COMING OF AGE IN AMERICA: HOW TO IMPROVE MIDDLE YEARS?
Changes to improve the middle years, like those just mentioned, cannot be put into effect without a fundamental change in our attitudes and values. We need a new vision of aging, a new vision of the human potential. We need to discard destructive myths and obsolete beliefs.
Our society’s single-minded emphasis on productivity and profits has been costly: It has alienated most of us from the experience of our own possibilities, including the possibility of re-inventing ourselves and reconstructing our lives continually. Socialized to believe that there is only one way to be, one role to play, most American men in their middle years have trouble imagining or inventing new purposes and new identities when the old ones have run their course or been outgrown.
We might begin by changing our perspective on aging. Contrary to myth, growing old does not mean becoming senile, sick, or sexless. The elderly do not become less responsive to innovation and change, according to scientific studies. Nor do they suffer a loss of intelligence or creativity. But in our society the potentials for late life have been largely unexplored. We do not help the elderly age with dignity and purpose, nor do we support them in developing fully until the end.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. By changing our vision of aging we can give ourselves a gift: the gift of a more vibrant, vital lift, To this end we might look for inspiration to a unique program called SAGE, which was designed to counter negative attitudes toward aging and revitalize the later years. Using a wide variety of Western therapies and Eastern disciplines, including yoga, meditation, body awareness, breathing therapy, and massage, SAGE was launched in 1974 by California therapist Gay Luce. Having begun with a core group of twelve people aged sixty-five to ninety-five, it has since expanded in size and scope. Staff members are now conducting training workshops, as well as serving in Convalescent homes and residential care facilities.
This innovative program has produced astonishing results among the elderly: Migraine headaches have disappeared; the deaf have recovered their hearing; and those who were considered senile have regained their mental agility. “I’ve seen people in this group change their physical and mental outlook,” says Frances Burch, sixty-seven, one of the original dozen. “They’re more open and responsive, their lives are more exciting, and they have more possibilities and choices. . . . I’ve seen things go on here that are amazing— self-healing.”
Another member of the core group, Worden MacDonald, comments: “I think the most important thing to me is that I’m sixty-eight years old, and probably for the first time in my life, I’ve experienced real joy in my association with people. My father was a Presbyterian minister and quite an old fogey, an old-timer. He was a fine man, but he was against dancing, playing cards, and having fun in general. So I truly was an old man most of my life.
“I wanted to look good. I was taught, ‘What will the neighbors think?’ so I didn’t do what I wanted to do. I did what I thought people would want me to do, but I’ve gotten over that. I began having fun, enjoying myself, and feeling free to do what Mac would like to do instead of what the neighbors would like me to do. It’s a real joy and I’m grateful.”
A pioneer project in developing a new image of aging, SAGE, is demonstrating that people over sixty can transcend the expectations of our culture. It is proving that old age can involve as much growth as early childhood. It is giving us a new perspective on the rich potential of our own humanity.
We need more programs like this. We need to study not typical but optimal aging patterns in order to change our beliefs about our own future. We need as public policy to make a major commitment to research in the behavioral sciences. We need multi-disciplinary studies on the process of aging that are aimed not just toward the extension of life but also toward its enhancement. We need to know more about how to live a healthy, vigorous, productive, and meaningful old age.
We need similar studies of the middle years, studies of individuals who have lived full, creative, and evolving lives. We need to raise the level of our expectations, to enlarge our sense of possibilities. Since we are a society that until now has not only disbelieved in adult growth and change but discouraged it as well, we need to know more about what we might become—rather than what we already are.
There is a crying need in this country for basic life-cycle education. “No one tells the child that he is a unique person and has a unique range of possibilities before him,” observes Dr. Robert N. Butler. “No one prepares him to be continually growing for a lifetime.”" Learning about the life cycle should begin at an early age in the public schools, says Butler. Children should be taught about our culture’s rites of passage, and learn to anticipate their own personal future. They should be given some sense of the stages of life: what it means to make marital choices and embark on parenthood; the problems of the middle years; what old age will be like; dealing with death and supporting a grieving person; and why we have such customs as funerals.
Many primitive societies are more advanced in these matters than we are because this knowledge is passed on in symbolic ways. Having become civilized, or at least industrialized, our society has some catching up to do in the realm of human wisdom Now that we know all about how to make a good living, it is time we learned how to live.
Like the American male in his forties, we as a nation are finally coming of age—not just because we celebrated our two hundredth birthday, but also because we have lived through two World Wars and the Great Depression. We have even survived bloody civil-rights battles, political assassinations, Vietnam, and Watergate.
America has lost its innocence. We are shedding our illusions, groping for new values, and trying to change. We are struggling to mature. Perhaps then the time has also come for us to become less heroic and more humane. Instead of demanding that men serve our institutions in the interests of economic growth, we should transform our institutions to serve men—in the interests of human growth. This would be a bold beginning.
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