There is something about life transitions that makes them more difficult the older we become. I have noticed this with my clients as well as myself, and I’m certain that it’s not a simple function of declining vitality or just a well-earned preference for our own habits. What is it about life change in later life that seems to be so challenging?
Human development is a long process of accumulated experience. It seems to take most of us about two decades to become independent of our caregivers, and during those twenty years we experience innumerable changes in our bodies, our environments, our relationships and our knowledge of the world. New people, new shoes, new ideas. Repeat. Whether we are moving from one classroom to another, or one neighborhood, state or country to another, our younger selves are constantly integrating change into our understanding of our self and the world.
I recall being an excited 21-year-old in the late summer of 1979, just weeks past college graduation, packing a dozen cardboard boxes full of records, books, clothes and personal items, weighing them and dropping them off for shipping. And then, accompanied only by my hard-sided sky-blue Samsonite suitcases and my guitar, getting on a series of planes beginning in Burlington, Vermont and landing in St. Paul to begin my new life as a Lutheran seminarian and would-be pastor, never to live in New England again.
Such full-scale moves are the norm for many young adults; new jobs, new relationships, joining the Peace Corp, moving alone to a new city for graduate school. What makes such dislocation possible is the fewer and transitory ties that young adults have made so far in their lives. Change is the standard young lives have known, and it is only by living into later changes of career, marriage, parenthood, childcare, student loans, chronic health issues, mortgages and aging parents do those transitions grind to a slow march.
I have watched this middle life deceleration of change out my living room window. Of the 6 middle-class homes surrounding me, 4 of them, including our own, have had the same owners for over 20 years. I used to think that remarkable. Now I understand what creates that stability because I have sought just that stability for myself. Moving is such an enormous disruptor when over the years you have made a house your home, when you value your children’s school district or your church, when you rely on key friends and health care professionals you know, when you live in a region with enough economic diversity you may be able to change careers in place, as I did. If those core resources have been established, one thinks long and hard before taking a geographic leap to begin putting that all in place again.
But the changes within and around you may catch you off guard. If you are lucky, your children grow and succeed and leave your home for one of their own. The work you sacrificed for changes or you change, or you age out and now it’s done. Your parents, blessed with long lives, die and you are suddenly the oldest generation of your family. Your body, which you’ve trusted to go and grow suddenly stalls and reveals new pain, problems and limitations. How did all this suddenly happen, you wonder, and of course the answer is that it was all happening while you were busy looking down, raising children, earning a living, trying to stay focused enough to create a full-grown life. And before you know it, you’re on the other side of trying. You’ve suddenly arrived, only to have to figure out the next transition into older adulthood.
No one as of yet has handed me a life map. We each end up sketching out our own with just enough foresight to help us imagine what comes next. And that may be the greatest and necessary emotional skill of later life: imagination. The ability to mentally image our next steps with greater wisdom and hard-earned courage than we could have possibly hoped for at 21 or even 41. Because it takes that kind of skill to discern how to live in an aging body, how to let go of old resentments, what of everything we have accumulated to keep and what to let go. If we’re lucky, there is so much left to learn.
(Originally published in the Savage Pacer Online 4/15/19 and in print 4/20/19)