We elders are the twenty-first century’s pioneers. Few in the past have lived as long as we do now. There are few guides. When I turned seventy-one, I felt uneasy, as if I was lost. Feeling lost was subtle. It seemed more like a mood than a specific emotion, and as moods do, they color our entire landscape. I decided after a while that the landscape had not changed, but that I had. The luxury of longevity was my cue to have a serious conversation with my life. I was at that peculiar junction in my life where circumstances conspire to invite me to look at the big picture, both then and now.
I can’t go back to the “old days” again. What I can do is to revisit them in the present with the soft eyes of curiosity, not the critical eyes of judgment – either of self or of others – and listen with a third ear to hear what my life is saying to me. As I review my past, I’m asking my life to teach me more about this mystery I call life.
I was sure I couldn’t do this alone. I knew I’d need help. Our spirituality is nurtured partly in solitude, but I believe we also need a community of others to validate what we discover.
I offered a workshop and called it, “Listening to Your Life.” Listen to your life? Typically we’re too busy living it to listen. What does listening to your life mean, anyway? Author Frederick Buechner says this. “If God speaks anywhere, it is into our personal lives that he speaks.” If we consider life as a spiritual journey, what we’re seeking isn’t to be found somewhere out there but here inside you and me. What should we be looking for? Buechner suggests this: “Not just the sounds we hear but through events [of our lives] in all their complexity and variety, through the harmonies and disharmonies . . . of all that happens.” A tall order to be sure, but worth every bit of it. Elders have the luxury of time to explore. And they have all the data needed.
I invited fifteen people to join me in the workshop. We spent an hour and a half each week listening to our lives. Our lives had surprising and unsuspected things to say to us. For all the other pioneers undertaking the task with me, life review was an adventure, and in many instances a healing one. We were able to see in what had been long familiar to us, something new.
Life is a continuous stream of what happened then, and how I see it now. In doing a life review we systematically begin by identifying significant events and people of our past. We ask ourselves what our experience had been then and how we see it now in the present. Time changes perspective. Revisiting the past, especially without making judgments reveals unexpected twists and surprising insights. I see my past evolving into a different picture, a bigger picture.
The process has a potential for healing old wounds and aiding in a better understanding of how, as elders, we are to be in the world today.
When I was eleven, my father’s death had a devastating impact on me. I yearned most of my life for a father. I could taste it. I was bitter. I’d known all this for years, but in reviewing it seventy years later I began seeing something new in the old data. It revealed a whole different picture. I had only recently realized that PTSD contributed to his death. Returning from WWII, he was a broken man. I didn’t see it that way then.
What I could see now at eighty-one years of age, was how my own deep wound also influenced my vocational choices. I chose a vocation of helping broken lives heal – whether as a priest, a psychotherapist or as a writer. I had actually been helping myself while serving others.
The process of life review is essentially structured story telling, stories from our own experience told candidly. They are not opinions as such, which are mostly cerebral, and are rarely issues of the heart. These are not stories we tell at dinner parties or social gathering where politics, trips we’ve made and how the market is faring is common.
The power of stories to change our lives is extraordinary. Children love stories. Consider this; as we’re alone and thinking about things we are telling stories in our heads. I’ve discovered that I talk to myself, so I’m telling stories out loud, too. From the time we rise in the morning until we are asleep at night we tell stories. It’s part of life’s energy. Even asleep, the stories continue in the form of our dreams, although those stories often seem bizarre and inscrutable, which is probably a courtesy, our dream’s way of not unduly embarrassing us.
It occurred to me how central my vocational choices were to stories. The priest preaches, telling the narrative stories of his or her religion. The psychotherapist listens to stories that people need to tell. Writers tell stories and whether fiction or nonfiction, they’re still stories.
The writer Joan Didion once said that we tell stories in order to live. I like the thought that whenever I’m telling stories, I’m taking good care of myself.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
Fletcher Hall says
I get it.
john kelly says
This aging process is still a challenge. I suppose it will be for all the reasons that are cliched explanantions for why it is so difficult to attribute the ease of growing older ——-I think of moments of happiness and joy and i live in those moments —-I am often accused of living in the past but I find that by knowing my past and reliving it in my mind I remember and concentrate on the very very good moments and pleasures and sensings and I find myself rejuvenated with the hopew of the future ——–and with the ability to overcome obstacles and to follow my dreams and my goals —-to live for that and whom gives me the most pleasure for life’s meanings……I dream and I redream all the goodness that I know id out there. I look to the Ridge’s view of the whole entire picture and I am filled with hope
George Merrill says
Amen t to that, Mr. Kelly. I’m working on it.