Taking Flight In My Senior Years

“We show up, burn brightly in the moment,

live passionately, and when the moment is over,

when our work is done, we step back and let go.”  – Rolf Gates

As of this writing I am 72 years old, the same age Mark Nepo was when he recently published “The Fifth Season,” his luminous book-length meditation on aging.  Nepo argues that our senior years offer all of us an opportunity to open ourselves to life in much the way that the petals of a flower open to the sun.  Instead of closing down, our senior years, if lived intentionally, can be a marvelous time of opening up.  But how can we accomplish that?  One key way, he says, is to let go of our area of expertise, the career we have spent a lifetime mastering, or at least trying to master.  And why?  Because, comforting as our mastery is, it no longer offers us the challenge of learning something new.  Instead, it becomes rote and repetitive, a well-trodden neural pathway.  By contrast, when we are at work—or truthfully, at play—seeking to master a new skill, we feel most alive.  Learning something new offers the joy of psychic renewal, the opening up of a flower.

Nepo’s wise advice resonated with me because for several years I’ve been toying around with retiring from my career designing residential gardens.  I still love gardens and plants, but I no longer feel compelled to design them.  My design skills, such as they are, amount to a deeply trodden neural pathway that I’m increasingly ready to abandon.  Doing so, however, requires retuning my most fundamental attitudes toward myself and my role in life.  As a youth, I was highly ambitious, and I basically assumed that whatever career I selected, I would rise to the pinnacles of achievement it offered.  Eventually, landscape architecture became my muse, my Mount Olympus, and I was determined to scale its dizzying heights. 

However, after passing through the crucible of my professional training and apprenticeship, my attitude shifted. Without abandoning my ambition, I became equally determined to find the secret key to achieving a work-life balance.  Having a vital personal life grew in importance to me until I resolved that I would give myself to my chosen profession but without becoming a workaholic.  I vividly remember recognizing the seed of that desire long before I achieved my professional pedigree.  My insight came in a fleeting thought that occurred to me while I was still in high school, when I felt pressure from my father to become an architect.  In my reverie, I pictured myself going through the daily motions of my career in much the way my father did.  But where did my friendships fit into that picture?  I dearly loved my friends, and I worried that if I were to devote myself to a profession like architecture, my interactions with them would become increasingly pro-forma, which meant more rigid and less spontaneous.  For example, if a friend were to approach me for professional advice, where would our laughter be?  What would happen to the joy we felt simply reveling in each other’s wacky personalities?  I pictured myself becoming robotic, as if the more I mastered the mysterious and rigorous demands of my career, the less of a vibrant personality I would preserve to offer my friends.  Worried by this, I resolved that I would refuse to sacrifice my personality to the demands of a career.

Of course, this youthful anxiety amounted to a false dichotomy. Eventually, I achieved the work-life balance I so desired, but there was a catch: I was no longer confident that I could scale the heights of  landscape architecture’s Mount Olympus in this lifetime. I wanted to stifle that anxiety; I wanted to prove myself wrong. So, nose to the grindstone, I set about building my independent practice in garden design. I fantasized that glossy photographs of my work would soon appear in “Luxe – Pacific Northwest” or “Architectural Digest.”  And eventually they did appear, if not in “Luxe,” then at least in the Seattle Times “Pacific NW“ magazine. But did this achievement represent the pinnacle of ambition? I feared not, and I compared myself adversely to many of my colleagues. Like Sisyphus, I resolved, once again, to push my ball up the hill, but this time I would push it up a higher hill.

Then I turned 65, then 66.  I went onto Medicare; I began receiving social security payments. Even so, did this mean that I had pushed the ball as high as it would go?  I continued to assume that I could push it higher, but my arms grew tired and the ball kept stopping at the same elevation where it had come to rest the day before. Eventually, I began questioning if I even wanted to push that ball up the slope, but there was a part of me that rejected my ambivalence. Didn’t that mean I was giving up?  I had long prided myself on being someone who does not give up, so Nepo’s advice offered me a tantalizing off-ramp.

 “You’re right on schedule,” my mother used to say, when I mentioned to her the anxieties I felt at every stage of my development into adulthood. Finding and reading “The Fifth Season” meant that I was ‘right on schedule’ once again. Nepo’s image of opening up, his description of the advantages of setting aside our professional mastery in our senior years, the better to experience the psychic renewal that comes with taking on new challenges, gave me the wisdom I needed to quiet the increasingly anxious voice of my remaining ambition. It was finally safe to tell myself that I had achieved enough, that I could stop trying to push the ball higher. At last, it was time to retire, but now I could retire without shutting down. Instead, I could retire by taking flight—by accepting  the promise of setting out on new pathways and mastering new skills. Enter creative writing. No wonder I felt more alive when writing “Landscape in Lavender” than when designing my latest garden!

Nepo counsels, however, that opening up does not mean we can stop pushing the ball altogether. Each of us is still a Sisyphus because every day each of us is obliged to get up once again, take our medications, make coffee, and put the dishes in the dishwasher.  Our dog is wagging its tail; our dog needs another walk. But we are not restricted to being  Sisyphus; each of us is also Plato, a philosopher king with new-found time to smell the roses and  grow in compassion. Oh, what vistas await when we take flight with a new interest or passion! Closing my eyes, I was reminded of the classic Buddhist paradox of the lotus: Its feet are fated to remain firmly rooted in the mud even as its petals open to bask in the sun.