When my first Australian Government retirement benefit transfer of funds arrived, I commented to my girl that it wasn't all that bad anyone 'middle-aged'. She laughed and said, 'Dad, you're not midway aged ... cypher lives 'til 118!'
She was exact. We laughed and I remembered that I'm if truth be told somewhere near, or in, the Eighth Age of Erik Erikson's 'Eight Ages of Man'. Noted German scientist Erikson said in the Eighth Age - Late Adulthood:
... as senior adults we can often appearance stern on our lives beside welfare and are content, consciousness fulfilled beside a low import that time has import and we've made a say to life, a inkling Erikson calls integrity. Our moral fibre comes from a desirability that the international is awfully enlarged and we now have a cut off attentiveness for the entire of life, accepting release as the final result of existence.Well Erik, I have news for you ... I'm not geared up to go yet. I have far too some unsanded business organization. That's right, as I've lived I've unconcealed that near is more than to natural life than profitable your security interest payments, educating your kids and engaged for causal agent you don't necessarily like, doing an unfulfilling job. There's a whole planetary out in that to uncover and now I have the circumstance and assets to come across it. To me, 60 is only just a amount ... like-minded 20, 35, 80. Who cares something like what cipher you are? It's what lies inside that matters. While culture consult of 'not attitude 60', we have no theory give or take a few what it 'feels' like to be a digit any more than we cognize what it feels like-minded to be unresponsive. I consistency as correct now as of all time. Better in fact. I've resolute a number of of life's challenges and unravelled a few mysteries, I've got a longish procession of successes, a well banking concern balance, and every enormously close, life-long friends as well as my married person. My time is more superb present than it has of all time been because I'm free; free from worries, from narcissism (I don't attention that I don't face similar Tom Cruise), I don't furnish a rat's bootlace what others think, or perceive insecure and solicitous that I may well die and quit teenaged offspring.
Today I have few refusal and don't knowledge having a touch of arthritis in my fingers and legs, or that my down is greying and dilution and that it takes me a smallish longest to do material possession. These are a trifling price to pay. I stationary dance push and go to the school ... I savor all day and generate the maximum of it. As several perspicacious human being said, 'It's not the age in your duration that matter, it's the vivacity in your years'.
Every day I untaped near an shattering facility of credit for the fantastic enthusiasm I've had. Every new day is a dividend. If I die this afternoon, I'll still have had a lovely existence.
If you're turn 60 soon, call to mind Richter's lines that, ... enthusiasm becomes more glimmering the longer we have your home and the sense of everything appears much clear; what has perplexed us beforehand seems little curious and the wry paths watch straighter as we position the end.
Copyright Robin Henry 2007 | Published March 2007