{"id":497,"date":"2016-01-15T11:49:14","date_gmt":"2016-01-15T19:49:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/?p=497"},"modified":"2016-07-17T15:50:38","modified_gmt":"2016-07-17T22:50:38","slug":"active-wisdom","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/?p=497","title":{"rendered":"Active wisdom"},"content":{"rendered":"

A talk by Mary Catherine Bateson at Town Hall five years ago\u00a0gave me many ideas I continue to use today and prompted the following essay.<\/em><\/p>\n

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The age of active wisdom<\/h3>\n

Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson spoke at Town Hall recently. Her book, Composing a Life<\/em>, published a couple of decades earlier, reinforced themes I saw in my own life then \u2013 that a life of interruption could be understood positively as \u201cmulti-faceted\u201d and that there were advantages in finding ways to adapt to change and new possibilities fluidly. The main title of her 2010 book, Composing a Further Life<\/em>, seemed flat, but the subtitle, \u201cThe Age of Active Wisdom,\u201d was more promising.<\/p>\n

Almost everyone at age 50 has had some condition, she said, that would have killed them in the past. I could name at least one in my case, more if I count conditions that would only have given me constant pain or that would have made breathing a moment-to-moment struggle or that would have taken my mind away sooner than later. On average, we live 30 years longer today than people did just 100 years ago. Most of this can be attributed to medical advances and increased knowledge. Many people more or less my age have unprecedented levels of health, energy, time, and resources. We don\u2019t have to expect, Bateson said, that a long life means \u201cperpetual decrepitude.\u201d<\/p>\n

We also can\u2019t think of our extra 30 years as just, sort of, tacked on to the end of our lives. Thirty years is much too long for that. She encourages seeing these years as a whole new period in a life cycle. This is a provocative notion, though I don\u2019t much like the name she gave it, \u201cAdulthood II.\u201d Maybe I\u2019m just slow to come to terms with being an \u201cadult.\u201d I use a definition from my step-daughter, an adult herself; what makes you an \u201cadult,\u201d she told me years ago, is knowing when you have to act like one.<\/p>\n

Bateson claims that by having this new cycle in our lives we are becoming a different species. In much the way that adding a room changes our entire house, adding an extra 30-year phase should change the way we think about our whole life. This increased longevity requires us, she believes, to imagine a new way to \u201ccompose a life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Work<\/h3>\n

Our concept of \u201cretirement\u201d and, even more fundamentally, our concepts of work must change. Otto von Bismarck created the first \u201cretirement\u201d plan in Germany in 1889. Bismarck set retirement age at 70, knowing that the average German worker never reached that age. In 1935, the U.S. instituted its own retirement plan and set the age at 65, when average life expectancy here was 61.7 years. We\u2019re living with the same framework today, even though life expectancy for a woman my age is pegged at 84.8*, not 30 years more, but it hasn\u2019t been 100 years since 1935 yet, either.<\/p>\n

Built into the notion of \u201cretirement,\u201d Bateson says, is the assumption that work is a curse, and if we don\u2019t want to work, what we will do with all that time? She (though not I) can imagine spending a year playing golf, but not 30 years. Rethinking the value of work in our lives is the task at hand, finding ways to contribute that mean something. She thinks we need a labor movement committed to adapting the circumstances of work so it\u2019s satisfying, not something to escape. As I often do, I look to artists for ideas. Poets don\u2019t generally retire<\/em> from writing poems; sculptors may move away from back-breakingly large projects, but they don\u2019t stop imagining\u00a0and making work in three dimensions.<\/p>\n

Liberation<\/h3>\n

Bateson refers to liberation movements from the past \u2013 Black, gay, women\u2019s. The act at the core of liberation movements is claiming the right to define oneself, to see ourselves differently, beyond both societal and internalized prejudices. She wants to change the assumption that age and the wisdom it can bring is sedentary. The new 30-year addition to our lives can, instead, be characterized as the age of \u201cactive wisdom,\u201d a time to use what we\u2019ve learned through a life, to take time to reflect on it and act with the stamina and energy that our relative health gives us.<\/p>\n

A friend recently caught me in the midst of what no doubt sounded like the start an angry rant. I was sure I\u2019d detected a patronizing shift in a telephone operator\u2019s voice when I mentioned my age. With Bateson\u2019s ideas fresh in my mind, I slid easily into talk about the need for a new liberation movement. Cathryn was tolerant but steady in describing her own comfort with and anticipation of withdrawing from the active work life she has led, especially in the past decade. She seemed to relish in advance the benefits of a slower pace and the opportunity to learn things more thoroughly. Her view pulled me out of the little lather I\u2019d worked up. There are many ways of claiming those extra years, many ways of being \u201cactive.\u201d Ultimately her view and mine may not be so much at odds.<\/p>\n

January 2011<\/em><\/p>\n

* As I post this in early 2016, the life expectancy for a woman my age in the U.S. has increased to 86.5 years.<\/p>\n

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A talk by Mary Catherine Bateson at Town Hall five years ago\u00a0gave me many ideas I continue to use today and prompted the following essay.   The age of active wisdom Anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson spoke at Town Hall recently. Her book, Composing a Life, published a couple of decades earlier, reinforced themes I saw…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-eighth-decade"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7pXN0-81","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=497"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":536,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497\/revisions\/536"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}