Late adulthood can be a time of confusion over identity, especially if you’ve commonly discussed your career at cocktail parties, socialized with co-workers, or thought of yourself primarily as a teacher, engineer, medical professional, fire fighter, attorney, plumber; pick your career. It can be difficult to realize that there is more to you than your career.
Teresa Amabile, who is, or was, a professor at Harvard, has done research on those approaching retirement to evaluate how it affects their self-understanding. She describes the concept of identity bridging in an interview with Harvard Business Review:
…by identity bridging, I simply mean to maintain or somehow enhance some important aspect of yourself that existed pre-retirement.
By late adulthood, you may have thought about this, but if you haven’t Amabile says that it can feel like “leaping off a cliff” or “jumping into the void.” Actually, I believe it’s an opportunity to get to know yourself, your inner life, better, which will lead to a more productive and joyful life with fewer regrets.
Bronnie Ware was in palliative care for years and wrote a book called Regrets of the Dying, which I admit I haven’t read.
She grouped patients’ most common regrets into five categories:
Not living true to themselves
Working too hard
Lacking the courage to express their feelings
Neglecting relationships
Denying themselves happiness
If Ware is correct, several of the regrets of those looking back over a life are not living true to themselves, lacking courage to express feelings, and denying themselves happiness, and they are related to self-understanding. In short, they regret a lack of attention to their inner lives. We are enveloped in a culture that emphasizes our outer lives, upward mobility, status, promotions, corner offices, awesome vacations and we forget to ask ourselves what makes us ourselves or what makes us joyful and content. Advertisers are delighted to tell us what makes us happy, and they’ve become quite good at using their version of happiness to sell a product.
As lifespans increase, late adulthood is a tremendous gift and an opportunity to correct some of our regrettable oversights.
We have time to pay attention to our inner lives and discover, or re-discover, who we truly are. I recently read a wonderful Substack post by Parker Palmer called On the Brink of Everything. He writes,
When Florida Scott-Maxwell was eighty-five, she wrote, “You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done...you are fierce with reality.” That’s how I feel when I’m able to say, “I am that to which I gave short shrift and that to which I attended. I am my descent into darkness and my arising into light, my betrayals and my fidelities, my failures and my successes. I am my ignorance and my insights, my doubts and my convictions, my fears and my hopes.” Wholeness does not mean perfection—it means embracing brokenness as an integral part of life. (Formatting mine)
I have been thinking about Scott-Maxwell’s phrase you are fierce with reality all week. I can’t get it out of my head. To truly know oneself, to be fierce with reality, is to acknowledge, as Palmer says, our brokenness. It’s not a subject most of us want to dwell on.
In late adulthood, we may confront the fierce reality of ourselves.
When I was young, I wanted to be someone that I now realize I never was and never will be. That’s ok. I now know better the reality of who I am, the good the bad and the ugly. I’m still working to upgrade my character and improve virtues, but I’m no longer ignoring the fierce reality of who I am.
With the experience of living for 60 or 70 years, we know ourselves better and when we’re out of the career rat-race we can examine ourselves to face the fierce reality of our identity. We can live true to who we actually are and express our feelings accurately. We can ask ourselves if we’ve worked too hard and attempt to improve relationships with others. I suspect all of this will make us joyful and content.
God knows exactly who he created me to be, and the better I know him, the better I know myself. He knows my past, present and future, and he will use it all, the ups and downs, successes and failures, healing and brokenness, to teach and show me who he is and the fierce reality of who I am in his sight.
These are a shadow of the things that were to come; the reality, however, is found in Christ. Colossians 2:17
Photo by Noah Buscher on Unsplash
One of the blessings of aging is being able to know ourselves better. And to have the courage to shun those things that don't make our hearts sing! Now, sometimes God provides those situations to help grow my faith. But even then, with the wisdom of life experience, it's so much easier to see his hand at work and know that whatever is bugging me a) won't last and b) might be for my own good. Another great post, Judy!
Absolutely love this! Fierce Reality, the better I know God the better I know myself! Thanks Judy ,eye opening.