas.

Great Work, Memories, Minnesota, Politics, Third Phase

A Minor Leftie Memoir

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Lughnasa                                                                   College Moon

Groveland UU has asked me to speak on December 14th. Their theme for the year is social justice. They wanted me to talk about restorative justice, a topic about which I know little. Instead I suggested this:

Social Justice: Reflections       Looking back at work for affordable housing, neighborhood organizing and neighborhood economic development, against corporate control of neighborhoods, organizing for jobs, for equity in philanthropy, for a sustainable human presence on the earth, for undocumented immigrants, for progressive politicians like Wellstone, Karen Clark and Peter McLaughlin, against the Vietnam War, for women’s rights, against the draft.

Looking forward at work necessary to retain and expand gains made.

When looking at it again, I realized it had the character of a summing up about my political work over the years, mostly in Minnesota. Sort of a minor leftie memoir, but not for the purpose of the memories, or not mostly for them, but mostly for teasing out the themes, the underlying rationales, the whys. What worked, what didn’t. What might work now, what might not.

This topic came to me because I realized it would be my last time at Groveland, with whom I’ve shared a two decade plus relationship and possibly my last time speaking in Minnesota, maybe ever. I don’t, at least right now, intend to find a religious community in Colorado since such institutions no longer interest me.

There is a modest bolus of energy in reviewing a body of political work that arose mostly in response to individual issues and moments of time, that never followed a straight path and that, like most serious political work, had some successes and many failures.

Where I wondered, did all this energy and effort come from? It wasn’t a good career move, yet the political path was the one I followed anyhow, pushing away more logical trajectories. There was, of course, my father’s role as a newspaper editor and his often weekly airing of his Rooseveltian liberal opinions, basically pro-social welfare and anti-communist, pro strong defense. That may have shaped my willingness to be seen publicly as a representative of unpopular points of view.

Also important was the nature of my hometown’s work force, the parents of my friends. With few exceptions, my parents being among those exceptions, my friend’s parents were either factory workers or stay-at-home moms. It was the 1950’s after all. As factory workers, a very high percentage worked for General Motors, others often in suppliers to the auto industry or other vehicle related manufacturers like Allison-Chalmers. They were members of the UAW.

These folks, the majority by far from the hills of West Virginia, Tennessee, Arkansas and other southern states, usually had not finished high school, but had jobs in General Motors, jobs that, thanks to the UAW, had health care, pensions, regular vacations, good wages and decent working conditions. As a result, Alexandria, Indiana hummed. When the auto industry went into decline and the UAW with it, Alexandria crashed into a ghost town.

A third factor was my mother’s unwavering compassion all people, no matter their condition in life or the color of their skin. Her example shaped me profoundly in that way.

The final ingredient came when the U.S. went full force into Vietnam. I started college in 1965 and would be in higher education for the duration of the war. The struggle against the war radicalized many students and I was one of them.

Faith and Spirituality, Memories, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Sounds Pathological, But Feels Blessed

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Lughnasa                                                                              College Moon

Understanding of more than the motives of the moment seem more and more elusive as the third phase of life wraps itself around me. The deep reasons for liking, say, the classics and dogs and reading are lost in the fog of memory darkened by time into near opacity. There was a time when understanding felt more accessible, more relevant, perhaps as a lever with which to change personality, to affect a less tangled future.

Now though the past, my own past, not that long a time by historical reckoning and none at all in the sweep of geological time, not only seems to recede faster than the clock’s ticking, but happily so. It’s as if the meaning of the past, my intimate past that is, has begun to detach itself from my present, floating off like Sandra Bullock in Gravity, untethered and weightless.

This sounds pathological, but it feels blessed. This man that I am now is just who he is, not explainable by his past nor excused by it, but who he is either in spite of it or to the side of the past. Perhaps it is always like this: that the person we are now seems only distantly related to the person we were ten years ago, forty years ago, even an hour ago. That untethered feeling comes with a sense of liberation, of not being bound to the threads, the strings, the ropes, the cable of yesterday; not being bound and free to go where today goes, not captive to yesterday.

Oh, this is not to say that the past does not still have its effects. Of course it does. Just that they are no longer determinative, destiny creating. They are, after all, in the past.

Bees, Garden, Third Phase

Back At It

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Lughnasa                                                                      College Moon

Another week begins. And, yes, after 22 years of working on my own time, Monday is still the first day of the work week. The weekend slows hit me even now. This habituation to weekends and work week begins not when we first draw a paycheck, but that first day of first grade, maybe even kindergarten. That’s when we begin learn the distinction between the work-a-day world of Monday to Friday and the different, more relaxed Saturday and Sunday. No wonder that rhythm doesn’t disappear, even when its usual props of work place or class room have long ago receded.

Today is auto maintenance and finish the firepit repairs. Plus more De Bello Gallico. Realized the other night that I want to read Vergil’s Georgics, too. This is a four book poem on agriculture. I’m beginning to feel that writing in some way about agriculture and horticulture, apiculture would be fun and important for me.

The exterior maintenance is wrapping up over the next couple of days, then the seal coater comes on Friday. I’ll finish packing the books, tomorrow probably. We also need to finish cleaning out the sheds and do a soil test for the garden. That’s the work week so far. As to the weekend? Nothing definitive right now.