Giving Meaning to the Rest of Your Life

Want to

... jump-start your life, a quick-fix of new energy and purpose?
... stop running in five directions at once?
... get in sync with your mate?
... find some life balance, harmony, and meaning?

Maybe it's time to take control.

Like making a no-nonsense plan for the rest of your life.
Somewhere between about 45 and 60, we must take inventory. (Although it's never too soon to start banking that 401k.)

By 50, nature is through with us. We're on borrowed time. We're being thrown out of the beauty contest and squeezed from our jobs. Our spouses look different. Our kids aren't as cute. Even the dog has started to growl. We need a personal "time out."

It's about time! We live 30 years longer than our grandfolks.
With life expectancy of 48 in 1900, most of them never got a chance to retire before they died. We get two whole lives before our due date, at 78. We still have another life waiting to happen!

Our first life is when we pay our human dues. We survive birth, procreate, and help our children do the same. Somehow, during that sexual mist, we also get educated, find jobs, and even become responsible.

Then the mist rises and, horrors, we still have 30 years to go! Even if we wanted to, we couldn't be kids again. Instead, we gathered a kitbag of experience, a ton of baggage, and lots of unrealized dreams. What we don't have are plans.

Of course, we don't need plans to live longer. It's a bimillennial blessing that we get a "second life." We can just bop along, doing less of what we're doing now, with less money, less vigor, and less direction until we just give up and start rocking.

According to Gordon Burgett, in How to Plan a Great Second Life: Why not live fully every day of your extra 30 years?, your parents, certainly theirs, subscribed to the "declining philosophy" that said from midlife on it was all downhill, the party was over, dreams unrealized were just that. But today that's as out of date as your prom dress or 8-track tapes. People now don't just curl up and die when they reach the 50-yard line. In fact, most bloom like never before. Better yet, they have the skill, strength, wisdom, and experience--sometimes even the money--to make their second half the joyous completion of what the first half prepared them to do.

We will almost certainly live longer, and surely better, though, if we do set some time aside and create our own "great second life" plan.

Why bother? Burgett says that

(1) Having a plan is a stress-breaker. Every slight, every disappointment, every slowdown in advancement gets magnified when it lacks perspective. Yet planning makes those activities part of a long-range vision that sees jobs, positions, and challenges as transitional and experience-building for a continually rewarding second life later.

(2) Life plans put more value in every action. What you are doing right now will look different when sifted and evaluated through a life plan. Then those actions you continue to do, or add, will make far more sense and will be an investment in the days to come...

(3) With a life plan you're always in control. From the day the planning takes place, you can measure time, direction, and choice by purpose. By creating a standard for decisionmaking, you simply ask, "Is this consistent with my plan?"

(4) Life plans create greater spousal unity. Who wants to live 30 more years as half of a pair tugging different directions? Getting on the same life page takes spousal planning, first to discover what each wants to do both together and individually, then creating mutually supportive paths to make that happen.

(5) A life plan gives you more choices. The earlier you plan, the more choices and chances you have. Want to teach at college later? Get the degree now. Want to write novels in Brazil? Start writing--and learn Portuguese! So what if you must janitor or care for kids in between?

What does Burgett, a 68-year-old speaker and writer who shares a model life plan in his book, suggest that you do to create your life map? First, survey your present financial and health status. Then

(1) Create a dream list: what do you want to do, see, learn, or share in the years to come? What kind of person do you want to be in your second life?

(2) Prioritize those dreams, then list them in appropriate time brackets, so you have the ability and wherewithal to make them happen when you wish.

(3) Have your spouse or mate do (1) and (2) as well, to get your individual and joint dreams expressed, then in harmony.

(4) Reduce those dreams to specific Action Steps that break each dream down into its logical and doable components. Inject the needed financial and health planning into each set of action steps, so you can afford to make them happen and will have the energy and well-being to enjoy the endeavor--without so depleting your coffers or corpus that there is nothing left for future dreams.

(5) Take all of these dreams (broken down into affordable and realizable action steps) and from them create a final (but always modifiable) Action Plan!

We're only alive once--but in 2007 it's for the longest time in history. The living model we grew up with no longer works. Extra years are a blessing, but only when they lead to a progressively better and more satisfying life, one that at least offsets the inevitable increased physical limitations that longevity brings.

Nobody expects that every plan we make today will come true later, nor that all will unfold precisely as we now envision them. And, yes, often the grandest part of a journey is the travel rather than the destination. But if we don't plan now, there will be no real trip at all, except by chance. Ours will be just a mindless passing. We deserve more. We deserve joy, excitement, and life-long fun and purpose. We deserve a dozen dreams to wake up to. Those come from planning.

Alan Harrington caught the spirit: "We are all, it seems, saving ourselves for the Senior Prom. But many of us forget that somewhere along the way we must learn to dance."

Dance lessons start now! Or at least plan when you will sit down to create your own "great second life," those extra 30 years that can make the last 40 or 50 years spin with envy!