Conclusion
Too much of old age is a downer. It’s about loss, decline, illness, and mortality. It’s also often about retirement, relocation, loneliness, and even despair. The personal narratives and poetry in this volume don’t shy away from these realities. But neither do they stop there. We’re struck by how everyone involved in this project so far presents an upbeat message. The story lines are positive, even the bleakest messages are handled creatively, and the thematic chapters focus on positive ways that learning and community help the elderly with matters of identity, aging, and mortality.
In these narratives, men and women demonstrate resilience and courage in the face of an enormity of issues. They also show it’s possible to avoid negative stereotypes of the elderly and of oneself as an old person. We discover new abilities, passions, and connections that enable us to find new meaning even this late in life. Our view of ourselves becomes more positive. Specifically, we are saying that writing, learning, and community do this for us.
Attending to aging and mortality has a darker side. It can make us less able to deny our limitations. It heightens the press of time. But we also increase our awareness of the choices before us. We can develop more optimistic, flexible, and adaptive attitudes. Writing these pieces involves struggles for clearer thinking and articulation. They encourage improved self–expression in writing and in conversation, and in turn, our clarity and confidence.
New Pathways is opening more opportunities at HILR for facing our own aging and mortality. Study groups on aging probe psychological, physical, mental, and social issues at deeper levels than informal conversation. Some study group leaders feel part of a social movement to change attitudes about aging. Others are simply interested in learning and exchanging information or in personal development within a group of peers.
For some, this new focus generates the optimism that comes from a meaningful and connected life. Among the five original authors, ongoing discussions about our essays created a group intimacy that enriched our writing and our relationships. These substantial benefits stimulated others in the community to follow suit by forming their own writing groups or writing on their own. Feeling less alone and more connected with others facing the same issues, we feel we are growing with age, not just shrinking. We are perennials, blooming again and again in spite of societal and physical obstacles.
Beyond our little group, we feel we are helping make these common struggles a subject of increasingly open and frank discussion at HILR. By publishing and distributing this book to a wider audience interested in the elderly, we hope to do the same beyond HILR.
Some of us unexpectedly find enjoyment and richness in belonging to the aging generation, even as we see friends who shy away from the subject of aging in the abstract and at a personal level. We don’t; we accept the realities of aging. We can turn to them and say that it’s not only okay, it’s special. Mixing an awareness of our mortality and our wealth of experience gives us a sense of possibility: we can still realize the best within ourselves, grow, and develop even in the face of declining physical well-being.
We don’t know how much life we have left, and we regard our existence as privileged. To those troubled by aging, we have the audacity to suggest a more uplifting alternative: immerse yourself in learning and share reflective writing with others to create a life rich with possibility, insight, and excitement. These qualities are as special as any experienced at other stages, if not more so.
Our work inspires a vision of continuous development. The therapeutic value of writing about traumas, of journaling, and of group sessions is well known. From the beginning, we have intended our work to add to our understanding of aging and to help us manage the vicissitudes of this stage in our lives. Each step in our investigations evolves from previous activity.
We invite others to join us in these explorations. There are many opportunities for research. For example, a future effort could study the health benefits associated with learning in a community: Can learning in retirement protect against memory loss or diminished mobility? How does it compare to other social activities such as bridge or arts clubs, volunteer work, or religious attendance? How does it compare to writing on your own? How do those who choose to write about themselves already differ from those who don’t? Do learning styles change with age? Do seminars work better than lectures? What benefits persist if the person learning is mostly interacting with a computer? If some learning communities work better than others, how and why is this so?
In this book we don’t try to integrate our findings with a systematic review of others’ work. We also recognize that HILR members are mostly educated, professional, older people with incomes above the national median for our age group. Those interested in additional research might therefore include comparisons with adults of different economic and educational levels, with other lifestyles or occupations, and in other settings.
Interest in studies of aging already extends to other institutes for learning in retirement. Those of us who started the New Pathways project have met with people from a dozen such institutes to exchange ideas about enriching curricula through conversations on aging and death. As Sharon Sokoloff, Director of the Brandeis Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, said: “All of us are engaged in making meaning of this stage of life.”
We hope this volume inspires elders to put their limitations aside and rather than passively accept the downside, be open to the opportunities of aging. The sources of resilience, optimism, and new forms of creativity are the same wellsprings that inspire people to join organizations focused on learning or other stimulating and supportive groups in the first place. The more we can create, map, and exchange varieties of pathways for aging, the smoother the journey for each of us.
We invite each of you to join us as together we make our aging a positive adventure.