Finding Your Voice

To grow old is biological destiny. But to become generative implies something more, an inner knowing that transcends aging. The generative elder is a person who knows about things that matter and at the same time knows how to savor the world. For generative elders, we observe that the final purpose of life is to die happy by teaching generously.

Not every elder knows how to transform his or her raw experience into this kind of wisdom. Not every elder automatically becomes wise and giving simply by getting older. In the elder’s role there is a range of capacity and gifts—all the more reason why those who are able to teach are so important today. They have a critical role to play in the transmission of universal stories, core values, and moral legacies. Their purpose, should good health allow them to exercise it, is to inspire the younger generation so that the larger spiritual narrative of life can advance. Ultimately, each of us must, in our own way, offer our unique voice to the larger truths that embrace us all.

In Wishful Thinking: A Seeker’s ABC, Frederick Buechner offers this: True joy comes from “the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

Many people live in between the gladness and the hunger, neither savoring nor saving the world. They are not so unhappy with their current lives that they can’t live with themselves. Neither are they so happy with their lives that they have no incentive to break free. They live in limbo — in the neutral zone between saving and savoring—committing to neither. Eventually, they might feel a growing sense of purpose, a feeling that there might be a greater mission or larger calling. Becoming generative in the second half of life becomes the ultimate test for whether we die happy.

In Chasing Daylight, the powerfully moving memoir of the last three months of his life, Eugene O’Kelly writes of the quest to find “perfect moments” with family members, friends, and colleagues in the limited time he has before death. He takes his doctor’s prognosis that he has just three months to live as a gift that teaches him to live in the moment as he has never before. Although none of us would welcome O’Kelly’s fate, we can’t help wonder how different our own lives would be if we knew how precious little time we had left. Ironically, the belief that we have plenty of living left to do often keeps us from living as fully as we can.

The simple truth is that as we age, loss is inevitable. The longer we live, the more losses we will experience; it’s an undeniable fact, clearly articulated by the Buddhist truism that life is suffering.

Yet no one, except in very dire circumstances, would consent to trading those losses for the opportunity to live a long and fulfilling life. The key then, in the second half of life, is not to avoid loss—which we can’t do anyway—but rather, to discover better ways to deal with it.

Bad things will happen; that’s out of our control. What is within our power, though, is how we react to those bad things. And to the extent that we can respond in a positive and generative way, we can mitigate the loss and continue to grow and evolve in the process.

One of the tools for responding effectively is what we refer to as “courageous conversations,” conversations in which we reveal ourselves to one another honestly, in which we disclose our true feelings, our hopes and dreams, our fears and concerns. This doesn’t mean we end up weeping in each other’s arms; it does, though, require that we let those with whom we’re communicating see who we really are, warts and all.

Being together with a group of one’s contemporaries on safari in Africa for three weeks is a catalyst for courageous conversations. Talking about the weather gets boring after a while and you want to get down to the nitty-gritty with your fellow travelers. Another, more typical way that courageous conversations arise is when unexpected “wake-up calls” occur in our lives. When life-changing events occur— difficult times like death, illness, major job changes—we naturally are led to more meaningful discussions with friends and family. And it is often only through such discussions that we are able to make it through those difficult times.

We were driving through the northern Serengeti corridor when Richard reminded us about the power of courageous conversation. We were passing by a noble acacia tree in the shadow of a great rock on our way to the Soitorgoss passages where we would be spending several days hiking and meeting with Maasai elders. “See that tree there,” he said. “That’s where we spread my friend Bill Payne’s ashes. Remind me to tell you that story tonight around the campfire.”

And so, that evening, as we sat around under the stars, after dinner, Richard related the following story:

Bill Payne was a dear friend of mine, a colleague, a fellow inventurer, someone who I bonded with the first time we met. His natural desire to travel and to grow had inspired his wife, Joan, to surprise him with a three-week Africa Inventure Expedition for his 50th birthday. And Africa, at least symbolically, had opened Bill’s heart to old questions and new answers, new feelings. He was not carrying a heavy load full of regrets, but he did want to open his heart more in his relationships and to “speak his true voice with more courage at work, his creative expression, his unique contribution to the world.” His heart told him it was time to face that which had caused him to shy away from life.

One evening, under an acacia tree on the edge of the Serengeti plains, we shared the edges of our lives. While witnessing the great wildebeest migration, we caught up with each other on the migration of our own lives. Like many of us who are in the second half of our lives, Bill wanted to share stories. He was not at a loss for feeling. He loved teaching, but most of all he loved sharing stories. He laughed, wept, and spoke movingly of the past and future. His central theme was: ”I’ve lost my voice. How am I going to find it?” He wanted to create a life with a distinct voice he could call his own.

Over the years, as I have asked older adults what, if any, regrets they had, one theme has shown up over and over. The older adults interviewed said, “I wish I had taken more risks to be myself, to find my unique voice.” Their greatest obstacle was their postponement—their choice to bury their authentic voice until later in life.

Bill’s capacity for postponement was exhausted. Like many people, he had remorse about neglecting certain parts of his life in favor of others. Spiritually, he felt a great need to find something larger than himself to believe in. Bill’s work increasingly needed to be an expression in the outer world of who he was becoming in the inner world. To feel whole, he needed to speak on the outside what was true on the inside.

As we sat together under the tree in Africa, Bill told me how excited he was about the upcoming year. He would keep doing what he was doing but change how and how much he did of it. He would travel less for work and focus more on relationships. Work travel had given him little joy in the past year. He would rekindle his joy by taking Friday off each week. With an intentional three-day weekend, he would spend more time with Joan and with close friends. He would change his relationship to relationships. He would, in short, find his voice and begin using it as never before.

Flash forward two years, back in Minnesota. I get a phone call from Bill in which he got right to the point “I have cancer,” he told me, “a particularly bad kind—adenocarcinoma, a malignant tumor at the base of my esophagus—that will probably kill me. I don’t know how long I have to live. I’m going to a specialist this afternoon.”

The irony of throat cancer in a man who had been struggling to find his own voice was not lost on Bill. Was this the fate of having held one’s voice inside for so long?

The painful news brought to the foreground the deep affection I felt for Bill. When we next talked by phone, in spite of his barely audible, raspy whisper, I heard his real voice come through almost for the first time. He spoke of his life and his imminent death; he talked about what he had accomplished and what he hoped to do in the time he had left, and he did so courageously.

When Richard related this story to us, we couldn’t help but be moved. Our own conversations that night were deeper and more courageous than usual. We were reminded of the fragility of life and the importance of being grateful for the time we have. Above all, we were reminded of the power of courageous conversations and of the critical nature of finding and using our voices, especially in the second half of life.

Clearly, one of the requirements of discovering our voice is time—time to grow whole—to come face-to-face with the incomplete parts of ourselves. And to do that we must make friends with death.

Death is a powerful teacher. The wisdom of life can originate from brushing up against it. Squarely facing our own mortality, or that of others, forces us to take a fresh look and see reality. It can shatter old assumptions and generate new questions.

Ernest Becker, in his book The Denial of Death, claims, “The fear of death is the basic fear that influences all others; a fear from which no one is immune no matter how disguised it may be.” Rollo May adds, “The confronting of death gives the most positive reality to life itself. It makes the individual existence real, absolute, and concrete. . . . Death is the one fact of my life which is not relative but absolute, and my awareness of this gives my existence and what I do each hour an absolute quality.”

In the months following that fateful phone call, Bill confronted death squarely. During that time, he was poked, prodded, sliced, and scanned at length by medical specialists in Minneapolis and at the Mayo Clinic. He experienced weeks of radical radiation and chemotherapy. He worked with multiple therapies including massage, visualization, accupressure, diet, herbs, and meditation. He rejoined the Catholic faith, prayed, and attended healing ceremonies. And he revisited his personal purpose over and over, reminding himself to live on purpose every day. His purpose, “to bring forth harmony on the planet through the force of love,” became his healing mantra.

Healing requires self-forgiveness of our inevitable crimes of unconsciousness. Bill said, “I was emotionally unconscious for 15 years! I denied the emotional me for 15 years. I’d been growing numb for a long time, and I really started to die inside about a year and a half ago. I started to see people as a group rather than as individuals. I even forgot people’s names. My cancer is a mirror of my own integrity. In the mirror one morning I saw the enemy—me.”

Bill and Richard began meeting more regularly to talk about purpose and meaning, all of which he filtered through his cancer healing journey. His cancer forced both to be emotionally vulnerable. It forced Bill to face the question, “Who are my friends and who is my healing support group?” He often said, “My cancer is not an undiscussable, yet many people close to me often are afraid to discuss it. It’s curious how some people I felt close to now stay at a distance to avoid their fear or discomfort with my cancer. And people who I wouldn’t expect show up!”

It was often hard talking to Bill. Sometimes Richard felt disconnected from Bill’s struggle, almost like he didn’t feel anything at all. Then, one day while driving in to work to meet with Bill, Richard’s own grief broke loose. He sobbed all the way to work.

Most of us feel a need to be part of something larger than ourselves— to have something to live for. Awakenings, like cancer, call this to our attention. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who studied death and dying for many years, taught us that at the end of our lives we will ask, or be asked, three final questions: Did I give and receive love? Did I discover my own voice—my calling? And, did I make a difference?

In one of Richard’s meetings he gave Bill a book entitled A Year to Live by Stephen Levine. The book offers a year-long program to help us learn to fully live before we die. Reading it himself, Richard was prompted to live as if he, himself, had only a year left. The experience of living this way for just one day informed and impacted his study of purpose profoundly.

Bill’s healing journey offered him extraordinary insights into what he was living for, which became increasingly obvious. But the deepest insight was an increase in courage. When you live as if you have a year left, fear makes you too small. You live the life you’ve been postponing.

Bill’s purpose—“to bring forth harmony on the planet through the force of love”—became his daily challenge, his reason for getting up in the morning. He said, “My struggle is a courage struggle. My cancer is about courage and voice—being in my heart and at the heart of things like relationships. My cancer is a mirror about living a life of integrity.”

Living with integrity is an act of courage. But ultimately, what gives our lives joy is living in an integrated manner—being and acting in a way that is a bold expression of who we are at our core. When we feel integrated we feel, as Joseph Campbell put it, “the rapture of being alive.”

Erik Erikson, whose classic work Childhood and Society depicted eight phases of maturity, believed that a later life task is that of achieving integrity. Integrity describes a person who has adapted to all of life and who has found a sense of wholeness.

Wisdom can occur when one is radically awakened. Bill’s cancer pushed him to face his life squarely and summon his voice. If we are deficient in courage, no voice can be heard. His voice, however, was not the intellectual voice from his past. It was a new, soft, luminous voice tempered with love and the wisdom of compassion.

Bill died at his Minneapolis home in the loving arms of his wife, Joan. Richard’s friendship did not end when Bill died. Some spiritual aspect of it deepened. The pain of his loss was the cost of deep friendship. Richard learned from Bill, as he has from so many of his true teachers, that compassion is the voice of purpose. Everything else pales in comparison. We do not need to accomplish grand things in order to show compassion for our friends, and the world. It is the power of compassion that we put into moments, day after day, that adds up to the power of a purposeful life.

The Sufipoet Rumi encourages us to think of our lives as if we had been sent by a king to a distant country with a special task. All of us are on a quest for something to live for. “You might do a hundred other things,” says Rumi, “but if you fail to do the one thing for which you were sent it will be as if you had done nothing.”

To be human is to search for “the one thing,” the “invisible game.” This quest is at the heart of the world’s great religions and spiritual traditions. We’re searching for the “one thing” that Rumi intimates and the rapture that comes with it. In the second half of our lives, this quest becomes essential. Purpose, something to live for, is the essence of our lives. Purpose determines how we spend our precious time and resources. Purpose energizes. Purpose motivates. Purpose structures and fills our day. Purpose is about holding a vision in life. Having purpose and vision is one of the most critical determinants of well-being in the second half of our lives. Purpose is essential because you can have it no matter how old you are, no matter how sick you are. Living on purpose in the second half inspires a voice of compassion. And Bill’s voice stays with us, always.