From Life as Story to Aging as Adventure

Abstract

Abstract Later life can often be perceived and experienced by older adults in what are implicitly tragic terms—that is, as a slow, sad decline toward decrepitude and death. Drawing upon insights from narrative psychology, narrative therapy, and literary studies, as well as concepts such as narrative development, narrative resilience, and the poetics of growing old, this chapter lays out preliminary groundwork for an alternative and ultimately more positive “story” of aging—of biographical aging, or of aging on the inside. Building on thinking over the years on the topics of meaning, wisdom, and spirituality in later life, and bearing in mind the many changes and challenges that later life surely brings, this chapter proposes that aging entails discovery and not just decline. The chapter advances the seemingly counterintuitive vision of aging as not a quiet tragedy to be accepted but as an adventure—outward, inward, backward, and even forward as well—to be heroically undertaken.

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