The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk, and Adventure in the 25 Years After 50

Perhaps it is my age. I am sixty-two, and for the last several years my conversations with friends, colleagues, and even casual acquaintances have often been punctuated by what I have now come to call "confessional moments." Certainly there is the expected chatter and grumbling about minor and major infirmities or unwelcome signs of deterioration—lower-back pain, varicose veins, bald heads, and gray hair—and there is the usual whining about offspring, now finished with college, maybe even married with young children, who return home to live and still need to be provided with health care and spending money. When I refer to confessional moments, however, I do not mean the habitual grumbling about our inevitable decline as we grow older. (One of my friends refers to these gripe sessions as "organ recitals.") Nor am I referring to the odd and troubling sensation of gazing into the mirror and seeing not yourself, but someone decades older than you imagine yourself to be—someone who looks very much like your mother.

I am, instead, talking about moments when we manage to resist the signs of burnout, make peace with the old/new mirror image, and refuse to be preoccupied with our chronic laments about aging or our sadness about our vanishing youth. These are moments when our faces light up, when there is a palpable surge of energy and we begin to reveal stories about learning something new. These are stories told most often by people who are—like me—in the "Third Chapter" of our adult lives, the years between fifty and seventy-five, the generative space that follows young adulthood and middle age. And these stories are recited with intrigue, passion, and self-discovery—stories that reveal themselves like mysterious secrets; tales often striking in their contradictions and paradoxes.

My friend Jacob, an ardent intellectual and a distinguished journalist with a Ph.D. in political science, has a quick mind and a subtle wit. Born in Hoboken, New Jersey, the only son of Jewish immigrant parents, he is a man of expansive warmth, whose greatest pleasures are relational and social and whose currency of discourse has always been language: a rapid-fire delivery blending a New York Bronx dialect with a sprinkling of Yiddish, for emotional effect. Now sixty-two, he tells me of his first experience attending a seven-day silent retreat where—after much resistance, fear, and panic; then resolve and determination— he began to let down his barriers and inhibitions and learn to live in the stillness. This still-raw understanding and practice of meditation has opened a whole new discipline and perspective that seem to "challenge old inhibitions and raise questions" about who he is "becoming," and about his capacity to be alone with himself. He says dramatically, "Meditation is the most counterintuitive thing I could have possibly tried to learn to do."

Roma, a fifty-seven-year-old physicist I met at a dinner party, who has spent all of her professional career in the laboratory enjoying the quiet and order of the space, the exacting, familiar rituals of the scientific process, and the pursuit of the objective, quantitative evidence, recently began to feel—after thirty years—the limits and constraints of her existence. The solitude and discipline of her work, which used to feel safe and generative, started to feel claustrophobic. The rituals began to seem routine. The questions that used to inspire curiosity began to strike her as dull and formulaic. But mostly she sensed the need to "make a difference on our planet" in a more direct and immediate way; she yearned to teach, to serve, to give back. Cutting back on her hours in the lab, Roma signed up for a mentoring program where she teaches middle-school black, brown, and poor students in an after-school program the subject that always fascinated her the most when she was a young adolescent: astronomy. In her first year of teaching, Roma admits that this is the hardest, most challenging work that she has ever done: learning the science now long forgotten and finding a palatable and relevant way to present it; learning to relate to and discipline the children and capture their imaginations; learning to recover from the awkwardness and public failures that come with being a total novice. "I’m so completely uncool," she says with a smile. Like Jacob, she has chosen "the most difficult path," strewn with minefields and misunderstandings, and rare, unexpected successes along the way.

And there is Robert, the seventy-two-year-old retired mechanical engineer whom I meet at an ice-cream joint on the side of the road in rural New Hampshire. He and his wife of fifty years are out on their ritual Sunday drive, and they are looking to pick up an interesting conversation with a stranger. They sit down next to me at the picnic table and begin in a place where we all meet: with family stories. I listen to their proud tales about their grandchildren scattered all over the country and admire the photographs of their smiling faces. But soon, with a bit of gentle prodding from his wife, Abbie, the conversation turns to Robert’s "new passion," and he goes to the car to fetch his drawings, postcard-size pen-and-ink sketches of birds. He has always loved birds: listening to their songs in the morning light, watching them visit the bird feeders outside his kitchen window, observing the "social interactions" among them. And he has always said, "I wish I had an artistic bone in my body, so I could draw the beauty I see in them." A week after his retirement party, as he faced the "surprising emptiness" in front of him, he took the leap of faith and signed up for three drawing courses— "a total immersion"—at the adult-education center. "This has become my life!" he says in confessional tones, as I remark on the steady improvement I see in his portfolio of work, and as he talks about the exhilaration and vulnerability of learning something new.

For women and men in the Third Chapter, the process of learning something new feels both familiar and strange, exciting and terrifying, mature and childlike, both in character and out of body, like returning home and setting out on an adventure to an unknown destination. This is true whether we are talking about learning a new skill, craft, or art form—like learning to speak a foreign language, play jazz piano, or become a play-wright—or whether we are learning to feel and express a broader and deeper emotional repertoire—freeing us from the bondage of the rigid requirements of decorum forged in our childhood— or whether we are learning to grieve after the death of a loved one—learning to make ourselves vulnerable and not retreat from intimacy—or whether we are talking about shifting the focus of our energies and priorities, from solitary, individualistic, and competitive to community-based and collaborative; from making it up the ladder of success to making an imprint on the lives of others.

This book focuses on the creative and purposeful learning that goes on in the Third Chapter of life. I explore the ways in which men and women between the ages of fifty and seventyfive find ways of changing, adapting, exploring, mastering, and channeling their energies, skills, and passions into new domains of learning. I believe that successful aging requires that people continue—across their lifetime—to express a curiosity about their changing world, an ability to adapt to shifts in their developmental and physical capacities, and an eagerness to engage new perspectives, skills, and appetites. This requires the willingness to take risks, experience vulnerability and uncertainty, learn from experimentation and failure, seek guidance and counsel from younger generations, and develop new relationships of support and intimacy.

In writing this book, I wanted to understand what motivates people in this Third Chapter of life to want to learn something new. What are our sources of inspiration; what are our greatest fears and inhibitions; what are the major barriers to learning; and what allows us to pursue adventures? I also wanted to know how the processes of learning, adaptation, experimentation, and mastery are different during this period of life. Do maturity and life experiences support a greater sense of liberation and collaboration; a new level of patience, perspective, and confidence; and a sturdy sense of self that permits risk-taking? How do people break long-established patterns of behavior, old habits and inhibitions that no longer serve them well? How do people seek and make productive use of feedback and criticism when they are developing new skills and adapting to new realities? How do they hang on to their dignity, sense of authority, and self-respect when the awkwardness and imbalance of new learning make them feel infantilized? What needs to be unlearned if someone is to learn something new? How do people balance—and negotiate the tensions between—the losses and gains of new commitments? What are some of the things that people in their Third Chapters discover that they simply cannot learn; what are the physical, developmental, cognitive, and emotional limitations that prevent them from gaining mastery of new skills and taking the next developmental step? And, finally, what are the connections that can be drawn between individual learning, community building, and cultural creativity? What institutional innovations, shifts in cultural priorities, and educational reforms might support the translations from individual gain to public good?

I think that part of the reason we who are in our Third Chapters tend to speak of our new learning in "confessional tones"—in tentative, hushed voices that barely veil the excitement and the terror we feel inside—is that something in us feels we are being irresponsible, or inappropriate, maybe even unseemly, when we admit our lust for new learning. Somehow, we feel that people our age should be consolidating our exp...