The Time Paradox by Philip Zimbardo and John Boyd was the inspiration for this essay and helped to refresh my brain with new synapses.

How do you know if you are primarily a future oriented person (rather than past or present)? You are if you floss your teeth regularly, as one of other self-care and healthy habits, carefully invest your money, complete your education and achieve in a career. You are building for the future.

You have hope because you imagine and expect positive outcomes based on present actions. You are, however, too busy to fully enjoy the present or reflect on the past. You neither smell the roses nor remember when they last bloomed.

Your primary work style is to start a task well before the deadline. You prefer steady progress toward the goal of not only completion but a job well done. You never crammed for exams as a student. Other students who skipped class to have fun asked for your class notes. You did not like pop quizzes. You feel anxious with any kind of short notice. There is little future in short notice. 

In the majority North American cultural view there is little future in aging. We are, of course, on increasingly shorter notice from birth. The acceptance of that reality is a developmental milestone in the second half of life and is experienced as a sense of urgency.

The negative outcomes expected of us as we age are not particularly hopeful. They are a major source of anxiety about getting old. We are, for example, expected to lose our memory. It is unfortunately the popular and cultural gold standard for persons living in the second half of life.

Given a reasonable upbringing, we are all socialized to become citizens of a culture and to abide by its standards and expectations. Research has shown that older people in North American culture demonstrate significantly poorer memory than those in Asian and Native North American cultures where they are respected and expected to be wise elders. To some remarkable degree, we lose our memory, and perhaps other faculties, in conformity with the culture in which we live.

As we age our capacity for imagining and expecting a future much more positive than expected of us does not diminish. The future outcomes we hoped for in our earlier years were for stability but not necessarily for excitement or pleasure. Similarly, we are at risk in later years for seeking future stability by basing present actions on what was comfortable for us in the past.

Stability is both the result of, and the context for good decision making. It is the latter that is particularly important in the second half of life. The past, or status quo, is comfortable because we are well acquainted with ourselves there. It supports a well developed set of beliefs about the kind of people we think we are, which in turn directs the life decisions we make. Comfort can easily be the disguise for stagnation with an eroding of meaning in life.

Feeling stable is the starting point for the second half of life, not the end point. It provides the platform from which to expand our present focus by creating a life of experiences that renew personal meaning, are exciting and pleasurable, and well, energizing. It is in direct contrast to the depleting view of decline with age in our culture.

We will naturally grow beyond the limits of our beliefs about ourselves as we engage in a creative present. As we redefine ourselves to include the riches of living, we can decide to have a lot more of it. Imagining the future from the perspective of living in a creative present is the opportunity before us in the second half of life. It will likely be more than we expected.

© C O P Y R I G H T   2 0 1 0.  Gary Holdgrafer ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.