Volume 4, No. 2 
Dear Reader,
This month, In a new article, Beverly Ryle shares insights on a milestone birthday that she gained while attending a workshop in Chicago led by William Bridges, a “pioneer and leader in the field of transition management ... widely recognized for his breakthrough thinking on how to help people to deal productively with change”.
Happy Second Half of Life
by Beverly Ryle
The Center for Career and Business Development
Are there colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare us for our coming life
and its demands, as ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world and of life? No, there are none.
Thoroughly unprepared, we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false presupposition that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning.
—Carl Jung
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ome of you may remember Jack LaLanne, whose exercise show on daytime TV was helping people stay fit long before anyone had ever heard of Richard Simmons. (he’s still at it, at the age of 90). For many years, he has been in the habit of celebrating his birthday by doing some amazing physical feat, like swimming across San Francisco Bay with his hands and feet tied, pulling a boat with his teeth.
I’m not quite that athletic, but I do like the idea of marking a milestone occasion in a way that is personally meaningful.
This year I decided to celebrate my sixtieth birthday by attending a workshop in Chicago entitled, “ The Second Half of Life: The Best is Yet to Be ”, led by a teacher of mine, William Bridges.
Most of us, whether we’re 30-, 40-, or 50-somethings, aren’t too happy about birthdays. Once you reach 60, maintaining a productive attitude becomes even more challenging, especially since our culture defines only one major task for this “middle of middle age”: retirement, or at least getting ready for it.
Hindu culture, on the other hand, recognizes a clear distinction between what Carl Jung calls the morning and the afternoon of life.
After the birth of a first grandchild, the Hindu may enter an ashram in the forest where old identities are stripped away, and then, after a period of retreat, begin a time of wandering in search of a new life.
In our culture, we’re more likely to hit a wall than to wander.
The American way allows no time or space for transition. We rarely if ever ease into anything. The notion of pause, of consciously entering into a period of non-doing while we wait to see what the future has in store, is foreign to us. That’s not how we cope with change.
For us, change comes with a bang, and we tend to do a lot of kicking and screaming over it. We label any unwanted life event, such as the end of a marriage, the loss of a job, a serious illness, etc. as a crisis, and we often overlook the opportunity that lies within it.
Our way of responding to change may not be as gentle as the Hindus’, yet the chance for growth, development, and renewal is the same.
The Hindu wanderer knows the value of a period of transition. So does the retired executive who understands that the sense of “going flat and feeling dull is as much a prelude to a new time of excitement and meaning as it is a finale to whatever state is passing.” The difference between them is that by seeking a new perspective on the afternoon of life, the executive is swimming against the tide of American culture.
Jung has observed that the tools that serve us during the first half of life, like claiming our identity through roles and relationships and living up to external standards and values, are often not helpful later on. Without a conscious ending to the first half of life, followed by some form of wandering, there is a good chance that the second half of life will be a faded repetition of the first.
I see this happening here on Cape Cod, where I live, with retired “second half” executives who volunteer to sit on boards and town committees and sabotage collaboration by attempting to run the show the way they did when they were still working.
Because they never executed an internal ending as a prelude to retirement, they still feel the need to be “in charge”, and so they try to recreate as volunteers the power structure they had in their working lives.
On the other hand, among my colleagues as a volunteer mediator in small-claims court, there are several retired attorneys who’ve successfully made the transition from high-powered law practices to mediation, a role in which they’re required to remain absolutely neutral.
They’ve gone from one-sided client advocacy to a process where they’re not allowed to say who’s right and who’s wrong, and their function is not to win, but to empower all parties in a dispute to find their own resolution. For these former lawyers, it's a whole new way of being in the legal world.
At the “Second Half” workshop Bill Bridges shared the stories of a number of famous and not-so-famous people whose willingness to wander, wait, and listen in the afternoon of life shaped a greater sense of purpose and a deeper sense of knowing who they were: the painter Auguste Renoir, who in his last hours, working with a paintbrush strapped to his hand because of debilitating arthritis, said, “I think I'm finally beginning to get this”; Welty Fisher who at the age of 72 founded a school to train people to teach Untouchables to read in India; Dr Benjamin Spock who left a very comfortable retirement to become a major voice in the protest movement against the war in Vietnam.
While these stories were moving, what I found most inspiring about the workshop was being in the presence of a man who, in the over-70 time of his life, continues to generously share, by word and example, his own wandering.
Witnessing Bill’s integrity, his commitment to “walking the walk”, made his teachings so much more accessible to me. I could touch them, rub them into my own life, and bring them home to share with others.
I realized that I had experienced this workshop on this deeper level because of two very different wandering experiences I had, one of them unsettling, the other joyful ( which is normal in the transition phase known as the Neutral Zone).
The first of these was the restless night on the return train trip during which I wrestled with an internal ending, described in last month's column.
The second happened the day I was to leave Chicago . I was visiting Millennium Park on an unseasonably warm day in November, and I was struck by how much the people around me enjoying the sunshine reminded me of the painting, “A Sunday on La Grand Jatte” (made famous by the Stephen Sondheim musical, Sunday in the Park with George ) which I had just seen at the Art Institute of Chicago next door.
I walked up to the huge elliptical sculpture in the park, affectionately known to the locals as, “The Jelly Bean”, (its actual name is “Cloud Gate”, and it’s by the British artist Anish Kapoor) and I wished myself a Happy Second Half of Life.
Now that’s a lot to get from attending a seminar!
In this issue ...
Happy Second Half of Life
Quotes-of-the-Month
About Us
Privacy Policy
As we move forward into the 21st century it’s pretty obvious to just about everyone that work isn’t what it used to be. Whether we work for ourselves, or for someone else, or are in transition, things are changing rapidly and we’re caught in a shift of seismic proportions. Many things are being demanded of us, and it’s going to require more than just new skills to survive and thrive. We’re going to need to learn how to get serious about taking care of the business of our professional lives.
Taking Care of Business was created to focus on issues related to this re-education process. If you find it helpful, please pass it on to others you know who are trying to find their way through the new realities of the world of work.
We invite you to share your thoughts by emailing us at:
The second half of life is not so much about making something happen as it is about not missing it when it does happen.
Think bigger: it’s often one’s self image that stands in the way. A hunger for experience can take you a long way.
This is the time when you can truly build a life based on who you are. Being who you are is a source of beauty. Our culture has lost a sense of the beauty of aging.
William Bridges
Age is a point of elevation from which it is easier to see who you are, what it is you want to do, and from which you find yourself closer to the very center of the universe.
Actor Ozzie Davis
I’m like a quarterback on the run, trying to get rid of the ball before I’m taken down.
Writer Norman Corwin
Growing old in a happy way derives from self-employment. If you are self-employed, you will see each day as useful, no matter how old you are.
Composer John Cage
I hope you die young as late as possible.
Journalist I. F. Stone
To say that I’m 86 years young is to deny my history and all the things I’ve seen. I’m convinced it is harder to be young than to be old. The young are not sure of a future. I am having a glorious old age.
Activist Maggie Kuhn
I feel very fortunate that I’m in a profession where retirement is not a meaningful word. Artists do not retire because most artists do not have a job; they have a view of life which they practice, and they continue that practice until they no longer draw breath.
Choreographer Bella Lewitzky
The quotations from Davis, Corwin, Cage, Stone, Kuhn, and Lewitzky are from
Ageless Spirit
edited by
Phillip L. Berman
and
Maggie Goldman
40 Oak Leaf Rd
PO Box 156
North Eastham, Cape Cod, MA 02651-0156
508.240.3532
www.successonyourownterms.com
About Us
The Center for Career and Business Development specializes in teaching people how to manage their professional lives by providing customized counseling and educational programs which integrate conceptual thinking with practical training.
Our long-term relationships with clients, recognition by peers, and growing reputation as a community resource speak to the excellence of the services we provide and our commitment to making the world of work a better place for all.
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The stick illustrations in this issue are by Eloise Morley.
Her email address is eloisemorley@earthlink.net
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