Chapter 9

Paths To The Ulyssean Life

The Ulyssean life is possible, and the Ulyssean way is accessible and free, because in many ways the conditions required for the creative life are more available in the later years of adulthood than earlier in life.

It is essential to make this statement with force in order to banish the myth that creativity resides chiefly with the young and the "highly geared." Being in "high gear" is no guarantee that one will be creative-productive, perhaps. Assuming that a constant factor in all creative enterprises is the existence of certain personal gifts, talents, qualities, or self-actualized attributes, there then seem to be conditions or situations that set the stage, or help provide the soil and air for the creative enterprise. And all of them are conspicuously available in the later years.

One is a release of time, not only to think and plan, but to produce. Incredibly, if you allot ten hours a day as released time across any 15 years after age 60, you have approximately 55,000 hours available to invent, to build, to serve, to paint, to sculpt, to write, to learn. Tolstoy could perhaps have written the monumental War and Peace three times in that period of time! For most of us our problem will not be unavailable time, but rather how to manage the abundant time we have. And how to manage our self --our will to learn and create.

Another is the rich store of experiences accumulated throughout life, which are recorded in the apparatus of the mind. In older adulthood not only is the brain operating with abundant power, but the great reservoir of the unconscious is surely more potentially fertile than it was earlier. Many possibilities arise from this --one of them Wordsworth's concept of emotion recollected in tranquility. Older adults have the extended experience, usually together with a greater accessibility to tranquil thought-not confusing "tranquil" with "passive" or "bovine." An example of this fusion of experience, perceptive recollection, and tranquility in a creative enterprise is, of course, keeping a daily journal filled with reflections and ideas.

Still another advantage exists among older adults. Surely many are freer than they have ever been to explore and adopt fresh and unorthodox points of view-to release themselves to new quests and adventures. At last they can "give themselves permission." For too many years, in too many ways, we listen to the Board of Directors in our mind, locking ourselves away from new ways of thought and new steps in experience.* Freer airs blow for many men and women in their later years. The stakes are less and intimidating Wers are gone. The steady process of maturing may have brought a courageous wisdom, a courageous compassion. One of the loveliest features of the later years is the affinity that many older adults develop for the causes and crusades of the young.

 

*A friend of mine in her 60s tells me that one day, lonely and reflective, it occurred to her that she had never set foot in a temple, synagogue, or mosque. When she put on her coat to do so, a voice from her "Board of Directors" (loved and lost), remarked in her mind, "But in our family we don't do such a thing." She paused. Then "giving herself permission" ("But I am 63!"), she went on to the symbolic act that has enriched her late religious life-her sense of the cosmos.

 

Thus the creative life is not only as possible for men and women in the later years as when they were much younger, but in important respects often more possible. Nor does lack of money, nor chronic ill health, nor lack of family and friends remove these advantageous conditions for creativity in many older adult lives. They are still present even when one is naked on the shore.

However, at all ages the creative life has to be purchased by an effort of the will and by the adoption of a certain lifestyle. Obsolescence of mind and spirit waits for those who think that creativity in the later years descends like manna from the sky. To grow and create, to bring into actuality the unique space-time intersection that is our life, requires exertion of the self ---exertion undertaken with love, faith, and hope.

Part of this process of self-actualization with a view to creativity in the later years is the sharpening of the senses. It is incredible that so little attention is paid to the deeper world of the senses. For surely to "see" and to "hear" is a process immensely greater than the physical act. I recall a conversation a few years ago with a group of men at a luncheon where two brothers, both friends of some members of the group, were under discussion. One brother was blind. However, in the rapid exchange of conversation, when one person suggested Bob, the sighted brother, for a committee job, another man cut in quickly: "No. I suggest Jim-he sees things so much more clearly than Bob." At the remark, which nearly everyone at once agreed to, delighted smiles spread among the group. The paradox was true, and the instinctive reference was beautiful.

For purposes of the creative life, there is not much advantage in having 20/20 vision if one really does not "see" very much. In fact, few of us, in the later years or at any time in the life drama, have developed our ability to "see" as we should. The point is developed extensively in a fine book by Ross Parmenter, The Awakened Eye. Parmenter was a journalist and music editor of the New York Times until 1964 when he "retired" in his late 50s to travel and write, and to bring out four years later his book on the awakening of the deeper vision. Parmenter identifies three categories of "seeing" beyond ordinary vision. The first degree above the ordinary he calls sharpened vision, as for example, the astonishing array of things in a pack o f face cards which ordinary vision never notices, even though one may play bridge for years on end. The next stage he terms heightened vision where symbolism is perceived. In heightened vision the candle on a red-checked café table becomes a symbol of the idealism of man; a wider context appears than simply the candle seen at the moment with the physical eye.

The highest category is transfigured vision, and Parmenter illustrates this at length with the description of an episode in 1949 which occurred on the road from California to Colorado when he was driving a 79-yearold retired school- teacher, Thyrza Cohen, to her sister's home in Denver. Parmenter became lost among primitive roads and mountain passes in the area of the Great Divide. He realized bleakly that the car, a 1932 four-cylinder Plymouth sedan, was very old, that his gas supply was giving out, and that they had little food. Then suddenly the canyon walls fell away and they could see, beyond green fields, the town they had sought for the night.

Parmenter describes the euphoria that seized him at the sight. He and Thyrza Cohen had been obsessed with the need of food, of gasoline, of shelter. Now in the ecstasy of relief, Parmenter "saw" what later turned out to be a dingy enough row of houses and filling stations as a Tunisian scene, bathed "in magical light"-the light of the afternoon sun. The owner of the run-down service station, although "in reality" simply a good-humored obliging auto mechanic of considerable skill, seemed transfigured into man as the universal helper of man.

Parmenter asks how it is possible that we can live so close for so long beside human beings to whom we relate, and so rarely see them with the insights and perspectives of the awakened eye. He gives many instances of the awakening power, sometimes the wonder-working power, of sharpened, heightened, and transfigured vision. He speaks of a "looking gear" into which one has to shift out of ordinary seeing. And Parmenter suggests a host of games that one can play to come alive and to gain joy by using the marvelous gift of sight.

Closely allied to the zone of new powers of physical vision is a whole world of creative potentiality made available by the imaginative play of the mind, fantasy, the intersection of opposites, the inversion of conventional viewpoints, and mind-storming. Here we are usually at opposite poles from the staid, carefully sanctified protocols of unexamined routines of thought-the "normal ... .. natural," "safe" scenarios that are the maps of the life of Total Expectedness. To all adults, of course, exotic and exciting ideas can arise from the unconscious. However, others will come innumerable times because summoned by techniques of the applied imagination.

Thus, Bonnie Cashin tells us that in the early process of opening her mind to daring new ideas in fashion design she will take a whole lot of dresses from the rack in her bedroom and throw them in wild confusion throughout the room. Sometimes she will hang or wear gowns and coats upside down, or in bizarre positions, so that from this riotous and colorful disorder new fashion concepts may leap into her mind.

It is not surprising that when testers of creativity in adults approach subjects in their 50s (and older) to find out how they react to well known proverbs, too many men and women react with interpretations that are lifeless and, in fact, mummified. ' We need to be roused from the self-inflicted (and society-inflicted) torpor that engulfs much of our mental "set" in attacking problems. In many adults, their creative potentials are not dead, but only asleep.

In an effort to stimulate fresher, more original approaches to problems, a Toronto consultant, Savo Bojicic, invented a small (3V2 pounds) inexpensive "Think Tank," which was used in a game of putting the imagination to work on new paths. Explaining why he spent over $100,000 developing his little Think Tank, Bojicic said "I want to help people to think properly, to widen their potential as human beings, to teach people how to learn again. Thinking skills will become more important as more and more people need to be retrained." Manuel Escot in The Canadian Magazine for June 8, 1974, described how this little machine could be used by someone, perhaps an adult in late middle age, to help save his marriage. Suppose the five words produced by manipulating the knobs of the tank come up as WOLF, MIMICRY, CONFETTI, VIRGINITY, and BULLDOZER. Let the mind move, really move, imaginatively on these words (I have space for only two here, the two most seemingly incongruous perhaps): MIMICRY: Acting, artificiality. Be natural, be human. Distortion, arguments. End this, and abandon pettiness. BULLDOZER: Power. Stop overpowering her. Don't tell her she's stupid. Level up, smooth the edges of our relationship. Demolish, rebuild. Start from the beginning, remember the things that used to give pleasure and repeat them.

In Synectics, a transactional idea-gathering technique that operates best with seven or eight people, an exercise occurs that really astonishes people new to the technique. It derives from Charles S. Whiting, and is called the Forced Fit. Suppose the group is struggling with the problem of inventing a more efficient hairdryer, one that will be almost silent. The manager of the discussion will ask the group members to choose an object as wildly different from the still-uninvented hairdryer as possible. Someone suggests the Taj Mahal! This is accepted, and members of the group strain to find analogies that might confer new' attributes upon the proposed dryer, and open up new approaches for a creative invention.

Too fantastic? Too absurd? Yet this technique for stimulating the adult imagination has worked well enough, long enough, in Synectics groups to be retained to stimulate creative power. Synectics also employs the "excursion," which I find virtually the same as mind-storming. In this, members of a group are invited to release their imaginations freely for solutions, and not to worry about the cost. Two benefits occur. For one thing, the air can become electric with ideas-many seeming to be "bizarre," "far-out," "absurd," but often rich with original solutions. Every excursion like this is a stretching exercise to get rid of mental inertia.

The second benefit is that immense questions, and certain seemingly fantastic ideas developed within their larger-than-lifesize dreaming, can often be reduced to the small canvas of the problem in such a way as to provide the solution. For example, the immense question, posed in a group: "How can we get the United Nations to work better?" can be reduced to a manageable, still fascinating query: "How can an older adult become a citizen of the world?"

It is crucial, of course, that all ideas in enclave mind-storming discussions be at first accepted and posted. In these sessions, without putdowns, highly workable ideas will emerge and get everybody's recognition. There is no room, however, for the "little killer ideas," as Alex Osborn used to call them: "We tried that last year"; "We are too small for that"; "It isn't worth doing"; "It won't work"; "It costs too much"; or, as recorded at an engineering deans' conference when they were looking at needs and solutions: "Are you serious?"; "You must be joking"; "I've got a better idea"; "It's too early"; "It's too late"; "Nobody would agree to that."

In fact, there is an interesting folder available called The Absurd Dictionary, which lists 500 ways of saying "No" to a new idea! (It's published as a service to the creative process by IBM Corporation.)

Astonishing and unusual ideas and approaches can ensue from group sessions. Thus, the designer Victor Papanek of the Department of Creative Arts at Purdue University reported in 1969 to a national seminar on creativity* that he and his students had been able to originate more than 800 ideas that could contribute to the solution of social problems across the world.

 

*Sponsored by the Thomas Alva Edison Foundation, the Institute for Development for Educational Activities, and The Johnson Foundation.

 

 

Papanek reported some devices and toys invented by him and student associates in Finland for partly disabled children:

A 24-square-meter exercising environment for children with cerebral palsy was designed and built in Finland. This environment has built-in toys. It folds up into a two-meter-square cube which, in turn, breaks into two parts to make it transportable through revolving doors or in a microbus. Most clinics in Finland and Sweden do not have the necessary equipment for these children; so this cube is now taken from town to town.

A second cube of this type has just been completed at Purdue University and is designed for use by mongoloids, cretins, and children with other disabilities. In this environment, there are quiet comers in which the children can hide. Other areas are so very, very soft that the children can jump headfirst from the top of the six-foot rack and land enveloped by the extra-soft pillows on the floor. These low-cost cubes were designed, built, and completed in 42 hours. They will soon be made available to clinics in the United States.

One of the students working with Papanek in Finland found that when he took a rubber ball, put wooden pegs into it, and then pressed on them, the pegs would spring back. This made an excellent toy for children suffering from paraplegia, quadriplegia, cerebral palsy, and other disabling diseases.

Papanek calls the key to his and his students' success their "wealth of enthusiasm"-exactly the commodity that is so often in short supply among many otherwise well-equipped adults in their later years.

So far the discussion here has concentrated on older adults in idea arousing groups. Yet there is wide scope in developing one's imaginative gifts as an individual, not least for many older adults who find themselves frequently or constantly alone and lonely.

The report of one creativity conference invites the individual reader to try a number of small creative exercises devised to help develop creativity among schoolchildren through the magic of words. One of these asks, "Which is bigger, a pain or a pickle?" The editor of the report remarks:

Dead silence is exactly how most adults respond, but children in the elementary age group do not hesitate a minute. One says, "A pain, because you feel it all over." Another answers, "A pickle, because it is big and long, while a pain is sort of shrimpy." Such questions do not seem nonsensical to them as they do to most adults; youngsters are attuned to questions like this.

Nonsensical? But without some element of the nonsensical in our lives, the drying-up process begins. Fantasy also: the bubbling cataract that can irrigate the drying soil of our imagination. We know very little about how much people fantasize in their ordinary lives. How many Walter Mittys are there? And where does simple wishing break off and fantasy begin?

Great are the uses of fantasy, and never more so than in the later years of life. Alan Lakein, the management consultant, suggests that fantasies are good in coping with life and trying to plan one's years productively, but that people tend to censor even their fantasy life, and that in fact "there's nothing wrong with uncensored fantasies." And he goes on: "Don't be afraid to include such far-out wishes as climbing the Matterhorn, going to a group-sex party, eating a whole cheesecake, taking the year off, building a retirement home in Italy, chartering a yacht, adopting triplets, and losing 40 pounds by jogging an hour a day." The world of fantasy can be the individual adult's "excursion." In that world the rules of routine life that inhibit us should be suspended during the game.

Unleash the mind! From such liberation comes most of our prose fiction, our poetry, our plays, our music and ballet, much of our art and architecture; all our utopias, and many of our utopian ideas (children's villages, literacy villages, Pugwash-type conferences); many medical breakthroughs, space adventures, astonishing yet seemingly "simple" inventions, and some of our finest breakthroughs in interpersonal relations.

Fantasy can be the generator of real adventures. If you can maintain the fantasy of going "on the stage," you may, years late, enroll in an amateur company and begin the adventure. At the least, you may take part in the production side of plays. If you can continue to imagine yourself as a painter, even though like Clementine Hunter everything interferes, the chances are high that, like her, you will one day apply oil to canvas, or hand to clay. However, you must have the win to ultimately make real the fantasy on whatever terms.

And especially should we in our middle and later years train ourselves to turn concepts upside down; intersect opposites; challenge conventionalities; look at the kitchen at home or the park around the corner from the retirement home as arenas for the game of "Why and Why not?" and the game of "How?"

In our time, in a society that deluges the TV screens and living rooms with canned emotions; in the society of the nuclear family and the insatiable computer, where real death and illness and old age are as deftly hidden as possible, people not only "lose touch" but lose the sense and consolation of physical touch.

 

A good side of our age is its willingness to accept the fact that there is a threshold of isolation in the individual life beyond which the estranged or grieving self must call out for counsel or comradeship. Hence the appearance of sensitivity groups, T-groups, encounter weekends, Primal Therapy sessions where adults may regain both the ecstasy of actually being touched by others, and the therapy of being able to bring into the open among hopefully sympathetic companions, old traumatic wounds and crippling or inhibiting hangups.

In North America there is a continent-wide network of therapy groups, producing finally the scenario so vividly described by Jane Howard in the pages of Please Touch. Jane Howard did more than simply visit representative groups practising celebrated techniques and interview their high priests. She often participated in the exercises, and cogently described her personal reactions as an experimental subject.

Those who do read Please Touch may, however, be struck by the impression that there is little room for older adults in sensitivity and release sessions. Is it widely supposed that there is a cut-off point on the life journey, say age 60, where it no longer matters whether people are sensitized or not? That perhaps-as it is said in law enforcement circles that elderly criminals are rare-so also the therapy world of Please Touch is for the young, the aggressive careerists not yet past early middle age, and the affluent couples whose marriages are falling apart or who are simply bored to death? Many advertisements of encounter groups across the continent specify age: not over 45, interested people 20 to 40, and so on. What is the rationale here? That older adults lack funds? That they lack the energy? That they are "past all that"?

There is another explanation. Some encounter experiences can be demanding and abrasive. Organizers of the groups, in addition to fearing that the gap between youngest and oldest may be too great, may also have a conception of later adults as too conservative, too rigid, and too respectable to be good subjects for the demands (in some cases, actual rigors and grotesqueries) of the encounter situations. At all events, few older adults appear, least of all the ill and the impoverished.

Yet a frequent phenomenon among people from their mid-50s on, and notably in their 70s and older, is that like Gide they feel themselves to be far younger than their years. The 80-year-old widow of a famous American judge whom I once met in Vancouver felt herself to be inwardly as young as when she was a girl at college; small and slight, even physically she showed much of the joie de vivre of a far younger woman. And a Canadian woman, Olive MacKay Petersen, writing about her reactions to her age in the Toronto Globe and Mail states, "I turned 65 last year --and on a good day feel about 25." Thus in spirit and mind many older adults are equipped to respond to the best of the

sensitivity groups.

In addition, there are great numbers of men and women in their later years who have carried all their lives secret fears and feelings of sorrow and guilt. Simply because they are now 65 or 75 or older does not mean that these feelings have got up and gone away. Of course in many cases they have been assuaged or compensated for, or in some instances actually outlived-but many in the later years are suffering from personal deficits, anxieties, and open wounds. And what about the large company described by Erikson who end their lives in "disgust and despair"? They are surely as entitled to the consolations and support of touch therapy and transactional empathy as the anxious and disquieted young. It is hard to deny that for many older adults the techniques of some of the encounter groups might indeed be distasteful or ineffective-perhaps injurious. Many, however, would thrive and grow with them.

The later years also offer another exciting potentiality --the possibility of participating on one- of the new frontiers of experimentation with the beneficent effect of brain waves-what Maya Pines well calls the "beautiful world" of bio-feedback.1 Pines documents the advances made in the study of the rhythm of our brain waves: the discoveries that not only mental but also physical states may be transformed by the individual's learning to recognize under guidance the varying waves of the brain --called alpha, beta, theta, and delta-and to employ his or her concentration in such a way as to obtain therapeutic benefits from the alpha states; also to generate from the low-alpha or theta rhythms the kind of reverie that often delivers breakthroughs and production.

The extraordinary Swami Rama, a noted yogi from India who astonished the experimenters at the Menninger Foundation by being able in effect to stop his heart (that is, to create a beat so rapid that it could no longer pump blood) for 17 seconds, was 45, and approaching the Ulyssean gates. Scientists like Neal Miller, Barbara Brown, Joe Kamiya, and Elmer and Alyce Green have no inhibitions about the age of their subjects. As is so often the case, it is the self-image that older adults have of themselves, and nothing else, that admits or bars them to the new and beautiful worlds of transcendental meditation, touch therapies, and bio-feedback.

Many men and women whose image of themselves lowers their confidence and joy of living can find new pride and happiness even in very late years by improving body and spirit. Programs such as those sponsored by the SAGE organization (Senior Actualization and Growth Explorations) and those of the TELOS Group in Bellevue, Washington, introduce adults over 60 to the wonderful worlds of body rhythm, musical exercises, self-awareness "games," and mind healing. Marie Paulyn's Stepping Stones Centre where adults feeling at the end of their tether can be renewed through sauna, voluntary exercises, massage, meditation, delicious but healthful diet, and nonintrusive group companionship, is still another example of resources for renewal.

There is clearly a need for the development of new kinds of groups in which older adults can talk out their deeper fears and anxieties and find the therapy for remorse that is sometimes provided among sympathetic companions-companions, moreover, whose role in the sessions is that of peers, not gods or high priests. How these newer-style groups might come into being, and what their processes might be, would be excellent target questions for mind-storming among enclaves of interested older adults. One approach would be to use E. L. Thorndike's questionnaire on the learning and unlearning of attitudes among adults for the initial thrust.

Obviously, Ulyssean voyages can be. undertaken not only in the physical world but in the inner world of the self. Once again, in a number of currently popular cults, the attention is focused on the young. Yet in large cities, at least, many opportunities exist for older adults to find their horizons widening through exploration of mystic lore derived from man's ancient encounters with the mysteries of the universe. Nor does this fresh search for old and new wisdom necessarily require abandonment of your own long-held faith (a common fear).

Two hungers are typical of many older adults who give serious thought to what their whole life has been about. One hunger is the desire to know more about the supernatural world, or even to establish once and for all whether it exists. Usually they look in vain to the orthodox religions for illumination or certainty in this field. Many conventional clergy are very quiet or evasive about it, because they themselves are doubtful or insecure. Some adopt exaggerated social concerns as a substitute for faith in supernatural things.

The second hunger is for the availability of every power that will aid the feeling of integration of the self. that you are a unique being, spiritual as well as physical, and-in spite of the terrible enigma of unexplainable evil-part of an essentially harmonious universe. The healing power, therefore, of meditative religions, yoga, and beneficent occult studies can be very great. Orthodox religions have beautiful things to contribute to those willing to make the real effort to grasp them.* However, in the meditative and occult groups at their best the seeker can find a beauty drawn from the universe, its winds, stars, and flowers which can enrich and help integrate the self; the best of the white occult is one example. If older men and women find all these stimuli and consolations in orthodox religions alone, or in humanism or atheism alone, well and good; but if not, why do so few investigate the potentialities of the less conventional faiths and philosophies? To do so is to engage in a Ulyssean adventure, although your may not travel more than 15 miles from your home. On the other hand, the search may take you late in life across continents and seas, among strange peoples and to distant cities you never dreamed to see except in fantasy.

There is another way, often neglected, to explore and actualize the unique inner self. This is through the medium of the personal journal, The most typical record book of our society is probably the office calendar-certainly it is the most prestigious. Here are entered the hundreds, finally thousands, of interview engagements, luncheons,

*The churches are already contributing to the new field of successful aging through such organizations as the ecumenical Canadian Institute for Religion and Gerontology founded by the remarkable Ulyssean nun, Sister St. Michael Guinan, and the international society Opera Pieta founded by Monsignor Alcido da Filippo, representative of the Holy See at the United Nations committee meetings, and other supports and impediments of the busy executive. "Impediments," because often in his 50s or early 60s he feels the weight upon him of a succession of days already given away to innumerable meetings, however seemingly important; "supports," because so long as the office calendar is filled, he can feel that his existence is justified. It is a testimonial of his identity.

 

 

*Robert Munroe, a California businessman who is also a serious student of psychic phenomena, and author of,7ourneys Out of the Body, has helped prepare a number of dying people for the next stage of their cosmic journey. Indeed, why not?

 

Many women, and some men, keep a diary of events attended, items bought, and other daily happenings, usually recorded in skeleton form. The value of this is obvious-not least for later years when you can check back to revive memories or ascertain when certain personal things occurred. Even so meager a record helps to break the gray anonymity of days that otherwise stream past, soon lost in limbo. Even if you keep a personal journal, there is merit in reserving the very top of the page for jotting down succinctly the day's events.

But nothing can equal or replace the personal journal as the sphere of action for a special kind of Ulyssean journey-the continuing quest of the self, seen in the light of events experienced and books and people encountered. The journal is the record of one's reactions to life and to the fascinating thrust and play of the self. As such, it involves both mind and emotions; and it is usually written in the illusion or with the profession that no one is going to read the entries except oneself. For exactly these reasons, the journals of the very young-mid-adolescents, for example-are usually tiresome to read on the rare occasions when they are made available. They are important documents for insight into the writer and, of course, for his or her insight into the self However, the emotions are usually too heavy and melodramatic for older adult readers (usually yourself, years later!), and the words are too self-conscious and postured.

These are not usually the faults of personal journals kept by adults in their later years. Why, therefore, has the journal as an art form had so little attention in North America and so much in England and Europe? One obvious answer may be that in older cultures mature men and women have learned to look inwardly into their reactions to life much more than have adults in a largely externalized, volatile society. At all events, it is so-but it need not always be so.

In the office calendar, the personal self never enters at all: "At 3 P.M. Mr. Herbert Cloke, National Elevator Company"-what does this tell 'us later about Mr. Cloke or the person who is going to interview him?

The little daily diary of events does better, a good deal better:

May 14, 1981 (Thursday).

Got up at 8 A.M.

Cleaned house, had coffee with Mary.

3 P.M. Paid plumber for fixing drain ($15).

Mary picking up Bobby at school.

I stayed in with the baby and Bobby at night, and reread The French

Lieutenant's Woman, by John Fowles. Baby fretful (caught cold Sun

day?).

To bed at 11 p.m. Must check on supplementary pension cheque tomorrow.

This clears away the gray anonymity of the days, but it provides little insight into the interesting, and often enchanting, journey of the self. The personal journal is light years in advance of this, and I give a fictional example: (a brief summary of the day's events has already been listed in the upper right-hand margin of the journal):

Tuesday, August 25, 1981. A beautiful morning. Sky banked with clouds, light sweet wind. I went for a stroll in the fields behind the house. Startled a snake which went gliding off down the path and into the. deep grass. Also startled me. How can a 60year-old-man and a veteran of 40 air missions over Europe still be chilled by a harmless snake? Where did this fear come from? Mother, perhaps: she also feared insects. No, --both parents. Can you unlearn a fear of snakes? At the campus in the city last week, a notice up inviting "adult subjects" to volunteer for a course on getting rid of fear of water, reptiles, etc.

At suppertime, delegation from the town to ask me to run for mayor. I offered coffee and said No. They pressed pretty hard-they are dear people, and hard to refuse; I reminded them that I had twice before run for mayor and been defeated, admittedly by narrow margins. Marge Kelly said, "Mark, everybody loves you but everybody doesn't vote for you," and Doug Ogilvie said, "You're our Adlai Stevenson."

Picked up at random after supper O'Connor's book on the sinking of the Titanic (Down to Eternity). Wonderful things turn up: like the bravery of the 50 young bellboys and messengers who spent the last hours "joking with the passengers, with that sparrow-like impudence of the young Cockney." Not one of them tried to get into the lifeboats. Likewise, the members of the ship's band. Marvelous quality of the so-called "little" people. And the so-called "great"?

Near midnight I turn on the FM. Surprised by a flute concerto by Mozart. The solo flute is about at the bottom of my list, still I listen spellbound. I wonder, is the flute the oldest of wind instruments? shepherd boy on Greek hill, etc.? Feel as always how quiet the house is. It is almost a year. Somehow the flute concerto keeps returning to my mind, and also that group of people from town. A sort of festival?

It is so late. I will look at this in the 'morning.

This entry has a number of the qualities of the personal journal: in sight, reporting to oneself, restrained emotion, the birth of creative ideas. Typical of many journal entries is the switch to the present tense at some point in the entry, sometimes through the whole entry-it has the advantage of bringing an episode back more intensely. Aside from all its other advantages, the personal journal can provide a sustained dialogue for many older adults who feel that they can never seem to find anyone with whom to exchange their many reflections.

One objection to keeping such a journal may be that it takes too much time. "I'm just too busy." But "too busy" doing what? Alan Lekein urges all of us to analyze our use of time-watch ourselves for a week, for example. The journal entry above might take the writer about three-quarters of an hour, far less than a situation comedy program on TV; and whereas the program leaves those who watch with a rather flat feeling of temporary risibility, the journal provides an experience in reflection, imagination, and the intimate sense of one's own life. Another objection may be that a journal entry like the foregoing is too close to a literary exercise, although presumably it would be natural enough to many well-read adults. But in any case, the personal journal still functions well on a simpler level:

Saturday, June 13, 1981. Not knowing what else to do today, I cleaned my room, and went out to the Zoo in the park. It was cloudy but it didn't rain, and afterward the sun came out. I've been going to the Zoo off and on for years, and then today I had a funny reaction.

I was watching the children looking in at the cages and pits and then running away laughing and shouting, and suddenly it didn't seem to me right that animals should be closed up all the time like that, and everybody else should be free. I actually wondered if it meant anything to the animals that the children could run and jump and be free. I think I would rather go to a safari park such as they write about in the weekend paper where at least the animals can run free. Maybe I know something about being in a cage, when I think of it. Still I can go free in a way they can't.

I loved the children today. I love them anyway. I don't mind their noise --I wouldn't want to be isolated from them. I was thinking this afternoon, my grandmother never seemed to like children. We were always kept in corners, etc. I wonder why she was like that? Something in her own childhood, perhaps?

At 5 P.M. I found a new little teahouse two blocks over near the subway stop. They have Twinings Tea-Earl Grey tea! And not very expensive, and the service is so friendly and nice. I haven't much, but I have enough to be able to go a couple times a week to that teashop. For the company. And the tea. Also, of course, I can buy some Twinings tea bags, when I think of it, and invite in two or three women here who've probably never heard of it.

I have two books here from the library. One I can't read-a story with characters that could never live on land or sea. I don't often pick lemons like that. But the other one I can hardly put down. It's about a women in her 70s who makes economy trips all over the world. I don't exactly envy her, still I would like to do it. You never can tell. Anyway, I realize today that I've been overlooking the big travel section. One of the girls said to me today, "If you can't go to the world, you can bring the world to you." She tells me they have free travel movies every Wednesday night, and why don't I come? Maybe I will.

When we are feeling tired or flat, we may be stimulated in making journal entries by a few questions kept at hand. For example: How did I react to the weather today? Has it been, all in all, a "great" day, "ordinary" day, "dead loss" day --and why? Who was the most interesting person I met today (or this week)? What was the most interesting conversation I had today (or this week)? What was the most interesting dream or fantasy? What was the item in the papers or magazines, or on TV or radio, that most widened my horizons? What book, film, or play most intrigued, informed, and moved me? What was my most frustrating experience today (this week)? When did I feel myself to be most real today? (I am indebted to June O'Reilly for adapting these questions from my self-actualization seminars for use in journal-keeping.)

A little book and pens, costing altogether five to ten dollars a year, does not seem too high a toll to pay for the entrance to what may become across the later years a personal Ulyssean journey, freshening your mind, reinforcing and illuminating your identity, helping heal and integrate the self, and stimulating creativity in your later years.

An excellent way to enter the Ulyssean life in later adulthood is to become devoted, even passionately committed, to social causes. Even Simone de Beauvoir sees light pouring from and around such social crusaders as Voltaire, Zola, and Bertrand Russell. Few older adults are placed in the limelight of history as these Ulyssean figures were; but scaling down the dimension of the enterprise in no way weakens its power for the person whose mind-and spirit have been captivated by what he conceives to be a first-rate cause. However, to produce rich benefits for the self, the commitment must be real. It must not be a flight from the self by a feverish round of activity, but a stimulating investment of heart and mind in promoting or supporting human causes-with comrades or alone. Of course a later life of social commitment need not exclude journal-keeping or the quiet seeking of inner self-journeys.

What the true exercise does is to enrich the self by experiences in social comradeship, which help to teach it new insights while also testing the strength and variety of its inner resources. And all too few older adults do this. Where are all the people, especially age 65-plus, wen enough equipped with time, money, and health-where are they in the ranks of the adults in our society who are pitting often slender resources against what they conceive to be the powers of darkness?

Causes come in little packages and big packages, in permanent exercises and temporary exercises. A permanent exercise, for example, is standing watch on the kind of soulless developer who will conduct an endless King Kong expedition through still-undestroyed inner-city areas unless someone stands up to him. A temporary exercise might be mobilizing public opinion in one of the frequent cases where lockedtogether groups of management and union disputants callously expose whole populations to the discomforts of stalled transportation systems, immobilized hospitals, reeking jungles of garbage, and undelivered mail.

Situations like these call for pressure groups, confrontations, representations through newspapers, radio, and television outlets, and similar techniques. The antagonists have their rights and needs; so has the public; so --very much so-have the older adults. How is it possible for a transit strike, for example, to freeze the public arteries of a great city ,for a month and, in effect, imprison great numbers of elderly people who have no cars within the tiny orbits of their normal walking range-and for days to pass with no letters of protest, no telegrams, no blocked switchboards at municipal and other government offices or corporation or union headquarters?

"But I keep informed." Many older men and women take a certain pride in the fact that they are well informed about the issues and crises of the day, including those occurring in their midst-and this is a just pride. It is important for anyone who has some thought of being actualized by outside human events to read the newspapers regularly; also to evaluate issues, tune in to press conferences and issues-and-answers programs, and monitor live telecasts and broadcasts of controversial events. Useful, too, to make telephone calls to informed or, even better, uninformed friends about these crises and issues.

It is important-but it is not really a Ulyssean exercise. The Ulyssean adult is the one who, like the Toronto architect Eric Arthur at the age of 70, sets up a hue and cry about some encroachment on human rights that otherwise will go by unnoticed-in some cases hardly noticed by the encroachers themselves. Arthur organized vigorous opposition to the development plans of a giant merchandising firm that would have destroyed the historic and still-beautiful Old City Hall of Toronto. In nearly all great cities there are now groups that keep watch over the historical heritage and beauty of the city. Other groups-all of them low in funds and membership-try to keep a city's or county's conscience awake to the need to guard against unnecessary destruction of homes. There is a whole domain of good development, but still ad hoc groups are needed to protect a lake, a park, a settlement of cottages, a street, or a whole neighborhood or area.

Few of these active groups seem to include older adults. Incredibly enough, even the desperately needed movement to reform the scandalous conditions in many nursing homes throughout North America has enlisted little active support from the huge population of older adults. Passive support? "I keep informed"? What can passive support accomplish?

The most searing book, and a deeply moving one, about the neglect of the friendless and helpless old in North America, Nobody Ever Died of Old Age, was published in 1970 by a young American woman, aged 32. Likewise, Josephine Lawrence was in her 30s in 1934 when she wrote the powerful and heartbreaking novel, Years Are So Long, describing the desolation of an elderly couple who thought they could depend on their family. Jan de Hartog was middle-aged (about 50) when in 1964 he wrote Ho*tal, one of the most chilling documentary accounts ever written, about the terrifying conditions in a huge municipal hospital for blacks and poor whites, many of them old people, in Texas. De Hartog was inspired to write the book by his experience as a volunteer hospital assistant while he and his wife were on a visit to Texas. It was not even their country! And still, millions of older adults listen nightly to vapid remarks passing for humor from television talkshow guests about all those oil-rich Texans.

Where is everybody? It is not just Texas-Texas is no worse and no better than anywhere else: it is the human condition, the outcry of the needs of all the world. "My life has been governed," said Bertrand Russell in his 80s, "by ... an unbearable pity for the sufferings of mankind." Yet, as already indicated, Russell brought joy wherever he went. In the process of losing himself in causes he found himself more and more. Beauvoir tells with obvious pleasure of the aged and infirm Voltaire, routing himself out of his comfortable chateau where he still enjoyed the varied delights of love, to go great distances in bone-shaking coaches, and insistently pestering the king of France until a terrible wrong to a young man had been righted. Is it a coincidence that everyone speaks of Voltaire's joyousness of spirit in his old age?

The point here is the self-actualizing power of the enterprises, not the exploits themselves. The size of the enterprise is immaterial, so long as the involvement of the person concerned is one of devotion, of losing-one's-self in participation, which in turn enriches and further activates the self and establishes around it the continuing climate of creativity. Almost nothing can hinder older men and women from engaging in some kind of active role in meeting human needs or preserving beauty except actual physical immobilization, and often not even that. One immobilized man, then 76, proved this to me by dictating letters to the newspapers which were published from time to time and were full of good sense, wit, and some creative ideas.

To run for political office after, say, age 60 can be a big and authentic Ulyssean adventure. Fewer and fewer older adults seem to do it, partly because of the expense, which can be high; but more because there is an evident trend in North America toward the nomination of younger candidates. The real problem is the silent disqualification of themselves by men and women 60,70, and older because, as usual, though perhaps splendidly qualified, they think of themselves as "too old". Why too old? -if they are physically vigorous, mentally alert, rich with experience, open to new ideas, and devoted to the good of community or nation?

A congenial arena for older Ulysseans to enter is municipal government. Perhaps this is largely due to the absence of party machinery and power cliques. Local or regional communities are natural stages for the nonpartisan man or woman. At all events, in city and county and village councils, older adults who have the energy and guts to do so frequently become mayors, controllers, aldermen, and councillors. (I speak chiefly here of Canada. Gus Harris, 73, mayor of Scarborough, Ontario, is a good example.)

Much more of this could be true of provincial, state, and federal politics if later-age adults had more faith in themselves. These political arenas need more models of attractive, well-performing, dedicated older adults. And this may indeed ensue as the political "clout" of the 60-plus group increases with the shift in population figures. Meanwhile, at the very least, older adults can do what the splendid Canadian Ulyssean, Dr. Hans Blumenthal, recently did, when in 1979, at age 84, he ran as his own man in the Canadian federal election because he believed enough in his principles to do so. He garnered a very small vote (his cause was control over nuclear arms) but he found an excellent way of spreading his ideas; he also gave a fine model of a vigorous, intelligent, dedicated citizen in his 80s, meeting people at parties, gatherings, and at their doorsteps, and speaking on radio and TV. With a major party behind him, it is safe to say that he might have won. His performance made his age irrelevant.*

 

*A charming Press Gallery story tells of a candidate in a backwoods constituency who was accused by his opponent of being a sexagenarian. He could not deny ifl-and lost, thus reinforcing one of two wrong stereotypes about age, morals, and politics.

 

For many adults, not politics "as such" but "passionate causes" become their concern-that is, human causes where personal emotion fortifies that commitment. Three useful examples, among many options, are Amnesty International, Civil Liberties, and movements to reduce the cruelty of world hunger and medical deprivation. Such causes evidently arouse little more than mild or nominal commitment from most adults, although even this is a gain. They periodically arouse personal anger in the minority of committed Ulyssean people. Perhaps this arousal of anger is one reason why such great causes have so few backers from the passive armies of middle and later adults. Many people fear anger-fear their own even more than others'! Anger, after all, is a powerful emotion. "What will people think if I seem too emotional?" etc.

Yet anger can be a cleansing and self-actualizing emotion. I refer here, so to speak, to the "big" angers, but there are also hundreds of justifiable little angers, such as that of Artur Rubinstein when he arrived late and chilled one night in Montreal after some abominable mismanagements in plane schedules. The pianist, who was 87 at the time, ,remarked heatedly to the music critic Jacob Siskind that "the amazing thing is that no one complained. People just accept these things without protesting. I was furious . . . You can quote me. They the airline personnel are liars. They have no right to treat people in such cavalier fashion!" Siskind reported that Rubinstein's face was slightly flushed by the excitement; but then he had got it off his chest, and "soon we were back to the Old Rubinstein."

Anger is therapeutic when used like this; bitterness and frustrating cynicism are not. It can channel off tensions and self-pity; explode frustrations; bring a certain glow to body and spirit; and promote the zest for life and the active rather than reactive attitude toward the human scene out of which creativity can be born.

The symbol of people creatively involved in social causes in their later years is not that of the woman of whom it was said that "she went through life asking for the manager." On the contrary, it is the happy warrior, whose spirit and thrust the years have not weakened.

Another form of "social cause" is individual service to others in need. Many large cities in North America now have "volunteer bureaus" where men and women who choose to do so can find many avenues to service. The process of enrolling is simple. You go to a central office (where you will be warmly welcomed), and are invited to select from a very large circular file of people in need of the special contribution you want to make: read to a blind person? Visit a lonely shut-in? Drive a "meals-on-wheels" car? Act as a foster grandparent? Teach a skill to a group of older (or younger) people? The opportunities seem endless because the offers to help never match the needs.

To follow the Ulyssean way is to accept the reality of change, not to accept all change passively and reactively, but to negotiate it imaginatively and dynamically for yourself and your society, and to create change.

There are hundreds of ways, small and large, of breaking the cast of routines that otherwise gradually hardens about one until the drying process has desiccated vision, originality, spontaneous responses, and the reflexes of change. Even physical posture and style of dress begin to reflect the aridity of old ideas. For example, elderly men who invariably choose drab colors, dispiriting suits, and squarely placed hats to match funereal faces betray their rigidity of response. If, as is usually the case, these physically dried-out and mournful attributes are accompanied by moribund attitudes toward the self and life, then potential creativity dies. Better by far to put on a colorful pullover, buy a beret (cheaper than a hat), pick up an outrageous paperback, and go out to a caf6 to sip the espresso coffee or the capuccino never tasted in all one's 53 or 75 years. Better to haunt for an hour or two each week the gourmet section of a supermarket and try out Burgundy snails and octopus.

Not many of us follow Colette and turn a dignified procession through a garden into a child's excursion, breaking and smelling petals, tasting and crumbling, stroking the backs of inquisitive insects-but we are the losers. Better, instead of endlessly deploring marijuana from reading about it in the newspapers, and listening to "informed opinions" on the radio and television, to talk with young people who have actually smoked it or, if opportunity offers, smoke a marijuana cigarette oneself. If you have never in your whole abstaining life allowed alcohol to pass your lips, drink a glass or two of wine; if you enjoy wine and for years have castigated abstainers as living drab lives, try going without for two Weeks to see if any joy remains in life. Better-to quote one of the most perceptive men I have known, Kenneth Norris-to break the unvarying routine of moderation by doing something too much: "Once in a while eat too much, drink too much, love too much, spend too much, play too much. . Everything in moderation," said Oscar Wilde, "even moderation."

What holds us back from the small creative adventures that, as they multiply, fill life with a certain verve, small exhilarations that build the climate for larger odysseys? The self-image of what we think we ought to be and ought to do. Men and women who would not now hesitate to attend a Billy Graham rally for interest's sake, because that has long since become a respectable enterprise, will not set foot inside a local Buddhist temple or attend an open and introductory session on yoga or transcendental meditation-not because they are not interested, even fascinated (they have "read a lot about it" -but because it is too heterodox for their idea of what older adults ought to do,

Little evidence exists as to whether adults in their 50s, 60s, and later years can successfully learn to play an instrument. The actor Barry Fitzgerald learned to play the organ at 53, but then organs have some sort of sanctified connection with The Messiah, hard-working church choirs, and Easter services. It may be that numbers of adults in the 50plus years have mastered the guitar and the accordion, but if so we never hear of it. Yet even limited mastery induces growth and generates energy in the whole self.

Arthur Ingham of Niagara Falls took up golf when he was about 75, surely a rather rare phenomenon; and other features of his late life were strong indications of a self-actualizing personality. Thus, Ingham was not only still driving at 91, but the car he chose was a red convertible runabout, a dashing choice for an "old gentleman." When he was 90 he went on a two-month cruise to Fiji, New Zealand, Australia, Manila, Hong Kong, Guam, and Singapore. Jack Marks, who interviewed Ingham, observed that he was "chipper and cheery, walking sprightly and swiftly. He talks and acts the same way."

The study of another language and its culture can throw open windows of the mind to a whole flood of new concepts and knowledge. Andrd Gide never mastered Latin, yet he was working happily at it the day he died at 8 1: the process helped keep him young, and filled part of his days with pleasure. Yet few older adults commence language study, although perhaps the problem here is the lack of a powerful motive and lack of confidence.

The extent to which older adults can learn another language after 40 if they set their minds to it is shown by a preliminary study (1975) of the performance of a large sample of 862 men and women who took the Canadian civil service training programs in learning French. The study, by Thérese Sibiga and associates, shows that about 30 percent of students age 50 and over obtained A or B standing; as against about 33 percent of those 40 to 49; about 42 percent for those 30 to 39; and 42 percent for those 20 to 29. It is a fact that in achievement of A standing alone the two younger categories clearly outstripped the students 40 and over, but not in the B classification.2

One of the best, and neglected, reasons for studying a language in later years is that the study itself stimulates mind and imagination. Besides, knowing the Ulysseans, one can just conceive of a few of them setting out to show that experimental new methods of learning a language may be efficient. As volunteers, and with little to lose, these pioneers could, for example, undertake studies under the so-called Lazonov or suggestology technique, based on the theory of suggestion, devised by Georgi Lazonov of the Institute of Suggestology and Parapsychology at Sofia. Lazonov contended in a series of lectures given at universities throughout the United States and Canada in 1971 and 1975 that adults could become proficient in, say, French or English as a second language in a matter of 20 days. Lazonov's interest in the subject came out of his training and practice in psychiatry. The method was born from his own experiences in psychotherapy, and does not employ hypnosis.

Three of Lazonov's dicta relate to the whole subject of the fears that hold adults back from new adventures in languages, and other fields of learning. With this technique, he claims, "no longer is a person limited by believing that learning is unpleasant; that what he learns today he will forget tomorrow; that learning deteriorates with age." (Lazonov himself is now 54.) And he adds: "The whole of life is learning-not only in school. I believe that developing this high motivation-which comes through the technique-can be of the greatest importance to humanity." For an older adult to volunteer for language learning under this technique would be a small but immensely valuable Ulyssean act. Even more so would be to hazard a second career by becoming a teacher in the technique, trained in the Sofia institute.

The way in which explorations of a more self-creative lifestyle frequently lead on to superb Ulyssean adventures is also exciting. For example, a professional man, a 67-year-old widower, "adopts" a young Greek boy under the Foster Parents Plan. His connection with the lad, which will be officially terminated when the boy reaches 16, is maintained by occasional visits to Greece. In the course of their nine-year relationship, the foster father becomes deeply interested in modem Greek culture, especially the language and the music: he learns Greek moderately well and develops a deep affection for the bouzouki. He also visits the Greek Islands every other year. Finally, as the years pass, he becomes deeply interested in Ulysses and in the modem locations of the voyages, and proficient enough in the subject to be invited to lecture on it in summer courses.

Two women, a nurse and a teacher, both in their late 50s, and friends for several years, decide to give up motoring for cycling, partly as a result of new convictions about the automobile as an environmental pollutant. They take an extension course at a community college in the efficient handling and maintenance of bikes, and thus meet two or three people devoted to hosteling as a way of travel life. The two women become keen hostelers -they had always supposed that hostels were only for very young people. In the course of time, their interest in both travel by bike and hosteling takes them through Europe, and to international meetings of hostelers at Stockholm, Paris, Vienna, and Rome. And they become the co-authors of a useful guidebook on hosteling for older adults.

A 61-year-old bachelor taxi driver in Syracuse, New York, living a lonely life in a rooming-house, has had a very limited education. Quite late in life, however, he develops two passions: to listen as often as possible to experts on the radio and at library extension meetings talking on all kinds of subjects, and to listen to folk music --an interest roused by coming to know a Yugoslavian woman at his rooming-house who belongs to a folk-dancing group. He also develops a Eking for ballet music and for Schubert and Dvorak. Concertos begin to fascinate him, first because the solo players seem to him comparable to the great lonely heroes of certain sports-then their music captivates him. He has saved a good deal of money, but he has no special interest in business; he is limited in manners and in the use of English. This has contributed to his loneliness; only a few perceptive people see his quality. He decides to take two months off every summer and visit the great music festivals and centres in North America. He begins what develops into a series of annual odysseys driving to many musical events in different parts of the country. When I met him he was developing a package of creative plans to stimulate interest in classical music among elderly people and meet their needs through cheaper and more accessible festivals.

The role of the will in later-life creativeness is paramount.3 However, the will does not alone produce the way. The word "will" is defined as: "energy of intention"; not merely the intentions that traditionally pave the roads to both heaven and hell, but the energy to enforce the intention, to transform it into action. Physical energy is exactly the commodity that seems to be in diminishing supply among many older adults. Some commentators on the productivity of creative people attribute their later failure to produce, not to incapacity of mind and talent, but to increasing deficits of will and physical energy. But the greater factor may be loss of psychic energy: caused by the ever deepening and darkening sense that one has become locked into unchangeable ways, or, in the words of Shakespeare's Richard II, "I wasted time, and now doth time waste me." Lack of confidence: this is almost the summation of the matter.

How is the older adult to break free from the immobilizing encirclement of these blocking forces: increasing physical inertia, psychic despair, and failure of nerve and confidence? The answers are not easy, because each individual self has its own complex personal history, often calling for the therapies of love and understanding; for the therapy of individual self-forgiveness; and occasionally for the therapy of extraordinarily sensitive psychoanalysis. Nonetheless, later adults can take important decisions and actions that win help them re-establish or maintain and expand their creative powers.

The first act is one of acceptance. This means not to mourn the past fruitlessly, not to sit immobilized by thoughts of how one is situated on entering the last years of fife. Rather: greet the day lovingly, and live its precious hours as though yesterday's sorrows and tomorrow's hazards were what they mostly are-chimeras luring us from the day-byday actualization of the self.

The second act is one of recognition, the acknowledgment that high potentiality remains to human beings in later life.

"But how do I start to live the creative and Ulyssean life after years of passiveness, or while in the throes of terrible self-doubts about being able to carry through?" The answer, strange though it may seem, is not unlike the first actions to set in order a disordered and dust-laden house. However, you must start where you are, in a relaxed mood of friendship with your self and with acceptance of the human comedy of which we are all a part, and begin with some simple action of clearing and remaking. It is a holy moment: "the journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step."

So simple an action as reaching for a dictionary can be the start-the dictionary that may have sat neglected for many months, even years, except for sporadic and hurried uses. Language is the stimulator of thought, and is an important channel to creativity. "Language," Peter Abelard insisted, "is generated by the intellect, and it generates intellect." In the mysterious process known to writers, thoughts are many times clearly summoned by some evocative or nostalgic word, some image-making or image-summoning word. All good writers are vocabulary builders; they have learned how traffic flows from words to concepts and images, and back again. They have also learned how to throw English vocabulary into new combinations that are not only delightful but idea-making. The same processes work to awaken the powers of older adults who are not writers at all-simply intelligent readers and seekers.

Vocabulary building is one of the least expensive and most stimulating of sports. Dictionaries provide wonderful opportuni ties for detective work on the derivations of words we have used without thought all our lives. Also, a considerable number of delightful paperback books are available such as Maxwell Nurnberg's Word Play, which uses dozens of games not only to tease and test adult readers but also to delight and educate them well-to make them grow. A deeper book and no less entertaining is Nurnberg's and Morris Rosenblum's All About Words; and all the paperbacks of Norman Lewis are energizing and growth-producing.

Every so often in stations, libraries, office waiting rooms, or even on subway trains, the crossword puzzle addict can be seen totally absorbed in the latest teaser. At its best, this is an admirable exercise, and if somewhere some ancient man or woman has fallen into what is euphemistically known as their "last sleep" while trying to find words to fit blanks, it will have been a worthy final curtain. This exercise has some resemblance to the creative process: problem-solving, the mental quest, some limited but real imaginative leaping. The game should, however, lead on to the richer personal arena described above: the enchanting search to enliven and enrich one's vocabulary, and through new words to open windows to new concepts.

Hundreds of little odysseys, any one of which may become a larger one, present themselves to the older man or woman who adopts an attitude of curiosity to the great world.4 Clipping items of unusual interest from the pages of the newspaper remote from the tiresome cavalcade of front-page events can be a vital exercise. In time, and with a lively will, some of these items can be collated steadily into new worlds of interest and inquiry, even of expertise. But why do we confine ourselves to one or two local newspapers and perhaps two or three familiar magazines, when we can explore new worlds in papers and journals published in far-off places? Consider a fascinating newspaper like the Straits Times or the Bangkok Post, bringing packets of news often exotic to North Americans and keeping the imagination supple and alive. Older adults also should break the pattern of their walks, of their drives, of their weekend excursions by bus or foot. Of course, thousands more should bicycle again, try hosteling even on a small scale, find a way of going by boat along a network of canals, make new coastal steamer trips, climb in the summer and rest on the sides of mountains or hills that have been within easy reach of life and limbs for unused years.*

What is needed is a new set: the "set" which demands that you put a quota on the destructive indulgence of tired drifting of thoughts, or of nostalgic sorrow for the dead days beyond recall, and of resigned refuge in the routine. To experience recurrent periods of sadness is only proof that you have, depth as a human being. It is beautiful to light candles in hospitable churches for people you love and have loved. Nor is a creative life nourished by a stagnant lifestyle. A terrifying phrase that has destroyed more creative impulses than any other is "if only, if only I had done (or not done). . . " To dwell upon missed opportunities is to blaspheme the Sacred Present, and to miss new opportunities to live creatively.. For example, there is something intensely moving and renewing in watching a younger middle-aged couple, as I have, who lost their only son, a handsome, laughing, brilliantly talented boy of 14, and a year later adopted a little deserted girl of two, naming her, significantly, Dawn.

Why do so few older adults become protectors and friends of desolate and deserted young people and children? Because older men and women have their own grandchildren? Is this a sufficient rationale for creative and compassionate people? And what of the several million reasonably well-off single adults-well enough off to have some money to spare-single by reason of choice or of death of a life partner? Is there no creative exercise by which they can match themselves with the millions of lonely young who also inwardly ache to resolve the enigma of personal isolation and alienation? I came to know an unmarried woman in her 70s whose love of young people takes the form of turning up at free concerts and plays, where attendance is often all too slight, and applauding and encouraging young musical performers and actors. "It's a great function," my own mother used to say, "to clap your hands for somebody else"-and this she did with loving interest and zest until her death at age 84. (This is what Robert Peck meant when he spoke of ego-transcendence in the later years.)

Thus the creative lifestyle for middle and later adulthood comes in power from looking life in the face, from acting, not simply mourning and brooding. But another important approach to gaining and increasing creativeness is to turn much of life and thought into problem seeking: not to be the eternal receiver, the droning echoer (which so many older adults become), but the active questioner, the zestful attacker of hundreds of riddles that life delivers to us, and the joyous redesigner of trite things and shapes.

A problem, the Concise Oxford Dictionary remarks mournfully, is a "doubtful or difficult question." For example, "how to prevent it is a problem," or "problem child (difficult to control, unruly)." How dour all this is! And how much this point of view is driven home to everyone in Western society by the thousands of solemn panels wrestling, unfortunately often all too fuzzily, with "social problems, family problems, business problems, health problems," and so on and so on. just at the end of its list of definitions, the Concise Oxford discovers the word "challenge": as, for example, "in chess." Then a different air enters, bracing, tonic-the air of creativity. Then problems become challenges to the applied imagination, and vivid contributors to the creative "set" of older adults.

To be specific: a small enclave of men and women, meeting to stimulate one another's creative zest and skills, can find enormous pleasure and motivation from such challenging exercises as these (those asterisked are drawn from Alex Osborn; the rest, except the first, are mine):

1 . List all the unusual uses you can think of for empty cardboard boxes. (Resist the temptation to simply keep filling the box!)

*2. Men's canes have gone out of style. What would you do to try to repopularize them?

*3. Name five practical inventions that the world could use to advantage that have not yet been invented.

4. If you were deeded $300,000 to open a new store or enterprise on the major commercial street nearest your home, on condition that it must present something uniquely creative among all the tired comme ial ideas-what three proposals could you make?

*5. List ten unexplored uses for Scotch Tape.

6. Think of three places commonly in use in the routine of one's progress through life that either stifle you with boredom or cause you vague feelings of dread, and describe how you would remove from them the curses of boredom and gloom.

  1. Your college-age son, interested in the occult, has persuaded you to provide housing for a few delegates to the witches' convention. How do you explain their presence to your son's no-nonsense, fabulously wealthy Presbyterian great-aunt who has simultaneously decided to honor you with her presence on the same weekend?

*8. Devise three ways to adapt an old snare drum to other uses.

*9. Describe the most annoying habit of a person close to you in work or in life. Think up six tactics to get that person to change that habit for the better.

10. Take two objects as bizarrely different as possible-for example, a wrench and a brown trout, and see how far you can draw from them analogiesy creative ideas, or new concepts filled with productivity for other beings or things.

11, "Your mind is like a parachute; it's no use unless it's open." To a similar result, complete the following: "Life is like a Bible; "; "Love is like a flying saucer;~-"; "Love is like Grandma's spectacles; (Creative exercise from the London Spectator.)

12. Describe an idea for a thoroughly new television show.

13. Suggest your choice of two, three, or four historical people whose meetings beyond time and space would create (a) bizarre, ludicrous, or comical conversation; (b) a highly creative situation.

14. How do you estimate another person's creativity? Write down your criteria.

15. What uses could be made of a silk top hat other than as a head covering?

Exercises like these are particularly successful in group meetings because members of the group can often hitch a ride on the ideas of others to produce additional ideas, and, of course, a certain creative excitement is generated by a mind-storming group. Individuals, however, working alone can also fitid immense pleasure and stimulus from these problems.

Ideas, as Alex Osborn says, are burning embers; judgment is cold water. There is a time and a place for judgments, but ideas must first have their day, and in the later years of adulthood, after most of us have spent a lifetime growing gray in the process of issuing and receiving judgments, usually the only hope we have that we can glow again with creativity is that we can now think of "problems" as challenging games, and then let our mind roam and play in the wonderful country of the unusual and the absurd.

Inevitably there are objections: good-humored, courteous, filled with good will, but objections nonetheless. Objection One: "Very interesting, no doubt, but I am a practical person. I'm not really interested in hypothetical situations." Response: But is there anything more practical really than nourishing and extending our creative powers? And do the routines of your practical life provide this? They do? Then yours is an exceptional case. The problem of many 60-year-olds, comments a brilliantly creative older adult, the editor Aron Mathieu, is that they already know from long experience that the thing can't be done. The 30year-old doesn't know it can't be done, and frequently does it. This, Mathieu, goes on, is what it means to become dated-that the practical man or woman, in later maturity, has stopped looking at the exotic, the off-beat, the simply different.

Objection Two: "But I'm quite an ordinary person who's lived an ordinary life. I haven't traveled much, seen much, read all that much. I'm just out of my depth." Response: If that is true, that is one of the situations that does seem to affect creative performance. Of course it helps to have filled one's mind with experiences that extend the reservoir of the unconscious: this is perhaps one application of Christ's parable of the talents. Still, the great world is all about us, waiting to be explored. To be human is to possess the potentiality of creativity, and an expert witness is that extraordinary Ulyssean who has spent most of his life among workers at docks and in casual labor, Eric Hoffer, the writer of The True Believer. Calvin Tomkins, in his portrait of Hoffer when he was about age 66, cites Hoffer's continual astonishment at the variety and originality of the many hundreds of laborers he worked among-men unknown to the world, usually uneducated in any extensive or higher academic sense.

Finally, and in complete reverse: Objection Three: "I understand and appreciate what you are talking about. However, I have made it a point for years to develop ways and means of keeping creative, and following up any further suggestions in my case would just be overloading the circuits." Response: Beautiful. However, perhaps you would take a few minutes to check this list of facilitating the creative process derived from this book and from other writers and creative people:

1 . Look at life with fresh wonderment, as though you were a child-and in fact, whenever possible, stay in the presence of young children and listen uncondescendingly and attentively to the cascades of original reactions and verbal expressions with which they color drab reality. Note some of them down: they evaporate like raindrops in the sun!

  1. Seek to generate new ideas by upsetting the neat, tired order of your thoughts and throwing them in temporary disarray so that new shapes and images may appear from the creative confusion. For example, mentally rearrange your local park at which you may have stood thousands of times waiting for the undeviating bus manned by the automaton driver.
  2. Read, view, and react with an active learning "set," to break the passivity that otherwise stifles new opportunities for learning. Keep at hand, unobtrusively but invariably, a notebook and pencil with which to record striking reactions, questions, later brief reflections.

4. Keep a notebook and pen beside your bed so that, when awake, you can enter fragments of poetry and dreams; ideas that arise unbidden from the unconscious mind, and which once lost may not reappear; and concepts and plans developed by the restless mind during periods of sleeplessness. This "idea trap" can serve both day and night.

5. Keep a journal not merely of events concisely noted, but of personal thoughts roused by certain books and films, by contacts with people who have stirred your curiosity, pity, admiration, amused anger, or whatever. Reflect in it that part of the cosmos which happens to have been reflected in the tiny comprehensive mirror of your own life. Simple or complex, well or not-very-well written, the entries bear the accumulating colors of your unique self-a life mosaic.

6. Pile up your fresh and strange ideas and points of view, good and bad, so that you may stimulate the practice of the free flow of ideas, and prove what is most certainly true-that continuously advancing years need by no means inhibit the creative potentiality of men and women. judgments-the choice of the best and most workable ideas --can come later.

7. Keep a changing list of everyday examples of the ways in which new situations or new products might be made out of different elements that are combined, adapted, or multiplied, magnified, and minified, put to other uses, eliminated, reversed, substituted. Do this as an exercise to keep the mind alert and tuned to change, and thus stimulate what Alex Osborn calls "applied imagination." Here are-a few samples to start you off-

Combine products and functions into new relationships: combine long and short lenses in bifocals; combine skis with small motorized vehicles to make snowmobiles; combine kitchen implements in a single tool; place stereo on city buses; switch land-based conferences to shipboard voyages; provide cocktail service on skates; combine a little library with a hotel bar; combine television, tapes, correspondence materials, tutors, seminars, libraries, and summer schools in a single extension service for adults; combine young singers and guitarists with the Catholic mass to form the folk Mass.

Adapt and substitute: place arbors and gardens inside otherwise sterile inner-city business skyscrapers; put the telephone to uses never seen in earlier years-for 24-hour distress centres, for inspirational messages, for long-distance small conference "round-ups", for wake-up services, for widely separated chess opponents; convert light bulbs to germicidal lamps; send audio and video tapes of seminars on new legal issues to thousands of lawyers throughout the United States; provide a diala-diagnosis network for isolated physicians; video-tape laboratory demonstrations and make them available on need to college students; use electric beams for supermarket doors.

Gain new uses by magnifying, miniMng, or multiplying products and functions: invent the jumbo jet (and advertise for staff trained in hotel administration); multiply benefits in insurance policies and doubling compensations, e.g., "double your money back"; produce handy miniatures of standard products: the tiny portable radio and tape-recorder, the telescoped umbrella, the TV dinner package (note that lists like this cite applied ideas only, without evaluating them!), miniature golf; and miniature time --- e.g. the three-minute sermon, the mini lecture in universities (the students have the text), and the fascinating little book of sixty one-minute "whodunits."

Seek ways to rearrange, to reverse: engage in role-playing to gain appreciation of other people's feelings and points of view; have visitors to a science centre actually play and do things rather than simply observe; build a skyscraper on the site of an old church, and put the church on the seventeenth floor; place the eye of the needle of the sewing machine at the point, as Howe did, instead of at the other end; sell flowers in book stores, books in flower stores, and both in caf6s; rearrange rigid bus schedules to meet dial-a-bus needs; turn zoo animals loose on huge public estates, take a restaurant into a woods, and grow trees in a restaurant.

8. Actually use "the unforgiving minute." Creativity has everything to do with making the most of time-not in frantic pacing but by creating a kind of private peace in which productive time comes alive-rescuing our mind from the long wasteful rambles it too often makes at the expense of enriching, creative thinking.

What use can be made of the often bored and idle periods that clutter many of our days? If the brain chatter will not be still, try using a "mantra" at various times during the day which stills its triviality-for example; repeat often: "Love, Laugh, Learn, Heal, Create," and see how the mind recovers both poise and purpose.

And there is that decaying network of people to be written to, or otherwise contacted, or that journal entry to make- it is a matter of will. What hinders us? A ready excuse is that we have no notepaper handy, no acceptable envelope, no stamp, and of course, no time. Some noted actualizers of friendship circles use the back of small slips of paper or folders, circulars, or other odd pieces of paper, and send off cheerful fragments of news or messages, or better, one idea jotted down but personal to the receiver. Cheap envelopes are everywhere, and so are stamps. Pre-prepared envelopes are an incentive.

To perform these small acts of love and will, to do them now, is to maintain the climate of creative "set"-to be more self-actualized indeed, but also to be readier for the creative life. Creativity is not, as some maintain, a matter of choice between living in solitude and living in the world, but a matter of judiciously living in the best of both.

To gain entry to the country and the company of the Ulyssean people no passport is required. No restrictions exist as to race, class, religion, political ideology, or education-just the reverse. The Ulyssean country is an open commonwealth of older adults of every racial group under the sun; its membership includes every degree of wealth and nonwealth, every level of education, every form of belief and nonbelief. Membership has nothing to do with whether one is physically well or dogged by ill health, whether one is personable or plain, well traveled or confined to a limited area. No period of years of residence is required for citizenship-citizenship exists, but it is not a static thing, conferred at a ceremony. It is a process, not a state; a process of becoming, and great practitioners of the Ulyssean way would certainly describe themselves as voyagers, not inhabitants.

These are the attitudes toward life and the later years that are typical of Ulysseans: that life is a process of continuous growth, as much through the later and very late years as in any earlier period; that the capacity to learn is fully operative among human beings across the entire span of life, and that a seeker-adult simply goes ahead and learns, and grows; that human creativity comprises, apart from the splendors of genius, thousands of manifestations of the mind and imagination that transform an individual's own self or his or her environment at any age; that creativity cannot be taught and learned like a language-but that certain conditions, all of them potentially available in the later years, can be fostered so that the creative attitude and powers, on whatever scale, can be liberated. The most important of these conditions are maintenance of a sense of wonder toward life, openness to experience, the sense of search, faith in one's powers, and the summoning of will and psychic energy.

I emphasize that these conditions are potentially available, because in our society millions of older adults enter the later decades with such conventional lifestyles and attitudes, their individual identity so diffused or confused, and their powers of creativity so unused and rusted, that only by a gradual process or by the intervention of some revolutionizing event in their lives can new capacities for growth and creativity emerge and begin a transforming process. This is not even a situation of "us" and "them"-few of us are home free. It takes sustained imagination, will, courage, and love to live the later years as Ulyssean adults, to maintain our own identity on our own terms.

We are dealing, after all, with a human journey, not an air-regulated shelter. Everything we know of Ulyssean adults tells us that they are total human beings. They are quite aware that in the important domain of physical powers they no longer possess. the prowess they had when young, nor the unbounded physical energy that among many young adults surges beautifully but unproductively. Ulyssean people know that advancing years bring hazards, and they know that either their own misjudgments or external fate, or both, may bring them for a time naked on the shore.

But either because of their nature or from their experience, they look into the face of life, not away from it. They cultivate the high art of looking at both the human comedy and the drama of the mysterious universe with intense interest and wonder. They use the remarkable brain-and-mind that is their heritage without fretting about supposed declines and deficits, knowing that there is an abundance of power there, knowing it will serve them well. And day by day they renew in themselves the springs that nurture creativity: freshness of outlook, spontaneity of feelings, acceptance of the constructive disorder of change, loving review of the past but with the eye of interpretation and growth, and the sense of life's adventure, its unexpectedness, its marvelous "you never can tell."

Thus Ulyssean adults maintain and develop their own real identities, quicken the pulses of creative growth in themselves and in the people around them. They enjoy the harvest, but they keep the winds of spring and its seed-time blowing through their lives.

 

Chapter 1 ] Chapter 2 ] Chapter 3 ] Chapter 4 ] Chapter 5 ] Chapter 6 ] Chapter 7 ] Chapter 8 ] [ Chapter 9 ] Chapter Notes ] Selected Bibliography ]

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