Starting Over Later in Life: Why We Never Stop Becoming

We tend to think of becoming as something that happens early. We are formed in childhood and settled by middle age. After that, we mostly keep up what we have, like a finished house that only needs a coat of paint here and a new roof there.

That is not how it works.

My Friends Didn’t Get the Memo

My friends are proof of this. All of them are retired, and each one has moved into a new phase of life.

Carol is a retired RN who now cares for a lovely 95-year-old woman. She’s also learning Mahjong and is fast becoming an expert, much to the dismay of anyone who sits across the table from her.

Keith is a retired school principal. He keeps traveling the globe, and he recently went skydiving. He jumped out of a perfectly good airplane, on purpose, at an age when many people are told to be careful on the stairs.

Lily and Doug are lay leaders in their church. They give an extraordinary amount of time to running its events and its day-to-day operations. Everyone in our small community knows and loves them.

Kay is a retired teacher. She spent the past several years helping turn an old theater into a lively community center. Where there was once a shuttered building, there is now a place where people gather.

Many of us travel together. Carol, Linda and I took a two-week cross-country train trip from Chicago to California. Then we rented a car and toured our way back home to Indiana. We had long days on the rails and longer days on the road, and we talked the whole way.

My point is that none of us is “mostly maintaining what we have.” Quite the contrary. Each of us is still becoming someone.

Experience, Interpretation, Response

In my doctoral work, I created a model I call EIR: Experience, Interpretation, and Response. It’s simpler than it sounds.

New experiences keep arriving. That never stops, whether we’re 7 or 77. We interpret those experiences by deciding what they mean to us. Then we respond. Our responses, together with the experiences and our interpretations of them, shape the experiences that come next. Those new experiences call for more interpretation and response, and the cycle keeps going.

Take Keith’s skydiving. The experience was an invitation or an opportunity. He could have read it as “I’m too old for that sort of thing.” He read it as “Why not?” His response was to put on a harness and jump. That jump will shape how he reads the next opportunity, and the one after that.

Every response is a chance to become someone slightly different. In other words, we are always in a process of emergence.

Are We Really Starting Over?

So is retirement, or widowhood, or a move, or a late-life adventure, a matter of “starting over”?

Perhaps. But there is always continuity between where we’ve been and who we are now. Carol didn’t stop being a nurse when she retired. Her years of caring for patients are right there in how she cares for her 95-year-old friend. Kay’s years in the classroom show up in her community work. Nothing is wasted.

Even after life-changing events, we don’t become someone else. Other parts of us emerge, and some parts recede. The ambitious young professional may step back, and the curious traveler steps forward. The person who always put others first may finally make room for what they want. We are the same person, and yet we are not quite who we were.

What’s the alternative to this ongoing emergence? In a word, entropy.

What Is Entropy?

Entropy is a term from physics. Put simply, it describes the natural tendency of things to run down and become disordered when nothing new is coming in.

You’ve seen it all your life. A cup of hot coffee left on the table slowly cools to room temperature. An untended garden turns into a tangle of weeds. A house left empty for a few years starts to sag, crack and decay. No one has to do anything to cause this. It happens by default. Order takes energy, and without fresh energy, things fall apart.

Living things are different, but only because they keep taking something in. The physicist Erwin Schrödinger, in his little book What Is Life?, observed that life holds off decay by drawing order and energy from its surroundings. A plant does it through sunlight, and we do it through food. When the exchange stops, decline sets in.

I think the same is true of the self. A person who stops taking in new experiences, stops reflecting on them and stops responding begins to run down. Habits harden into ruts and opinions harden into walls. The world shrinks to the size of a recliner and a television remote. That isn’t peace. It’s entropy.

Emergence is how we resist it. Every new experience we take in, every honest effort to understand it and every response we risk is fresh energy coming into the system. That’s what keeps us alive in the fullest sense of the word.

Standing in the Doorway: Liminal Experiences

Some experiences are what can be called liminal. The word comes from the Latin limen, meaning “threshold,” the strip of floor you cross when you walk through a door.

The death of a loved one is a liminal experience, and so are marriage and divorce. A new career, a move across the country or an unexpected adventure can be one too. Retirement itself is one of the great liminal experiences of later life.

Think of a liminal experience as standing in a doorway. Behind you is the room you know. Ahead is a room you can’t fully see. You may have real fears about walking through that door, and some of them will need to be faced and overcome. You may need deeper insight before you’re ready.

In terms of the EIR model, you need to interpret what is happening and then respond. You can stay on this side of the door, or you can move through it.

Either way, your response will shape your future experiences, which you’ll then need to interpret and respond to. Staying put is also a response. Sometimes it’s the wise one. But it should be a choice, not a default.

Standing in a doorway is uncomfortable. Nobody stays in a doorway forever. Eventually we go back or we go forward. What matters is that we decide.

So, Are You Starting Over?

If you’re in the later chapters of life and wondering whether it’s too late to become someone new, look at my friends. Carol is dealing Mahjong tiles. Keith is falling out of the sky. Lily and Doug are holding a church community together, and Kay is bringing a theater back to life. All of them are proof that becoming doesn’t come with an expiration date.

You don’t have to jump out of an airplane. You may only need to take one class, make one phone call, volunteer one afternoon or say yes to one trip. Every new experience, every honest effort to make sense of it and every response you’re brave enough to make is a step through the doorway.

We are never finished. Thank goodness.

What doorway are you standing in right now? I’d love to hear about it in the comments below.

If this piece spoke to you, you’ll find more essays on growth and change in the Becoming section, and newer posts on the Blog. You can also read a little about me and The Emergent Self.