Surviving maturity - and creatively thriving
Playwright Edward Albee achieved early career success (”The Zoo Story,” “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,”) that was followed by several decades of “thorny obscurity and neglect,” but a triumphant return to achievement in his mid-70s with his Tony-winning play “The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?” according to a 2003 SF Chronicle article listing other enduring creators: Survival as art: 20 who defied the odds to follow their muse.
Candice Bergen continues to add great wit and charm to her role on “Boston Legal” at age 60, and commented in a 2005 AARP mag. article, “People sometimes get crazier as they get older. I can just be weird whenever I want, and there’s the freedom of not caring what people think.”
Architect Oscar Niemeyer received the highest honor in his field, the Pritzker Prize, months after his 80th birthday.
More quotes, books etc on the page Maturity
Sara Davidson, author of LEAP! What Will We do with the Rest of our Lives? wrote in her Huffington Post entry The Narrows about what can be a “rough passage to the next part of life. In the Narrows, you feel you’re being stripped of your identity and your worth. I sank into the narrows in my fifties.
“After 24 years of writing for TV, I couldn’t get hired anymore, my partner left abruptly, and my kids went off to college. I spent two years thrashing, trying to get back what I’d lost, before I surrendered to the reality that my former life was finished and I couldn’t know what the hell was ahead. …
“There’s a new life stage–after 50 and before 80–and we’re the ones whose mission it will be to figure out what to do with it.”
One of the people she interviewed for her book was political activist Tom Hayden. She notes on her site www.saradavidson.com that “After 18 years in the California legislature, he lost a municipal election to a man half his age, suffered heart failure and had a quintuple bypass, followed by depression. Now he’s forging a new role, teaching and inspiring young people to work in politics.”
She goes on to quote Hayden: “We can be freer now than we’ve been since we were 20. We may have 30 more years to give the system hell!”
In a book excerpt [The First Day of the Rest of My Life, Newsweek Jan. 22, 2007], Davidson writes that she contacted Carly Simon [photo], “because I’d heard she’d been dealing with multiple blows: she was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a mastectomy at the same time she and her husband were drifting apart, her kids were moving off on their own and her record company was abandoning her.
Simon, she says “felt discarded like a dog… Forced to give up her apartment in Manhattan when the rent was tripled, she moved by herself to Martha’s Vineyard where she started recording songs in her daughter’s old bedroom. She’d stay up late, mixing tracks on her own, just trying to please herself.”
“I was doing what I’d done at 19,” Simon said, “making sounds I liked. That was the only star I could follow.”
She went on to work with producer Richard Perry, with whom she’d made “You’re So Vain” and other hits. “He asked her to collaborate on some romantic ballads. They funded the recording themselves and when they were satisfied, sold it to Columbia. The week it was released as ‘Moonlight Serenade,’ it hit No. 7 on the Billboard chart.”
But there may be substantial personal challenges impacting how we can explore and realize our talents in midlife and later, such as the skills and values our parents model and teach.
Sally M. Reis, Ph.D. warns in her article “Internal barriers, personal issues, and decisions faced by gifted and talented females” that “The very characteristics found to be associated with older talented women (determination, commitment, assertiveness, and the ability to control their own lives) directly conflict with what some parents encourage as good and appropriate manners in their daughters.”
Dr. Reis is author of book Work left undone: Compromises and challenges of talented females
Kenneth W. Christian, PhD, author of Your Own Worst Enemy: Breaking the Habit of Adult Underachievement, describes a variety of self-limiting styles of thinking and behavior that we may take on in early life, that continue on unless we become aware of them and decide to change.
One example: “Extreme Non-Risk-Takers focus totally on minimizing risk in their lives… because they try to avoid situations in which they could possibly fail, they gravitate toward occupations, relationships and activities that do not present serious challenges or reflect their real interests.”
More styles: Charmers ; Extreme Risk-Takers ; Rebels ; Misunderstood Geniuses ; Best-or-Nothings
More quotes, books etc on the page Self-limiting
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