The Epiphany of a Corporate Warrior
By Ken Pyburn

Editor's note: The author worked at IBM for 29 years in a variety of management capacities before moving to the nonprofit sector and work with Habitat for Humanity. Active with the Wilderness Guides Council, Ken has extensive experience with vision quests. He stewarded Second Journey's strategic planning process, served as co-facilitator at the July 2006 Northwestern Visioning Council, and chaired the Board of Directors during the 2006-2007 term. Ken lives in Boise, ID.

During my “corporate warrior years,” I had been fortunate to work for a corporation that took its responsibility to the communities in which it operated very seriously and encouraged its managers and executives to become involved in whatever way they felt called. For me that meant various task force assignments: a United Way board membership and work with Rotary. I was even assigned as a Loaned Executive to a governor or two to work on government efficiency. As I approached a long anticipated early retirement (these were the days when pensions were still funded and honored!), it became crystal clear to me that my true pleasure came from work in various forms with the community rather than from success in moving up the corporate ladder.

So at age 54, finding myself with 30 years under my belt, I retired — for the first of three times. Over the next several years I made some forays into consulting, taking on several paid Habit for Humanity assignments. My satisfaction always came from building organizations, making their good work more visible to the public at large, and the psychic boost I received from the sense that I was contributing to the welfare of others. I was usually surrounded by selfless people who did volunteer work for pure and altruistic reasons. While some of the people I ran into were older and seemed to be thoroughly enjoying themselves, by far the largest groups were younger or middle aged. I wondered why.

During this “consulting phase,"what I’d actually been searching for was that one community that called to me — a place to settle, a place to care about. But since this mode of searching wasn’t yielding results, I tried a second retirement and spent the next year traveling 26 states and five Canadian Provinces, finally settling in 2001 on the California coast.

It was a book with a simple question that caused me to rethink my life again on that fateful May evening in 2003, my 65th birthday approaching. The book was Stephen Levine’s One Year to Live; the question was “How could I live my life as if I only had only a short time remaining?”

The question forced me to see that my struggling marriage had been on life support for years. Life in our small town on the coast of Central California — populated by mostly successful upper-class retirees — was pleasant enough: I played tennis, had coffee with the “boys,” traveled occasionally in a small RV, and worked productively with the local affiliate of Habitat for Humanity as its board president. But all this simply wasn’t enough. There had to be more to life. My spirit and my soul needed to be fed. I left the comfort of that seemingly idyllic situation and started what I now look back on as my Second Journey.

I had lost track of many dear friends; I wanted to go visit them and either rekindle the old relationships or reach closure on them. Earlier in my life I’d done a lot of personal development work, including attendance at Esalen and other institutes. One of those experiences, a Vision Quest, which is a rite of passage activity, I remembered as particularly powerful. When a new offering by the School of Lost Borders, called “Dancing on the Ballcourt of Death,” came to my attention, I signed up.

And so — out there in the primal wilderness called Death Valley — I danced. And I died.

The challenge then became how to live this reborn self. I found direction from the marvelous little book (and website), Too Young to Retire: 101 Ways To Start The Rest of Your Life. I took a workshop built on the notions raised by the book and supported by the Life Coach offering it. Then I happened on a notice that Second Journey was hosting a Visioning Council on Creating Community in Later Life in San Rafael later that year in August (2005).

To prepare for the experience of the Council, I began scouring the literature on aging. I found it usually concerned itself with the health or deterioration of the “elderly” or how to provide for their caregivers. I found it was the rare few book shops that even had sections on the subject of aging. Something was wrong with this picture, and slowly I was becoming aware of the scores of organizations that shared the same disconnect, though many were coming at it from myriad angles.

My experience at the Council was exhilarating. The group of “visionaries,” educators, activists, and just plain seekers that gathered in San Rafael — folks from diverse backgrounds in their 50’s to their 70’s — was full of exuberance for life and in their own way had a dozen different exciting ideas about how we should envision community in later life. Though none of these ideas quite fit my own view, the larger vision of the organization so excited me that I volunteered an old corporate skill I had used for years and offered to facilitate a planning retreat for Second Journey.

Since that time I have co-facilitated a Visioning Council on Whidbey Island in Washington state, shepherded a strategic planning process, served as board president of Second Journey and participated in countless conference calls, attended national aging conferences in Anaheim and Chicago, and devoured a long list of books on aging. I discover we are not alone: many wonderful organizations around the U.S. and overseas are equally concerned with changing the way we view and live as elders.

I welcomed the chance to move from board president of Second Journey — when my term as president ended last July and the organization was restructured — to co-chair of its national Advisory Council. My hopscotching across the country has ended in Boise, Idaho, where I find a local outlet for my passion by working with AARP and other organizations dedicated to improving the lives of “older adults.”

So what have I learned about aging from all of my scurrying about the countryside, delving into the literature, and talking to many older Americans?

Aging after 50 — or even 65 — is different from the way gerontologists have viewed it for years. The gift of additional years that the revolution in longevity gives us has changed all of that. The “golden age,” the second journey, the Third Age, the encore (or any of the names given to the second half of our lives) is about changing the way we are viewed by changing the way we act, work, talk, behave, take care of ourselves, and contribute to society. We MUST take better care of our health and exercise even more vigorously than most of us did when we were younger; and we must DO something, even many things, with passion and dedication, even if it is not full time. We must not succumb to the selling of aging, which generally insists it is about leisurely pursuits or seeing the world — both good things, but not as a life force.