The Call to Live More Simply
Ron Pevny, Contributing Editor

When at last age has assembled you together,
will it not be easy to let it all go, lived, balanced over?

— Florida Scott Maxwell

We feel an urge to slim down and disencumber ourselves. Lose those extra pounds, clear out the attic and our storage unit (assuming we’ve kept ourselves to one!).

But it's not just physical baggage we've collected. Like Alvin Straight who rides his John Deere lawn mower halfway across Iowa to seek reconciliation with his estranged brother Lyle (in The Straight Story), that “slimming down” often includes our ridding ourselves of useless regrets and poisonous resentments.

The Hindus name this stage of life — the third of their four — vanaprastha or forest dweller: “When a householder sees his skin wrinkled, and his hair white, and the sons of his sons, then he may resort to the forest.”¹ The developmental task is to let go, to leave behind our previous things, roles, and duties.

The culture bombards us with a different message: Perhaps we can keep loss at bay. Maybe there's a magic pill. Maybe there's a regimen of exercise and sound nutrition. A good health care plan. A well-tended 401K.

The problem is we usually experience this transition in life not as a voluntary LETTING GO, but as an involuntary TAKING AWAY. The empty nest, the end of a career, the experience of a major medical emergency — these are experiences of loss and diminishment: loss of roles, loss of identity, loss of youth and vitality, loss of passion. And each in some way prefigures that final loss we call death, which looms uncomfortably nearer each passing year.

How do we shift our perspective in a way that lets us view these losses as “modes of liberation contributing to spiritual growth. If age strips away pride, pleasures, and profit, all the better… If our responsibilities are diminished, the time available to explore the sacred expands” (Leder).

Befriending Death

It can be extremely difficult to let go when the ubiquitous message we receive from the culture in which we are immersed is that letting go is death, and death is negative, to be avoided for as long as possible. However, since time immemorial, the world’s spiritual traditions have provided another understanding of death — one in which death is honored as the necessary prerequisite to new life — new beginnings.

Seen in this way, the letting go that is asked of us as we transition into elderhood is the necessary inner preparation for the emotional aliveness, spiritual awareness and service to one’s community that can be the fruits of our aging. Befriending death is embracing life.

Our ability to voluntarily let go — to surrender our identification with the roles and abilities of our midlife selves so that we may be fully born into the rich possibilities of elderhood, is very much enhanced by practicing letting go at transition points throughout our lives. And even more so by choosing, as we approach our elder years, to devote time to the critical inner work, such as life review, forgiveness practice, and deepening of connection with our spiritual sources, that will prepare us to live fully as elders and to surrender our bodies to the great mystery when physical death comes calling for us.

 Go to The Call to Recover a Sense of Place