Everyone knows the familiar Boy Scout motto: Be Prepared. Whether we acknowledge it or not we are always thinking about preparation. We spend the better part of our lives preparing ourselves for a vocation, for raising a family, for saving for retirement, for assuring the welfare of those we love, among countless other things.
Retirement has become an item that occupies much of our attention. Think of all the anxiety producing times spent wondering if enough resources have been laid away to look after us in our old age. Collecting data about retirement is important; there are plenty of books written about the how to spend the “golden years.” For many the glow of those years is far less than glittering.
A thoughtful friend recently asked about living in a retirement community. “What’s the meaning of life in a place like that,” he inquired? It brought to mind a book by Richard Rohr, a Franciscan monk. What could such a person who has lived more than fifty years in a monastic setting possibly know about life in the real world? Quite a lot, it turns out. Falling Upward, his book about finding purpose in later life, brings up an interesting point about preparation.
He posits that we spend the better part of our lives filling the “container of who we are.” That varies from person to person, obviously, but what we do vocationally, how we fit in with our societies, the influence that we bring to our children, to our fellow workers, and the acquisitiveness with which we approach these areas defines sharply how we view ourselves and how the world in which we move sees us.
That’s pretty obvious but his next point is startling: If we live long enough that system of achieving what we can broadly define as success is doomed to failure.
All that work in those successful years will diminish and disappear with aging. That is particularly true in Western culture where the elderly are more tolerated than venerated. With the natural loss of physical and mental capabilities that comes with aging, the lessening of a sense of self-worth may make an appearance.
As my inquisitive friend asked, what’s the purpose when your first container of “The Big Me” is replaced with the second empty container of “What Now?”
When you can no longer control the flow of your life, how do you avoid wandering into the sandy delta of senility? Falling Upward gives some guidance but, as is usually the case in a complex topic, it will take some real work to get to the meat of the message. On the first reading my reaction was, “That’s interesting . . . sort of.” Years later with a different perspective I found the suggestions not only relevant but compelling.
It’s true that many of the things for which we worked so hard, which gave us statue in our own eyes, if not the eyes of the world, will diminish to the point of insignificance if we live long enough. What remains is what Rohr calls the True Self. It has been there all along but overshadowed by what he calls (erroneously, I think) the first container, the False Self. The Dominant Self, the persona of our productive years, would be a better term.
So what’s left to give purpose and meaning when “who we are” morphs into “who we were?” In a successfully lived life purposeful living should have been active all our adult years but the Dominant Self usually has kept it in the background. Put in a vast oversimplification it is a life of altruism . . . living for a purpose greater than ourselves.
For those with a spiritual inclination Passover and Holy Week are upon us and that’s not a bad time to think about preparation for a future that will contain meaning and purpose even in the face of physical and mental decline. It’s out there if you’re interested in searching.
To be continued . . .
Hayden Hollingsworth
