We Cannot Play the Second Half By First-Half Rules

A person today turns fifty every seven seconds. The Baby Boomers are quickly becoming "senior boomers." America is moving from being a youth-oriented culture to a senior-oriented culture as the Boomers enter life's second half. As record numbers of people enter life's second half, we face fundamental questions about what it means to be an aging person in a culture dominated by images of ascent. The journey in the second half is not about success as measured by things. Although some may be struggling still with questions about how to live economically and socially, how to be successful, life's second half should be about why to live. What gives us meaning in life?

The issues in the second half are different from those in the first half. Central now is an inward journey instead of the first-half ascent outward, in moving from the first-half question "What do you want to do?" to the second-half questions "What do you love? Where is your passion? What gives you a sense of significance in life?"

Moving From Success to Significance

The second-half journey requires that one dig deeper to find new sources of refreshment, moving from success as the central motivating force to finding significance in life. The notion of success carries with it all the weight of cultural success, of external locus of control.

Significance is something expressed from the inside out, a mark made in us by God which then makes a mark on the world. Significance is to write our own name based on what is inherent to us. It has an internal locus of control, to play out one's meaning and destiny in life.

Helping people in life's second half begins by aiding them to move out of an external locus of control, by which they followed someone else's plan for their life to finding their destiny. What is it they were created to be? What do they wish to leave as their mark in the lives of others? This requires the spiritual journey of digging to find one's roots, the Ground of Being, to find new sources of meaning in later life. It necessitates coming to terms with existential issues such as death, the role of work, retirement, and relationships with others. Finally, this journey brings one to wisdom, from aging to "saging." This requires throwing away the old, tattered and unhelpful maps used in life's first half and finding new roadmaps to lead us along life's path.

The Midlife Crisis of Limitations

Somewhere in the middle of life, typically in our forties or fifties, we face a crisis of limitations. We may have climbed the ladder of success, only to see that the ladder was against the wrong building. We ask, "Is that all there is?" Midlife crisis is usually accompanied by a sense of loss. By midlife, most of us likely have experienced some pain: loss of a loved one, a broken marriage, career changes, job loss through downsizing, addiction, death of a parent or the premature death of a friend, physical limitations. We may act out this pain by trying to regain our power and control at work, over the family, pushing ourselves physically to show we can still "do it." But the heroic virtues of the first half do not work anymore. The paradox is when we are confronted with our limits, then and only then can we find the mysteries of life. At this proverbial fork in the road, we find honesty and humility by letting go of our effort of self-control.

When this happens, midlife becomes a summons to grow anew, a challenge to change, a beckoning inward to a new wholeness, a turning point to our True Self. We spend life's first half trying to find the answers to life's questions. The reality of the second half is we have entered a mystery that we will never fully understand.

When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!

There are three roads we can take at this fork. The first road is that we can still try to ascend the ladder even higher. Society has icons of second-half success, people who continue to gain more power, prestige, and possessions. In so doing, they also become one-dimensional, shallow people who primarily seek ascent, materialism, and outward appearance. Success has little to teach us after forty.

Most people take the second path, the rusted-out road, where they never come to terms with their pain. If we don't transform our pain, we transmit it. Men and women on the embittered journey have never turned their wounds into sacred scars. They continue to look for someone to blame. They remain negative, critical, and unhappy people.

There is a third way, a journey inward to new sources of life. This is the wisdom journey, becoming a "Holy Fool." This way involves a spiritual transformation. It does not come naturally, for it runs contrary to the cultural messages of ascent. Deepening shows that the old rules no longer work. To go the third way requires that we stop trying to ascend the ladder. The deepening journey involves surrender, letting go of control, abandoning competition, power, possessions and prestige. It involves finding compassion in life. It may require some painful insights often gained through "time in the wilderness" that involves going through a dark place and finally emerging into light.

It means going to a larger, spiritual sphere that embraces others and their story. In the first half, we focused mostly on "my story," as puny, boring and insignificant as it may be. "My story" is subjective, personal, and psychological; and it is the subject matter of far too many TV and radio shows. Somewhere in the first half, we focus on "our story": our traditions, family, group, community, country, and even our religion. As important as that is, there is a greater story that unfolds, "The story," wherein we realize we play a small but vital role in something greater than ourselves, a cosmic story found in a sense of interdependence with others, our world, the Earth, our Creator.

Aging Well

According to the Harvard Adult Study, there are several key dimensions one needs to cultivate to age well, most of which involve the inward journey of deepening.

• A sense of generativity, investing oneself in something that will outlive us.
• A sense of tolerance, patience, open-mindedness, understanding, compassion.
• Maintaining health: abstaining from smoking and alcohol abuse, maintaining a healthy weight, a stable marriage, exercise, having adaptive coping skills.
• A sense of joy in life.
• A sense of subjective life satisfaction not found in outside measurements
• Instead of viewing the second half as a time of decline, we need a vision of life as a time to discover inner richness and transformation. Out of inner growth comes "saging," where healers and role models for future generations are born.

Helping Second-Half People

For people ministering to older adults there are key issues to be aware of:

1. You cannot take a person to a place you haven't been. If we seek to help second-half people on their inward journey, we'd better have begun our own inward journey, the spiritual path of our own wholeness. We need not have arrived at our journey's destination (hopefully, we never will). But, we need to have begun to transform our own pain, lest we transmit it to the people we are trying to help.
2. Helping others requires being there in their periods of darkness. If the second-half journey requires "time in the wilderness," as caring people, we must sit with them, often in silent, simple presence, during those times.
3. Helping others is about relationship, not about technique. Technique is what we use until the real helper shows up. Relationship begins with our ability to be vulnerable. If their journey calls them to be vulnerable and intimate in new ways, we, as helping professionals, need to face our own vulnerability, and be able to be intimate too. My definition of intimacy is "in-to-me-see," being vulnerable.
4. Change happens when people move toward us, not away from us. Helping others involves attraction, them seeing something in us they want. We will not be judged by our performance as much as by the spirit of our performance.
5. These qualities come from outside ourselves, from something greater than us, God, our Higher Power, the Ground of our Being.

Conclusion

Second-half people are not diminishing first halfers, teenagers with less spunk, but individuals, like all of us, seeking meaning and purpose in life. Before we begin the next encounter with older adults, let's take a minute and remember our humanity. We have an opportunity to encounter a truly unique, second half life.

David J. Powell, Ph.D., is President of the International Center for Health Concerns, Inc., in which capacity he is assisting in the development of behavioral health treatment in Asia. He resides half of the year in Beijing and Singapore. Dr. Powell is the author of Playing Life's Second Half: A Man's Guide for Turning Success into Significance, as well as six other books in the mental health field. He has been a clinician and marriage and family therapist for forty years. Dr. Powell can be reached at djpowell1@aol.com or www.ichc-us.org. This article first appeared in the fall 2005 issue of Center Sage

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