It is not often that I feel so inspired by a group of people that I feel uncomfortable with the fact that I am not more like them. Yet this is what happened this week in Boulder, Colorado. Late last year Dr Harry Moody, former Director of Academic Affairs for AARP, invited me to join one of the Positive Aging Lunches he arranges in Boulder each month.
At the lunch I encountered a group of people ages 55 and older who have decided that they are going to make aging into a positive experience for themselves and for the world around them. This group of highly accomplished individuals are refusing to go into retirement and then fade into old age. Instead they are conscious of the fact that they have entered into a new phase of life together with which comes lots of new opportunities to make a difference.
I rarely have an opportunity to spend an hour and a half in the middle of the day to attend a lunchtime presentation by an artist and listen to her inspiring story. To be honest, for me attending the Positive Aging Lunch was business. I am doing a study about how people ages 55+ find purpose in life and am developing a product to help adults find purpose in life and therefore saw attending this meeting as part of work. But for the rest of the attendees this lunch had nothing to do with ‘work ‘ in the traditional sense, it was about self development and making a difference.
This group of people have the busy work days behind them, now they are focusing on living. I was the only person at the meeting who was in his thirties and the usual ego-type behavior one notices when meeting a group of mid career professionals was completely absent from this group. There was a collective wisdom that seemed to have replaced the exuberance of youth one usually notices.
We are a society that prizes youth above age. This makes many older people feel marginalized. In an age when a 29 year-old can pick up the phone to admonish the president of the United States how is a person who has his or her accomplishment behind them to feel?
The group I met, headed by Harry Moody has the answer. Whilst aging may be a different phase of life, with a different things to accomplish for most people, it is no less positive than being young. Arguably, people in the second half of their life have much more to contribute now than they did when they were young. At most meetings I attend I am unafraid to speak up freely. At this meeting, however, I felt little desire to speak–just to listen. I had much more to receive from this group of sages than I could offer them. I therefore sat quietly and tried to not only absorb what was being said but also to imbibe the atmosphere and spirit of the group.
My high regard for this group is certainly influenced by the culture I was brought up in that tells us to have respect for elders. But beyond that it is clear to me that people in the second half of their lives have a huge amount to contribute to people of my age group. I therefore intend on making this Positive Aging Lunches a regular part of my monthly schedule. My discomfort at not being more like them is a small price to pay for the amount I stand to gain from the collective wisdom offered by a group such as this.