The Illuminated Life® Workshop: Home > Workshop Sampler > Life Question 1

One day in August, Eda LeShan, then 69 years old, raised her eyes beyond the shoals in her life, beyond the dark horizon, and tried to get her bearings. Some years before she had written a wise and funny book on life past the age of 60. She had given the book a jaunty title, It's Better to Be Over the Hill than Under It, but on that late summer day she was feeling anything but jaunty. The previous year she had suffered a stroke--a hard blow that forced her to reassess her life. She saw that she had neglected her physical self and psychological self. She had been taking care of everyone's needs but her own, and she resolved to change.

As LeShan continued to consider her life, she remembered to count her blessings. She was getting better, growing. "The stroke," she noted, "was on the right side of my brain, both literally and figuratively" so she could talk and write. She was still herself, courageous, determined to maintain some humor and optimism, determined to make her life as meaningful as possible. And she was as feisty as ever--the same person who earlier had written that age is not all fun and games so a good yell now and then is good for soul and circulation.¹

"Over the hill" hardly describes LeShan's status nor could it apply to anybody whom Cathleen Rountree interviewed for her book On Women Turning 60. These women appeared to be "embracing the age of fulfillment"--which happens to be the subtitle of Rountree's book. Said one interviewee (Riane Eisler), "Somewhere in the back of my mind, there is the notion that at sixty-five you are what Americans call "over the hill." Rather, I feel that I'm not even half way up and I'm going to keep climbing strong."²

Rountree discovered that her older women were living lives quite different from society's stereotype, and sociologist Edward Thompson found this to be generally true of older men. The evidence he reviews in his book Older Men's Lives suggests the quality of such lives compares favorably with that of older women and also younger men.³ One of my Elderhostel students, 70 years old, told me that as a young man he had an unfavorable image of the older years, but he had found his "mellowed-out" sixties more comfortable than his "struggling" twenties.

One of the most intimate and moving assessment of a life full of years was set down by Florida Scott-Maxwell in her notebook when she was 82. She had had a rich and varied career as an actress, writer, and psychologist, and also as a wife, mother, and grandmother. Although she had acquired a deep understanding of life, she was finding her most recent years quite surprising: "My seventies were interesting, and fairly serene, but my eighties are passionate. I grow more intense as I age."

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