"Our barns are full!"

© Imelda Maurer, cdp

A brief continuation of yesterday's conversation refuting the belief that later life is circumscribed by "letting go".

We are all familiar with the images comparing the life cycle to the four seasons of the year. Autumn comes, the leaves fall, the trees are bare. We wait for the next season, a stark barren winter, which brings death.

An important initial message from Gene Cohen in his book, "The Mature Mind" is that we must change every idea we have about aging.  This "problem of aging", Cohen tells his readers, originated with the beginnings of aging studies research.  The studies were always focused on deficits and decline.  The aging process was always and only seen as a problem. Indeed that was brought home to me a few years ago. An area university library was thinning its shelves and I went to  see what was available. The lobby of the library was filled with books from their school of nursing for sale to the public.  As I panned the titles on these old, sometimes worn books, one has stayed with me: "The Aging Problem".

Cohen says we must look at research which only recently has looked at the positive aspects of aging. We must turn upside down - flip - every belief we have had in the past about aging.

Let's flip one concept here: The season of autumn as symbolic of later life.  

Traditional concept: Time when trees lose their leaves - a kind of decline and approaching death. (And we spiritualize this concept of loss and decline by invoking the Paschal Mystery.)

 

In reality, as the summer heat wanes, we wait with anticipation for that first cold snap, that crisp fall wind that tells us that the leaves will be changing, that their Fall colors will soon be in full array. Multitudes will be drawn to parks and to the countryside, awestrudk with this beauty!

This is what really happens to leaves, and I offer it as a flipped concept, a new but absolutely valid and truthful reality also about us and about aging in our later years.

In fact, these brilliant Fall colors have always existed in these now-brilliant autumn leaves. When the hours of sunlight lessen,  chlorophyll (green) production decreases and eventually stops entirely. No chlorophyll in the leaf, no green color.

It is only when the leaves "lose" their green color that the brilliants colors that have always been present in the leaves become visible. 

Flipped concept:

And for us humans also experiening ongoing change (called aging), for us, beauty, continued growth and development becomes possible and visible precisely through and because of our aging.

James Hillman in his book, "The Force of Character" writes about this very concept .

Fibnlly, another flipped concept of fall as a season of life was brought home to me at a prayer service sometime ago that was part of a meeting focusing on aging.

This one line has stayed with me and I smile every time I think of it:

"It is fall. Our barns are full."

Indeed they are!

I hope you smile too and cherish every moment, every 'stage' of life, wherever you are in it, as a time filled with potential for growth and development of your whole person.