Creative Aging: Rethinking Retirement and Non-Retirement in a Changing World »

In a practical and useful way, Marjory Zoet Bankson explores the spiritual dimensions of retirement and aging. She offers creative ways for you to share your gifts and experience, particularly when retirement leaves you questioning who you are when you are no longer defined by your career.

Drawing on stories of people who have reinvented their lives in their older years, Bankson explores the issues you need to address as you move into this generative period of life:

Release: Letting go of the vocational identity associated with your career or primary work

Resistance: Feeling stuck, stagnant, resisting change

Reclaiming: Drawing energy from the past, discovering unused gifts

Revelation: Forming a new vision of the future

Crossing Point: Moving from stagnation to generativity

Risk: Stepping out into the world with new hope

Relating: Finding or creating new structures for a new kind of work

Library Journal

Workshop leader and president of Faith@Work, Bankson explores the inner work of making one's later years creative and meaningful. She has interviewed hundreds of people and discovered that there are seven phases of transition in aging: Release, Resistance, Reclaiming, Revelation, Crossing Point, Risk, and Relating. She explores these in depth and points out that the key concerns of the retirement-aged person are self-identity and the need to give back and be useful. She takes the realities of failing health and finances into account but provides the wider perspective on finding new meaning. Real-life stories and probing questions help readers gain insights into the last decades of life.

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Making the Extra Years Count 1

1 What Now?: Rethinking Aging 7

2 Release: The Inner Work of Leaving 23

3 Resistance: Moving Beyond Security 41

4 Reclaiming: Riches from the Past 55

5 Revelation: Where Does Newness Come From? 71

6 Crossing Point: Joining Inner and Outer Worlds 87

7 Risk: Beginning Again with More Focus 101

8 Relating: Finding the Right Form for Now 117

Epilogue: Living Wholeheartedly 133

Suggestions for Further Reading 137