I was invited to make some remarks to a group of ministers to senior adults. I organized it around five questions for them.

 

I am almost 78 years old and five years ago stepped aside as the leader of my third non-profit organization. People ask me how I spend my time now and it feels like what they are really asking is how do you fill up all the vacancy and empty space in your life? How do you use your time between getting up and going back to sleep now that the productive part of your life is done and you are coasting to the finish? In that way, I am like one of the people you serve. You see someone like me every day and maybe you ask the same question. Maybe they ask it of each other. However, you and I may be similar in that people are beginning to ask you the same questions about this stage in your life. What is it like to work with people who need to find ways to spend their time? How do you keep them busy? How do you keep them from becoming morbid now that they are old? Of course, you may be asking yourself the same questions about your own life? What is the future of someone who is growing older? What does my life look like over the next several years?

I want to talk about five areas of life – yours and mine – that have preoccupied me for years now. They boil down to five questions and during the time this morning I want us to ask them together.

First:

I have never liked job descriptions. Instead, I have worked to find images or metaphors for each stage of my life. When I was a teacher in a boarding school the image was a candle because I read somewhere that a student was not a vessel to be filled but another candle to be lighted. When I was forty the metaphor was a quilt because my work was connecting people, ideas, resources and opportunities. When I turned  fifty I realized I could no longer depend on raw energy to accomplish my work and needed to be smarter about the way I did things so I could accomplish more with less exertion. A friend in the oil business gave me a valve that sits atop a new well and manages the flow. It does not cap the well but directs the energy to make it more efficient. Then at 70 I realized my life was becoming one of distilling what I had learned and experienced in order to burn off the non-essentials. By that time I had been teaching Sunday School for over forty years, been publishing a weekly blog for years and written two books. In a way my life has become one of sluicing and filtering content to be used by other people. I had gone from a young man walking around a classroom lighting candles to an older man sitting with a Bunsen burner and a condensing flask. I expect I have at least one more image left that will guide me.

Here is my question I would like you all to talk about among yourselves. It’s okay to say, “I have no clue and besides this is a really dumb question.” But if you are open to it I would like to ask you to find a group of six or seven and see if you can come up with a metaphor or image for your life now and, maybe, how you see that changing.  This is not about your church or the people you serve. It is about you.

Second:

I was on a trip with my father in the 60’s when he pulled over to make a business call from a phone booth he spotted. He was only gone five minutes and when he returned I asked him what he had done with such a short call. I’ve never forgotten his response. “Son, the conversation took five minutes but it has taken 25 years to be ready for that call.” Have you noticed in your life that there are things you can get done now with a short call to someone or a note or text that 25 years ago would have been impossible? There are decisions you can make that long ago would have taken weeks but now you have seen how things work out over time and there are patterns that are predictable. In “Blink” Malcolm Gladwell writes:

“We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it…We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible and depending as much time as possible on deliberation. We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world. The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.”

He also writes about the cumulative effect of practicing something for at least 10,000 hours. You get really good at it. “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” And getting good at something only comes with time. There are tasks that once required great energy but you have practiced them for so long that now they barely require a swipe of your finger across the glass screen of your phone.  You have advantages in growing older that are not available to younger people.

In the book “How to Grow Old” there is a piece of wisdom by Marcus Tullius Cicero that has been helpful to me:

People who say there are no useful activities for old age don’t know what they are talking about. They are like those who say a pilot does nothing useful for sailing a ship because others climb the masts, run along the gangways, and work the pumps while he sits quietly in the stern holding the rudder. He may not be doing what the younger crewman are doing, but what he does is much more important and valuable.”

But there is something else about the accumulation of experience and competence in growing older.  It is what I call the sprinkle effect based on how inheritance distributions are made over the course of a lifetime and not all at once.  Here is how it works in life.

God gives us different experiences, relationships, trials, competencies and blessings at various stages of our life. I believe every stage prepares us for the next. We could not receive them as a lump sum. They had to be distributed over the course of our lives.  It’s not that we necessarily would have misspent or squandered them. We simply would not have known how to invest and use them all at once.

Things have come in stages and God’s “sprinkling trust” in your life has not only made it possible for you to grow but each gift has prepared you for the next.

It’s easy – but mistaken – to assume all the gifts have been distributed by now and the challenge is simply to conserve and protect. No, there is always a next gift. That doesn’t require making a change or going in a different direction. It just means I am thinking about what all these gifts along the way have prepared us for next. It means being grateful for the wisdom of sprinkling these gifts over a lifetime.

Here is my question. What advantages do you now have that you did not have earlier in your life? What are the experiences and relationships that you can now see as gifts of preparation? How is your work role different now from when you were climbing the masts and working the pumps?

Third:

You may remember the phrase, “Find something you love to do and you will never work a day in your life.” Jack Palance told Billy Crystal in “City Slickers” that the secret to life is finding the one thing. Of course, you remember the response to the question of what the one thing is. “That’s what you gotta figure out.” I spent several years of life looking for that one thing. A few years later someone came up with the advice that all we needed to do is find our passion and that would carry us through life. Even now, you and I have people asking us about our passions. What makes us raise our fist and pound the table? What is it that drives us to fix the world? If only we could find that single all important passion. Then there were the people that said when the work was no longer fun we should stop doing it because the Bible says we are to enjoy our work. If it’s not fun or something we love or are passionate about then it’s time to find something else.

It’s not that simple. It’s not that superficial. It’s not that self-centered.

When I first read Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning” I thought it would help me find meaning, passion and that one thing. I was stunned to discover that it is not about any of those things because they are all self-focused. I suspect most of you have read the book and know his story of being a survivor of the Nazi death camps. He wrote about how they survived. Here is what I read:

“It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life—daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.”

It was not about passion, joy or fun. It was about taking responsibility for what was expected of you. Thomas Kelly, the Quaker mystic, put it this  way, “God, more powerfully, speaks within you and me, to our truest selves, in our truest moments, and disquiets us with the world’s needs.  By inner persuasions God draws us to a few very definite tasks, OUR tasks, God’s burdened heart particularizing God’s burden in us.”

We have a task, a responsibility. I discovered years later that the word “inheritance” does not mean simply a gift. It means the acceptance of a responsibility or a task and an inheritor (which we all are according to Romans in Scripture) is someone chosen for an assignment – a particular work.

I thought inheritance meant I could stop working but it is just the opposite, isn’t it?  My task, my responsibility, what life expects of me is not something I can discard or toss to the side.

Here is my question. What does life expect of you? What is your responsibility and task from which you cannot retire or resign? What is the work of your own inheritance?

Fourth:

In all our lives there is the pull of gravity and it gets stronger as we get older. It is easy to say we have done enough. While we might use excuses like, “I want to spend more time with the family,” we know that is not always the case. If we are not careful we stop growing. We stop being responsible for the task we have been assigned. A friend once told me that I should not think about retirement but think about the next stage as being repotted to allow more growth – not less.

John Gardner’s book “Self-Renewal” has been the most helpful for me in resisting the pull of gravity. He uses the illustration of the barnacle that finds a place and then spends the rest of life with its head cemented to a rock. Of course, that is not as bad as the sea slug who finds a place, attaches itself and then eats its own brain. Still, there are people who over time become stale and bored. Gardner says their clocks stopped at a certain point. But it is possible to avoid that and continue to grow.

“Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one’s capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring..If we are conscious of the danger of going to seed, we can resort to countervailing measures. At almost any age. You don’t need to run down like an unwound clock. And if your clock is unwound, you can wind it up again. You can stay alive in every sense of the word until you fail physically. I know some pretty successful people who feel that that just isn’t possible for them, that life has trapped them. But they don’t really know that. Life takes unexpected turns.”

Or we believe the assumptions about life we made when young will work as we get older. Carl Jung was not a Christian but I think what he observed in people who had stopped growing is true.

Wholly unprepared, we embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young people to a knowledge of the world? No, thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto. But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.

Sadly, our refusal to grow can affect others as well. I’ve been rereading a book, “Generations: The History of America’s Future” by William Strauss and Neil Howe. The description of Boomers as we age is not flattering. The authors see many of us being people who will “grow increasingly pompous, intolerant, uncompromising, snoopy and exacting of others…The major question – indeed, the one whose answer may decide whether Boomer leadership will end in triumph or tragedy – will hinge on this generation’s capacity to restrain (or let others restrain) its latent ruthlessness. Ruthlessness? Not very comforting, is it? While there is also the real possibility that many may take on the role of wisdom figures and self-sacrificing patriarchs, it is “just as easy to see these righteous Old Aquarians as the worst nightmare that could ever happen to the world.”

Here is my question for us. What does the pull of gravity look like for us? What keeps us from continuing to grow and threatens to make us barnacles instead of repotting?

Fifth:

One of the temptations of aging is reducing risk as much as possible. We talk about living on fixed income but there are other things that become fixed and limited in our minds. You know the story of the slave who walked behind the victorious Roman generals and whispered “Memento Mori” in his ear – “Remember you are mortal” and that is good counsel for us all. But there is another phrase as important, “Memento Vivere” – “Remember to live.” Do not be so caught up in the reality of death that you forget to live.

In one of his last conversations with the disciples Jesus warns them about false greatness and says, instead be like little children. Another way of using that word is “be a constant beginner; someone new to something.” It’s hard when you’ve become an expert to be a beginner again but that is what keeps us from becoming narrow in our interests. Being a beginner is not only good for the soul but for the ego.

Finally, it was T.S. Eliot who wrote: “Old men ought to be explorers. Here and there does not matter. We must be still and still moving..”

Here is my question for you. How will you remember to keep living? What would you like to explore? What is your next adventure?

I am almost 78 and this is the best time of my life. I hope it will be yours as well.