New Questions
My experience some thirty years ago with Creative Aging, an organization I co-founded, was that people resisted the idea of aging. They did not have the perspective that each year, each decade brought the possibility of developing a yet undeveloped potential — a potential which, once developed, would assure greater power and satisfaction in life. I researched this by asking hundreds of individuals to chart life on a graph. The result was a bell-shaped curve, peaking at thirty-five years of age, clearly showing that the overwhelming majority of people perceived life span as an inevitably declining process. This perception is quite evident when we see people turning thirty, forty, and fifty, who by and large are upset and anxious rather than enthusiastically looking forward to the next decade of their lives and development.
Why is this? I wondered.
Are they correctly perceiving life? Is their definition of life as an inevitably declining process turning it into one exactly, like a self-fulfilling prophecy? What if it turned out that life span was actually an upward-curving, ever-potentializing process? If that were true, would people forty, fifty, and sixty years of age perceive the next decade of their lives differently? And if that were possible (that life
is an upward-curving process of potentializing), what theoretical framework would support it and prove it? My intuition said that, in fact, life is an upward-curving process of potentializing, which we misperceive because the body and, to a lesser degree, the brain do seem to decline with age. If we believe we are only body and brain, then we are right to resist this process and not look forward to the next decade and then the next. After all, who in their right mind (or left brain) wants to watch themselves decline?
I set out to find a theoretical framework that would not only prove that life is an upward-curving process of potentializing, but also in the process, change people’s perceptions. I wanted to inspire people across generations to find their true potential, satisfaction, and unconditional love, and to motivate people to be the most productive in their later years. Retirement, for most, is certainly not the most productive part their lives.
So, with that as background, let’s delve into the theory.