Retirement imagination
Retirement—a failure of imagination.
:- Doug.
![](https://www.footprintsinthewind.com/wp-content/themes/quentin/images/printer.gif)
If what you believe about your life’s story today is the same as when you were twenty and fifty, you are not yet growing.
:- Doug.
Converse around story construction before we get to our long purpose: here we start to discover for ourselves what that long purpose is, for us.
:- Doug.
So how do dilemma and subtext help elders tell their stories? They can say how what they did was not exactly in line with what they wanted. They can say how choices were difficult. They can discover these things in the telling, the writing, the recalling.
:- Doug.
Just how do you grow a better humanity if to be alive is to perpetually be in conflict?
:- Doug.
Footprints in the Windsm # 1885
So much depends upon
a really good stretch
Please pass it on.
© c 2019, Learning Works, Incorporated. All rights reserved. Easy reprint permissions: 574/291-0022, or by e-mail to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com. Back issues available at http://www.FootprintsintheWind.com
Please publish in your print or electronic periodical, with the above info.
To subscribe, send an e-mail with the word “subscribe” to mailto:Footprints AT FootprintsInTheWind.com
Which is the more profound role for you as storyteller: To tell or to hear?
:- Doug.
Exercise: write your life’s story as hero’s journey with your choice now whether to share the boon.
:- Doug.
Elders have lived the hero’s journey—left home—faced life’s challenges—returned: how will you share your boon?
:- Doug.
Choice—Response. What happens after response? What happens in the dash? After response: re-entry, ever-after, the larger challenge.
:- Doug.
Old lawyer does not refer to biologic age but to soul age, even spirit age. Long view.
:- Doug.
Has human nature changed over the years? Is it just that our choices are similar across generations, and this gives us the illusion of no change? Or maybe our lack of historical perspective? We have built upon the landscape cities and states and tribes which give us ever increasing and nuanced kingdoms to try to control. Have we learned? Have we progressed? Population compression and experiencing more of our diversity and similarity in diversity has given us a little larger view, a skosh more compassion: we can be optimistic. Progress is glacial. The fact that we can see the 10 Commandments as anachronistic and simplistic says there is progress; the fact that we see them as difficult in real life shows how slow is this progress.
:- Doug.
The walls and floors of the house give space for closets and cabinets and shelves and offices and laboratories we would not have dreamt in a wide-open field. Our choices are furcations along the road, imagination constrained to be more imaginative, to create more choice points because of the prior choices we have made and the ones we anticipate making.
:- Doug.