I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Thursday Thinker, I share a smart idea or theory.
In his new book The Fifth Season: Creativity in the Second Half of Life, poet and philosopher Mark Nepo suggests that as you age, you should expand your sense of the present while letting go of thinking about the future or gazing at your past:
[For] most of our lives, we are taught to look forward, to imagine horizons and then go after them. Yet, along the way, love and suffering make us realize that the gift of life is always where we are. Still, we work toward dreams and goals, which we set ahead of us like mental horizons, hoping for some final reward.
Eventually, as we age, the effort and habit of looking forward is no longer life-giving, simply because the years ahead of us keep diminishing. There is less forward there to work toward. We are ushered, then, into a shift of horizons, which can be disorienting. Our first reflex is to turn around and look at our past. This is the horizon of nostalgia. But nostalgia only glorifies the past, which doesn’t help us live in the present.
More deeply, we are challenged to neither look solely forward nor solely backward, but to make our elder horizon all encompassing; that is, to broaden and deepen the extent of our horizon in all directions so it can confirm the foundational truth of a lifetime.
Yesterday evening, I sat in M’s kitchen while he browned ground beef for tacos, and cut up avocado and tomato. We had some conversation but as he was busy making dinner I didn’t want to distract him with too much chatter. In the cool of his air-conditioned house, sitting at the kitchen table, I felt pleasantly present for the moment, no sense of wanting to be or do anything different.
I feel this transition from living for the future and looking to the past to finding deep presence in the now, partly because M is 12 years older than I am. That compresses my sense of possibilities for the future, and he and I don’t have a past together. I feel the future and past declining in importance even as the present expands in possibility and meaning.
But I still live within a midlife horizon, as I’m only 57. Even as I seek ways of connecting deeply with the present with love and compassion, I take action directed towards creating future value. The difference from when I was ten years younger is that I’m not so much trying to create value for my future self, as for other people. Perhaps I have entered Erik Erikson’s stage of generativity.
Erikson, a 20th-century developmental psychologist, is best known for his theory of psychosocial development, which outlines eight stages of human growth across the lifespan. In Stage 7, generativity vs. stagnation, typically occurring in midlife, adults face the challenge of contributing to society and nurturing the next generation. This might take the form of raising children, mentoring others, creating meaningful work, or giving back to the community.
I am engaged in writing and painting both as a present-moment activity that I can thoroughly enjoy and as a way to create value in the world that will outlast me.
I have been going back and forth about whether to sign up for painting and drawing classes at the nearby community college. I really enjoyed taking photography courses last fall, and part of me thinks, “I should do an associate’s degree in fine arts to set myself up for a jobette in the future.”
I did decide to sign up for the courses, and added creative writing and art history to my schedule as well, but not in order to set myself up for a future job. I decided to do it for the engagement with the material and professors and students that I’ll find in each moment.
I also signed up because I want to build mastery in painting and creative writing so that I can improve upon what I produce. I want to create art, whether written or visual, that makes other people feel something: empathy, or joy, or insight, or grief.