Holding the Center: The Purpose of Aging in Times of Transformation

Never have there been more people over 60 on the planet. Never has society so needed us to be at our best for the good of future generations. Yet families and individuals are often on their own to make this happen, and, if we are not alert, we can lose our way and even allow ourselves to be diverted away from our deeper aspirations. While we all have individual choices to make, our large numbers, due to our increased longevity, also give us a collective opportunity in times of cultural transformation.

The poet William Butler Yeats, in his classic The Second Coming warned us about the dangers we face as we take part in this crucial point in human development on a small planet. His famous lines: …things fall apart, the center cannot hold

describes our civilizational upheaval and flux. Our culture searches for its moorings and faces a tipping point, a time of endings and death and potentials for rebirth and the new. So much is at stake and all is dynamically undetermined, still in the making. It is up to all of us, all generations, to lean into this time with courage and as much wisdom as we can muster, to tip the scales toward a positive-oriented future. Our work is twofold: to take on deeply internal and personal healing and development and, secondly, to stay engaged in the society, even if in only on small and local scales, where we can best serve. 

Holding the Center: the purpose of aging in times of transformation is a learning and engagement offer: a six-session, two hours per month virtual event to assist us on our journeys into and through the latter-in-life years. On these journeys we want to keep the best of our culture’s, communities’ and families’ current story while also catalyzing the new stories waiting to be born. Elders have a unique role to hold and stabilize not one, but many centers: keeping things together enough so that the best of the new can come forth. This is the scope of the topic for Holding the Center.

The personal pay off for the investment of time and money by participants– we feel the joy of purpose shared with others on the path, and we revitalize our best efforts. The collective pay off – future generations, ones we will never see, can inherit a foundation and not a messy set of fragments, used-to-be’s and I-remember-whens. 

Each session will be aimed at providing:

• Helpful frameworks and ideas to personalize and use

• Inspiration and imagination for springing afresh into our own unique journeys

• Practical tips and how-to’s as we compare notes on our journeys and the lessons the provide

The connecting and virtual learning modalities for the 12-hour experience:

ettes: examples, models and thoughts from important sources for analysis and incorporation

• Lecturettes: examples, models and thoughts from important sources for analysis and incorporation

• Poetry, story-telling and the arts for our intuitive and imaginal knowing faculties

• The use off the chat feature and large and small group dialogue and q and a

• Guest “appearances” by a select elder speakers/guests on how they are holding the center with their work

• A vault for archived material: recordings of each session, power points, the poems and other resources referenced in the sessions

Our Work

The task for us in these later life stages is to harvest and wisely disseminate our wisdom, and continue our learning from and interaction with younger generations. We do this on three fronts:  

• staying close to Nature and its healing and wholing properties

• staying healthily involved in the social structures--education, religion, business, the arts, families and government—the ones that shape and form our human experience

• exploring ever deeper the sense of the sacred that bring reverence, joy, lightness and values to all our endeavors.  

While emphasizing the inner dimensions and mental frameworks for holding and strengthening our own personal center intellectually, emotionally and spiritually, we will also have special “reports” on inspiring actions from elders holding part of the center in the world through their involvement. This gives us the inner spiritual and the outer earth community dimensions. This is what comprises our lives and is the what of where and how elders show up.

The six sessions are structured into the following flow:

1. Setting the Stage: the realities and possibilities. Aspirations and ways to live them. Using the best of reason, intuition and imagination. 

2. Holding on: mindset and strategies for fruitful mid-life carry-overs. All of us in latter life have long histories, skills, and the possibility to harvest and pull together our best accumulated wisdom and earlier life practices.

3. Letting go: mindset and strategies for emptying, handling loss, saying good-bye, non-resistance. Elders need not learn to love change and loss, but we do need to know how to cooperate with it. 

4. Taking on: mindset and strategies for learning, forging new identities, and learning in new ways. Those of us in latter life continue with a developmental mandate. We learn in old and new ways and take on activities that suit our capacities and passions.

5. Inner/outer space: the practicalities of spirit in the world. Spiritual dimensions take on deeper., more salient dimensions when we are free of mid-life busy-ness. What does the sacred mean to us as we consider the good, the true, the beautiful, the transcendent?

6. Integration and Moving Ahead: wisdom paths, reminders, practices and next steps. Our last session grounds us and inspires us to move on in our journeys and pilgrimages with enhanced maps for the road and the wilderness ahead. We are all, in the words of Ram Dass, now at the conclusion, better equipped to walk one another home.  

Biographies

John P. Schuster is an author, coach and educator who speaks to a wide range of audiences on thriving during the transitions that come with maturing. He has been working in the fields of leadership and adult development for many years, first for those in early and mid-career and more recently for those in later-life stages. He is a regular resource as a coach and as a teacher for a variety of individuals and audiences in various stages of their aging process. 

His books include one on purpose and vitality, and another on life review and helping your past work for you.  He produced a podcast with Public Radio, Stories for the Ages, on aging consciously, carried by NPR.

He holds advanced degrees in literature and Jungian psychology and has four grandkids in Ohio, reminding him and his wife Patricia that aging has many joys. 

Click here for NPR Podcast: Stories for the Ages

Read full biography here