Reclaim gratefulness
Rather than a silver tsunami that is going to overpower us, aging is really about the birthing of a new paradigm that bears so much potential and opportunities
Marilyn Schlitz, Professor at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology at Sofia University, social anthropologist, researcher, writer, and creator of The Grateful Ageing Programme
The magic number was 150, written in white bold letters on a black background. With its austerity, the plate on the wall marked the entrance to the imposing building where my grandmother lived in Milan. Behind the massive walnut doorway, the space was a game of sensory echoes and tactile experiences. Under my shoes, a carpet of squared toffee-colored embossed tiles interspersed a double line of rough grey stones. Lost of their shine, the tiles gained in charm. The brick-colored walls somehow correlated with the smell of the vegetable soup that, coming from the concierge’s kitchen, filled the high vault. The concierge was a middle-aged, plump woman, with a marked southern accent. Looking down from her elevated position, she opened a sliding glass and exchanged words and correspondence with my grandmother while I tried to peek into her flat behind her. Carrying the two handles of her black handbag on the left forearm and the keychain in her right hand, my grandma used to wave at the concierge and walk away at the same time.
The building, constructed in the first decades of the 20th century in a more austere Liberty style, had miraculously survived the bombs of WWII and stood majestically on a four-lane avenue. In the fifties, anonymous constructions overtook the empty lot around it, but their plain facade with plastic roller shutters emphasized the grace of my grandmother’s building, with its classy Venetian blinds. At that time, I couldn’t point my finger at style differences, but I could hear the call of that massive construction. In retrospect, I suppose it was because of its feast of details. The iron railing on the staircase was a minimalist interweaving of iron bars that ended in a tiny metal flower at each intersection. It was paired with a shiny oak handrail with a double inlay on its sides. I enjoyed running my hand along it, walking up the stairs until I reached my grandma’s brown double door on the third floor. While she inserted the key into the keyhole, I looked down at the spiral of the staircase, inhaling the cold and musty air. The brown door hid a white door with a ground glass on the top half, surrounded by a frame of smaller colorful ground glasses. This door had a metallic lock, a shiny switch that could slide up and down on its hidden track. With their 13-feet height ceiling, the walls terminated in a gentle concave shape under the ceiling. On the floor, the decoration changed for every room. I spent hours losing myself in the depth of those geometrical, optical styles, with their harmonious blend of chestnut brown, ivory, and pigeon blood red. The waxed surface gave a round, mellow feeling.
My grandma and I drank coffee from tiny cups, paired with even smaller almond-shaped silver spoons. I loved her fifties furniture, with its long shiny metal legs and sturdy surfaces, and her fridge with a pedal that closed with a dull thud. Under the kitchen window, on a marble countertop near the sink, a basil plant bathed in the morning light. Sometimes, from the open window, we talked with her neighbor, who had a tiny white dog called Lilac. In her bedroom, my grandma kept a sewing machine, which I was allowed to use, with its delightfully heavy counterweight that produced a cricket-like sound when the iron pedal reached the end. Full of light, the room smelled of mint. By putting a tiny quantity of mothball in an eight-door floor-to-ceiling wardrobe, my grandma tamed the naphthalene. In the evening, we simply looked outside the window at cars and people going by. Sometimes we chatted, sometimes we sang songs, or she told me stories of her life: the hardship of her childhood, her arrival in Milan in 1929, her little brothers who ate her toothpaste out of its metallic container, something they had never seen before. There was an ineffable happiness within her and we shared little moments of total affinity.
Talking with Marilyn Schlitz, Professor at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology at Sofia University, social anthropologist, researcher, writer, and creator of The Grateful Ageing Programme these two flaps of time overlap. Her smile and her warmth bring the memory of those long gone nights in Milan back, across space and time.
Many people age without developing an interest in aging. What sparked your interest?
I’ve been interested in the topic of consciousness and its various faces and transformations for decades and I did a big project around death, “Death Makes Life Possible.” The truth of it is I was working with a retirement center and I was developing an educational program for their communities. It was going great, and then somebody in their marketing department discovered the word “death” in the title and they said no, no that’s not part of our brand, we’re not about death, we’re about aging. So that weekend, I just pivoted. Aging is a great topic and death is certainly a component of the aging experience, as people become more and more aware of their own mortality. That's how I created an educational program. Again, it was designed to be a facilitator training for people who led programs in these retirement communities. They piloted it in a couple of places and they really liked it except they said it was not Christian enough. Really? I just let it go. I thought maybe that’s not my audience. That’s when I started writing more in a focused way about aging and I created this transformative model around aging. Since then I have created a multi-part educational program, I have done a little bit of research. I’m hoping to do some more research using augmented or virtual realities as a way to facilitate positive experience around aging. The goal is to research pre and post around whether we can enhance the experience and see changes in both the psychology and the physiology of the users.
Is this program for older people or for young people as well?
It’s for everybody. I’m teaching right now “Aging, individuation and wholeness” and that’s for anybody because we’re all aging all the time, going through developmental stages. But it is primarily geared for people who are reaching that point in their lives when they are beginning to put themselves in the aging category, or society is putting them in that category, but also for their caregivers. That’s my primary audience, but in the end it's for everybody as we all face the same issues.
It’s rare that people think about teaching about aging, as growing old is an uncharted territory...
It’s sort of true but sort of not. It seems like a topic that is up, primarily for the aged community who are kind of in this no-man’s land, where do I go now, because people are living longer and healthier lives, the whole issue of retirement is now different than it used to be. So I thought that people are facing new challenges and there are no roadmaps for this. This program attempts to be a way of situating people and understanding of their own transformative potential. It is also about redefining the view about aging so that it’s less about pathology and failure and more about possibility and hope.
What inspired the definition of grateful aging?
Sometimes you see things very pragmatically and I wanted something that grew out of our work on transformation, so that in its own way was unique. Nobody had that framework to grow from. I wanted a title that distinguished it from other things people talk about: positive aging, graceful aging, conscious aging. Because I was drawing from a unique change model that has been derived from empirical research, I wanted to be able to stress this difference. I was looking for a label and I thought, what could be better than gratefulness? I do gratefulness meditation, I’ve been an advocate for gratefulness as a practice for about four decades and it felt right. If we are really embracing our own potential as we move through our lifespan, then having this experience of grateful living seemed like the right approach.
When it comes to the aging population, the focus tends to be on welfare. You cast light on our evolving worldview, culture, and mindset instead. How can these transformations impact society?
I really do believe that a fundamental aspect of our living experience is our worldview. And our worldview is this sort of invisible filter or lens through which we perceive everything. I developed a curriculum called “Worldview literacy,” a sort of worldview exploration. It’s all about how do we become aware of what we are not aware of? That’s the idea of the worldview, a way to recognize it. There are skills and tools we can develop to recognize our worldview and other people's world views. What are the skills I need in order to deal with and engage with people whose worldviews are fundamentally different from my own and ultimately how do I take that awareness into the world? One way to do it was looking at this idea of aging, to bring a reverence to the wisdom and the experience that people have as they have lived their lives in various ways. I wanted to take this skillset about worldview literacy, apply it to aging and then challenge the dominant model that says it’s a bad thing to age. There’s a gray tsunami, oh my God what are we going to do? We can realize that it’s not appropriate or helpful to hold that model. It is not helpful for anyone, it is not helpful for us as individuals and it’s not helpful to society because we are not embracing the qualities and gifts that our elders provide for us. It’s not even offering the qualities and the resources that people need as they move through this third act in their lives. It feels to me that we need to shift the worldview and in order to do that, we need to understand that we have one, what social worldview we’re up against and we need to develop awareness, skills, capacities, powers within ourselves in order to challenge and redefine the status quo.
Being young is the measuring stick of being old. Maybe that's why we develop fear and anxiety about aging. You propose a radical change of perspective with a culture of hope and inspiration. Can you tell us more about your view on aging?
It has not always been this way. Civilization, in different places, in different cultures held a reverence for the elders. We see this in different societies, like in Japan where people are living well into their hundreds and there’s an integration in the community. I think our attitude to aging is traced to the Industrial Revolution where our productivity and contribution to the profit centers of society began to inform where we place the value on people. It became so materialistic, so physicalist that people have lost sense of our appreciation for the wholeness of our collective enterprise. Nelson Mandela suggested taking care of the children for they have a long way to go; take care of the elders, for they have come a long way. And take care of the people in between for they are shouldering the work. It’s not just a beautiful frame for understanding that we are about a whole. Our civilization, the way we live together, the way we inform each other, shouldn’t put our elders in these aging retirement communities where they are going to be cast off. Instead, we should be finding ways of engaging people at every facet of life. So how do we find ways where the grandparents, the great-grandparents can come into rapprochement with the youth and how is it their wisdom and life experience can be held in reverence in ways that are really important? Again, looking at other cultures it is often the case that the grandparents are the ones who raise the children. So, in modern Western industrialized countries, we can come back to that idea. We need to find a way to appreciate and integrate anybody in society. One other thing to say about that is that just as there is this taboo about aging, there’s this incredible fear in our culture about death. Aging and death are seen as failures, when in fact it is the perfect journey that allows us to understand and appreciate our own mortality. Understanding and reconciling our relationship with death is a way of making peace with life and owning our empowerment. I think that age and death kind of go together.
The Grateful Aging Program implies the concept of awakening to our third act. What can we achieve in the third act?
This is the opportunity where we don’t really have a road map. We don’t have a guiding structure for that. How can we recognize what are the opportunities for people as they reach their third act? Many people might have the privilege of financial stability and don’t have to be out there working jobs, they have the chance to redefine what they want to do with their days and their lives. Maybe it’s art, maybe it’s some kind of voluntarism, maybe it’s a reading group. It’s really clear that staying engaged in the community is really important, so participating in whatever way. Taking this opportunity, but it also may be that people want to keep working. I can’t see myself as not working, I see myself as contributing for as long as I live, creating pathways for those ways of contributing. Maybe there’s less energy, less strength, less stamina than we used to have, but that doesn’t in any way diminish our capacity to give back to society. The third act or four acts, whatever it happens to be, can span from one having an active role or just acting as inspiration for others. One of my great inspirations for starting this program was a woman who died when she was 92, but she was just full of vigor and vitality. Dying was not a failure to her and, in fact, she did a lot of meditation around that. At the same, when she was in her mid eighties, she lived in a retirement community intentionally. She was an activist in that community and she used to teach people in walkers to do line dancing. What a wonderful vital way of approaching the aging process! My mother died at 92. She was always somebody who maintained her sense of personal empowerment, her role was more being the matriarch of the family rather than going out and volunteering in the community. You know, there are different ways and there’s not one right path. It is really about owning and empowering our own possibilities.
The first act of The Grateful Aging is self-exploration. What have you discovered about your ideas on aging?
Well, it has become more personal. Now that I'm 63, I’m recognizing my own stages of development. I have no interest in stopping, but I have interest in deepening, if that means doing more writing, more reflecting. I’ve been engaged in collaborating with Ellen J. Langer, who has done a lot of work on mindfulness before it was a trendy topic. She wrote a book called Counterclockwise - A Proven Way to Think Yourself Younger and Healthier which really was an attempt to immerse elders in an experience of being ten years younger. What she found is that once they were fully in that experience, they had psychological and biological changes that suggest that we can reverse the biological clock. Together, we have done a lot of work around how we could create virtual reality experiences for people so that they can have this encounter with themselves back in time and begin to rethink what is their own process of engaging with aging. I found a company that is doing virtual reality with aging people and Alzheimer’s patients and I’m very interested in finding someone who has built the app - so that I don’t have to build it myself or extend the app. I'd like to research with that group in order to be able to document what are the psychological, biological, and physiological potentials that come when we bring this mindfulness, this worldview and deep appreciation into our lived experience. The fact that we can provide data will legitimize this kind of experience and will reinforce this shift in the paradigm of aging that I’m advocating for.
As the author of Death Makes Life Possible, do you think that death and aging have an edge in helping us to understand who we are?
There are transpersonal, or humanistic, or noetic qualities we have that often get lost when we live in these situations where we pathologize. Certainly in the US, there just isn’t this reverence. I know this from friends who have lived in Kerala, in India, or in Bali, where there’s much more culturally embedded sense of appreciation. There are many programs that are happening and I’m a cheerleader for all of them. The “Aging to Saging” program, for example. How do we recognize that wisdom is a quality that not all people have in their lives? It often comes with the developmental process. How do we find ways to appreciate wisdom, the wise brain? We know that people's brains develop in different ways as they get older, people become less reactive, their ability to integrate the left and right hemispheres of their brains through their corpus callosum helps them to see things in a more balanced way. They become less reactive to a lot of the triggers that might influence someone when they are in their teens or early twenties. People move into that phase in their lives when it’s about money making or being productive, taking care of the family, growing the household. When you can begin to relax to some of that, there’s this sense we can cultivate a greater ability to have that peace. Aging comes with a lot of fear and anxiety. One of the things I love to do is to contribute to how we shift culture in a way that helps to reduce that anxiety and make peace with those very stages of our process of individuation, the capacity we have for cultivating the personal dimension, the shift from the me, ego-centered to the we or our engagement with something bigger than the ego-self. There are the potentials we can develop at a larger scale and I really love to do that.
It is notable how society and culture are like headwinds against which we are trying to develop these qualities. Do you agree?
Cultures are a very powerful force. There is the biological imperative; it’s all embedded with our culture and the way we interact with each other and the lens we use to interact with each other. All those aspects become very influential in how we live, relate, how we experience the world around us. I think the metaphor of headwind is really great. Another metaphor would be the gardener. Anybody who is a gardener knows that the garden goes through cycles and you need to have the death in order to have the birth. How do we become the gardeners of our own experience? How does our process of life development through its various life stages help us to create a healthier type of self? Tracking the metaphors we live by and how society informs those metaphors. We all have within ourselves the potential to question those assumptions, to question those metaphors. Rather than a silver tsunami that is going to overpower us and create this crisis, it’s really about the birth of a new paradigm that has so much potential and opportunities. That’s what I’m trying to live into, lean into, and see the wind coming at our back, helping to guide us into a better world and a better future.
