The Gifts of the Autumn Years

With the arrival of autumn, I wel­come the return of what has always been my favorite sea­son. There is some­thing poignant about savor­ing the wan­ing days of light and warmth as the last long days of sum­mer take their final bow and win­ter appears on the dis­tant horizon.

Like drink­ing the last drops of a really fine wine or lin­ger­ing over the last few bites of a sump­tu­ous meal, autumn arrives on the heels of sum­mer urg­ing us to har­vest the abun­dance and fill up with sweet­ness. All too soon, the light will be gone, the days will be short and nights will be long. The time to turn inward approaches, and the work of win­ter is about to begin.

Autumn has a deeper mean­ing for me this year as I rec­og­nize my own life about to enter its “autumn years.” Peo­ple jest that “60 is the new 40″ — I guess that makes me “the new 50″ on my birth­day next year. The younger ver­sion of me always dreaded the idea of grow­ing older. Now that I’m knock­ing on autumn’s door, I’m quite delighted to have come this far and to be right where I am.

No mat­ter how old one is, we’re always stand­ing at the edge of the unknown. There is no cer­tainty, not even about tak­ing the next breath. But grow­ing older affords one a cer­tain per­spec­tive on life, not avail­able from the ear­lier parts of the jour­ney. Grat­i­tude comes for­ward, front and cen­ter, as the pre­vail­ing con­scious­ness. What could be bet­ter than that?

Life becomes more pre­cious when there’s much less left of it. Turn­ing 70 is a poignant reminder that the road ahead is far shorter than the road already trav­eled, or as my friend says, “There aren’t that many more shop­ping days left til Christmas.”

Out in the dis­tance, on occa­sion, if the angle is just right, I can catch a tiny glimpse of the fin­ish line. I can feel the end of my earthly story coa­lesc­ing, and although the details aren’t clear, nor do I know how it all turns out, I know that between here and there, there is a lot of liv­ing left to do, even if it’s only one more day.

Sens­ing the pres­ence of the fin­ish line is a vivid reminder that every day mat­ters. Although at times these words sound trite in a Hall­mark card kind of way, the truth is, none of us knows how or when the fin­ish line will rise up to meet us. We all know of some­one who left home one day and never came back. They weren’t plan­ning for it to be their last day, and yet win­ter arrived with­out warn­ing and the fin­ish line rose up to meet them. The sea­sons of our lives don’t always pay atten­tion to or play by the rules of the cal­en­dar. One could be in autumn or win­ter and not even know it. Why not live each day as if it’s the last?

But what does that mean on a prac­ti­cal level? Should we go off the reser­va­tion and live with wild aban­don? Should we shrug off all respon­si­bil­i­ties, charge up our credit cards, leave the beds unmade and dirty dishes in the sink? After all, why care about these things if we’re liv­ing each day like there’s no tomorrow?

The answer doesn’t lie in what we do. We could travel the world and check off all the items on our bucket list, but if they’re done from a con­scious­ness of fear, dread or cling­ing to life in a needy kind of way, we could spend our pre­cious autumn days suf­fer­ing as much as ever and miss out on the oppor­tu­nity to expe­ri­ence ful­fill­ment and completion.

The ear­lier stages of life are all about mak­ing it in the outer world. For most of the 40-to-50 years pre­ced­ing autumn, peo­ple are heav­ily engaged in gain­ing knowl­edge and expe­ri­ence, build­ing a career, estab­lish­ing a rep­u­ta­tion, work­ing hard to earn money and pro­vide a liv­ing for one’s self and one’s fam­ily. Life is all about achiev­ing, accom­plish­ing, accu­mu­lat­ing or surviving.

But the focus shifts as autumn approaches and our tasks become more inward ori­ented. Much of the tra­di­tional doing part of life begins to dis­si­pate as we approach the age of retire­ment, or at least we begin to slow down. Our task now, if we are to con­tinue to grow beyond our for­mer out­ward focus and develop the deeper depths of our being, is self-renewal.

Autumn is a time to update the oper­at­ing sys­tem of our life. There are old files and pro­grams to be deleted, hard dri­ves that need clean­ing and ran­dom access mem­ory to be added. It’s time to push the “refresh” but­ton and invent one’s self anew.

And why not? It’s not about being in denial. In fact, just the oppo­site. It’s time to look squarely ahead out in front and rec­og­nize the inevitabil­ity of the fin­ish line approach­ing. Then, choose who you want to be and how you want to live out the remain­ing years of your life, know­ing any one of them could be the last.

What­ever sea­son of life you’re in — spring, sum­mer or fall: Write an inspir­ing script for your future and then live into it, start­ing now, know­ing that you won’t have con­trol over every­thing that hap­pens between here and there. But so what? Even though life has its own script, your job is to step right up to it, face it, and then choose. If not now, when?

Mir­a­cles occur when human beings step up to the life they’ve got right there, in the muck and the mire, and dis­cover they’re far more cre­ative and capa­ble than they ever dreamed they were. Mir­a­cles occur when we learn to blos­som right in the mid­dle of what we told our­selves we could never sur­vive or get beyond. Mir­a­cles hap­pen when we dis­cover that we are far more than who we ever thought we were or what we were taught to be. Mir­a­cles occur when we have the courage to choose, not from fear or from the past, but from our deep­est and high­est self.

Right now, at the level of appear­ances, the world isn’t look­ing too good. The world econ­omy, and the insti­tu­tions that sup­port it, are in trou­ble. All of us have been impacted by these events, which are entirely out of anyone’s indi­vid­ual con­trol. This doesn’t look like the breed­ing ground for mir­a­cles, but this is what we have. It isn’t pretty, fun or easy. In fact, it’s down­right dif­fi­cult and dev­as­tat­ing for many. Espe­cially seniors.

In times like these, it’s easy to lose faith in one’s self, in life, in peo­ple or in the world. The easy way is to drop out, give up, resign, tell your­self you’ll never win, why bother, the deck is stacked against you. And then some­one like my friend Bernie, who is in his 70s, goes out and gets a job work­ing in an Apple retail store. The “geezer” is becom­ing a “geek­ster,” or as Bernie says, a “geekstar”!

Bernie has never worked retail in his adult life. He retired as an exec­u­tive from IBM over a decade ago and has spent most of the last 10 years as a men­tor and coach, help­ing oth­ers to dis­cover their own great­ness. He didn’t have any spe­cial con­nec­tions that pulled strings to help him get this job. What he does have is the gift of know­ing who he is and a will­ing­ness to show up and be avail­able for life and its oppor­tu­ni­ties. What he con­tin­ues to have, as a man in his autumn years, is the abil­ity to push the “refresh” but­ton and invent him­self anew. What he does have is access to his power and pas­sion, cre­ativ­ity and alive­ness. Bernie knows there is a lot of liv­ing left to do. And so he’s set out on this new adven­ture, liv­ing right out to the edge.

The autumn of life brings us into evening, where life becomes qui­eter and a new por­tal opens. We dis­cover a kind of beauty that only becomes avail­able at this stage of life. New voices emerge; new wis­dom is gained. We learn to appre­ci­ate the sub­tle and the sub­lime. We become cre­ative in ways never deemed pos­si­ble in our younger years. Artists, writ­ers and poets emerge. Lovers of life with less time left now see their job as giv­ing back to the larger com­mu­nity of beings. Larger forces come into play, prepar­ing for the jour­ney ahead.

Stand­ing at the thresh­old of autumn, this is what I see it’s about: har­vest­ing the gifts grown over a life­time, apply­ing gen­er­ous amounts of love and grat­i­tude, com­mu­nity and wis­dom to ren­der up a rich and sweet elixir suf­fi­cient to sus­tain one through the last leg of the journey.

Where in life’s cal­en­dar are you? What are the gifts and chal­lenges of your season?

Tagged as: Aging, aging gracefully, Autumn, autumn gifts, growing older, senior citizens, senior years