Originally published in the San Antonio Express-News Opinion page, October 2, 2021
I never really imagined what aging would be like. Yes, an older body subject to disease and limits, a memory that needed kick-starting more often than when I was younger. Perhaps less mobility and more a sedentary life as my default position each day. Would my attitude gravitate towards what South Wales poet, Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) cautioned in his poem I read as an undergraduate:
“Do not go gentle into that good night
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
The refrain in the last line ends each of the stanzas as a defiant posture towards aging. But here I am, at age 77, continuing to teach a variety of audiences, writing, publishing books, traveling, and enjoying family, friends and fortunes both good and challenging. I am not alone; we are living now in an unprecedented era of an entire population living longer than ever before in human history. How are people using that extended time to refresh what purpose their lives allow for?
But there is another entire galaxy of interior possibilities as retired psychotherapist Connie Zweig eloquently expresses in her new book, The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul. As I continue to read it, I recently heard her offer a zoom talk on the book’s central features, which made me realize how nuanced and complex aging can be. It is a time for new discoveries of one’s central myth, namely, the core values and aspirations that give our life coherence, meaning, and purpose.
She believes, for example, that aging is a spiritual practice, one that invites a deepening into our interior worlds. And far from an individual suffering a mid-life crisis, she notes that as a therapist she witnessed a “Late-Life crisis” in those she worked with. So what paths may open up within our aging journey? For her, aging into elderhood is an opportunity to awaken to deeper dimensions of ourselves that ego-consciousness has suffocated or deflected, in order to have some control in the wheel house of our lives.
Many books on aging and retirement stress new tasks to perform, like volunteering in service to the common good, or painting or dance classes—all admirable activities. But Zweig takes a different tack in asking: “What do you long for in your aging?” “What is your promised land?” as she recalls the end of Moses’ life after leading his people to the edge of that terrain of milk and honey. “What is falling away from your life that you may have clung to for decades?” She believes as well that as we age, our dream life can offer us wisdom in our exploration.
As a practicing Buddhist for most of her life, Zweig offers that cultivating the art of meditation can be a life-preserver. “Meditation also appears to slow age-related degeneration in our brains. Citing a neurologist’s studies at UCLA, she reports that “On average, the brains of long-term practitioners appeared to be seven and a half years younger at the age of fifty than the brains of non-meditators.”
Finally, as author/editor of two very popular books on the shadow in our psychological life, Zweig believes that as we move in age to the sage within, we would can benefit from engaging the shadow: “the shadow is our personal unconscious, that part of our mind that is behind or beneath our conscious awareness. . . . The shadow holds the key to removing the inner obstacles that block us from finding the treasures of late life.”
Readers will find in her wisdom book many case studies from her practice that provide a host of narratives to further ground her observations and insights about not raging “against the dying of the light,” but rather to welcome and connect with the shaded terrains of our aging pilgrimage. In moonlight, for instance, our perceptions soften to a less sharply-chiseled world; we may then rejoice in the knowledge that a life that honors the shadows of our being can complement all that we have become and achieved. Gratitude may then host our most favored attitude.