The Soul Tasks of This Stage of Life

This week, I have a guest blogger–my good friend Brian Fay. He’s a retired professor of philosophy at Wesleyan University, a thoughtful guy, and  a good buddy. He talks about paying attention to our souls (our basic attitudes or orientations toward life, reality, and the universe) and “gerotranscendence” (which, to Brian, definitely doesn’t mean leaping away from our bodies for refuge in some bodiless super-reality).  His thoughts seem particularly useful for this quiet Covid season.

Here’s Brian:

The popular press is replete with articles about how to live well in the twilight of our years. These articles pay lots of attention to staying physically healthy (and thus to matters of diet and exercise); to keeping economically solvent (and thus to strategies of investing, saving, and spending one’s capital); and to making the most of our remaining time (and thus to matters of travel and leisure). Some writers recommend developing a “Bucket List” of the things you always wanted to do but never had the time for.

All of this is fine. However, not much mention is made of the psychological and spiritual dimensions of aging well. This is an odd lacuna: the other stages of life seem to have their particular “soul tasks,” so why wouldn’t old age? It’s as if the experts assume that older people, unlike teenagers or those at midlife, already know what they are about, and how they should feel and act, so they don’t need any advice; or perhaps the experts assume that there’s nothing psychologically or spiritually noteworthy about this particular time of life. But why should either of these be so? Aren’t we older folks in a distinctive period with its own challenges and opportunities? And can we honestly say that we have figured it all out by now simply because we’ve been on earth for such a long time? Moreover, isn’t old age our last chance to achieve whatever wisdom and maturity we are going to achieve, and shouldn’t there be some discussion available to help us attain them?

As it happens, if you search for it, you can discover a rich literature about the soul tasks germane to old age. One of the richest veins in this literature is the little book by Erik and Joan Erikson entitled The Life Cycle Completed. The book ends with a discussion of what it labels the “Ninth Stage of Psychosocial Development,” a stage uniquely relevant to those in old age. According to the Eriksons, two main “soul tasks” characterize this stage: attaining ego integrity, and achieving gerotranscendence.

The Swedish psychologist Lars Tornstam developed the idea of gerotranscendence in the 1980s. According to Tornstam, “the gerotranscendent individual experiences a new feeling of cosmic communion with the spirit of the universe.” He and others have offered different elucidations of what such a “cosmic communion” consists of. I think of it as occurring when individuals come to appreciate the deep relatedness of everything and, arising out of this appreciation, when caring feelings and actions become the center of their lives. The gerotranscendent have concluded that most of their former goals that once seemed so important to them (honor, success at whatever enterprise they were engaged in, being recognized as worthy) were often obstacles to their grasping their essential interrelatedness and thus were impediments to their acting compassionately. Indeed, they see that these former goals frequently stood in the way of their experiencing and enacting what Dante described, in the last lines of the Divine Comedy, as “the love that moves the sun and other stars,” or what Buddha called “dwelling in karuna” (compassion).

Both love and compassion in this sense are more than feelings. They are instead ways of being and acting that arise out of recognizing our interconnection with everything that is, and the gratitude, delight, and caring that results from this recognition. It’s what an oboe player might experience when she becomes a member of a great symphony orchestra, and how she might change her playing as a result. It’s no longer all about her but about “us,” and her playing thus becomes attuned to that of the other players rather than merely a display of her own talents. The gerotranscendent don’t just intellectually assent to the truth that all of us are in fact members of a Great Orchestra (though most of us don’t know it) and that love and compassion should thus be the focus of our lives. They feel this love and compassion in their bones, and they express it (or try to!) in their actions and relations with everything and everybody with whom they come in contact. This is indeed a powerful vision of what constitutes wisdom and maturity.

In the view of the Eriksons, and of many others as well, one of the soul tasks of old age is precisely to grow into a living “communion with the spirit of the universe” in which love/compassion lies at the core. Achieving this in and through our own particular circumstances is a kind of quest to which a successful old age should be devoted. Such a quest is not easy; indeed, it might seem especially onerous as our faculties diminish, as we lose the energies and friends that might aid us, and as we suffer an assault on our capacity for hope in the face of the continued idiocies that mar human life. But the call to gerotranscendence isn’t only a burden; it’s also a gift in that it provides a profoundly meaningful dimension to this time in our lives, giving it point and purpose.

If the Eriksons are right, achieving gerotranscendence, along with realizing ego integrity, should not only be on any Bucket List for aging well, it should be at the top of this List.