There are many myths embedded in our beliefs and fears about aging, but one has been clearly debunked: The ageist notion that creativity peaks before midlife and declines in the years after that.
As I researched my new book, The Inner Work of Age, I interviewed many people, some renowned and some unknown—but none I would call ordinary. We spoke openly about their inner experiences of aging, their trials and triumphs, their fears and hard-won wisdom. I learned, especially, about their inner obstacles on the spiritual journey of aging, and how they worked through those obstacles to uncover these treasures of late life:
- Releasing the past so that it no longer controls how we feel or act now
• Releasing our hurt, anger, resentment, and regret by using emotional repair to reframe relationships
• Cultivating a genuine self-acceptance of who we are now, which liberates us from our inner critic and empowers us to feel and act with full authenticity
• Creating a quieter mind, which gives us space from negative emotions about aging
• Choosing a spiritual practice that fits our stage of life and brings rewards to our mental health, brain health, and emotional health
- Experiencing a deeper spiritual identity, which offers freedom from our past roles and responsibilities
• Discovering a revitalized energy that opens us to play, beauty, and gratitude
• Reconnecting with activism and service, which ends isolation and connects us to a kinship community
- And reclaiming our lost creativity and exploring its joyous value today, the subject of this article.
But what are the inner obstacles, which I call the shadows of age, which block us from finding the treasures? And how do we overcome them?
Personal shadow is a term coined by renowned Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. The shadow develops in each of us as children as we inevitably identify with socially acceptable traits (politeness, generosity, caretaking, and so on) to form a conscious ego and banish their opposites (rudeness, stinginess, self-centeredness, and so on) into the unconscious shadow. These unacceptable feelings, images, and desires lie dormant in the shadow but may erupt abruptly in hurtful or self-destructive behavior, addiction, and projections of all kinds.
With shadow-work, we learn how to listen to the inner voices of the shadow that lead us to do the same things we have always done without the results we want. Instead, we can detect these voices as shadow characters and work with them in a specific way. In the context of age, they are those images, fantasies, and fears about late life that are influencing us outside of awareness and stopping us from finding the treasures.
In the context of creativity, we express certain traits, feelings, and talents and don’t express others. Those that remain unexpressed get stuffed away into the shadow, creating the “unlived life.” But that material is not merely “negative”; our forbidden and unexpressed gifts and talents and our unfulfilled dreams and desires also lie dormant there.
For instance, in some families, athletic gifts are praised and encouraged; in others, they are devalued as trivial or meaningless. In some families, artistic or musical talent is praised and encouraged; in others, it’s seen as a waste of time. In some families, academic performance is praised and valued; in others, it’s seen as a way of avoiding “real” work. So, if we grow up in a family in which our unique gift is not valued or supported, it gets banished into the dark closet of our minds.
In addition, as adults, our financial and emotional needs may limit our creative expression. Marriage, family, and work may inhibit our creativity by keeping us in narrow roles with few outlets for imagination.
The result: Spontaneous creativity cannot arise naturally from the soul, which always seeks to express itself in innovative ways. But in moments of transition, the barriers to connecting with the creative soul grow thinner and the call to create grows stronger. At midlife, we may stop and reflect on our journey, eventually reclaiming lost creative impulses and exploring new forms of expressions. Facing illness or accident, many people reevaluate their lives in a shortened time horizon and seek to fulfill an unmet dream, such as painting, photography, dance, or writing a novel.
My friend Phil told me that he felt fortunate that he was able to earn a living as an author. However, after writing twenty-five nonfiction books to pay the bills, his long-lost dream, a novel, was calling to him. He had continued to fantasize that it would be a labor of love in his seventies—and it would be the one thing left undone that would lead to regret on his deathbed.
With retirement, too, the soul’s longing for self-expression can be unleashed. For the first time, many people feel freedom to heed the call, follow their intuition, pay attention to their daydreams and night dreams, and explore their unlived creative lives. As I was writing this section, a woman, age seventy, emailed me and described her late life: “I’m a writer, sculptor, and member of two choirs. And I’m playing in a recorder quartet, after not playing the instrument for many decades. I didn’t know that I was an artist until now!”
Howard, a psychologist colleague, and his partner bought a condo on the Big Island, in Hawaii, anticipating that they might retire there. He went back and forth for a decade, seeing patients in L.A., then returning to the island. I spoke with him during the week that he completed the transition to live there.
“I’m nervous because I’m a busy beaver,” he told me. “And I’ve never lived without accomplishment. So, I was worried about what I would say when people asked, ‘What do you do?’”
But the cultural rhythm in Hawaii is slower and easier, he told me. “So, the setting supports where I’m at. I’m choosing to change life now, and for me, that means focusing on creativity—sculpting and writing.”
Howard described how, when he’s working with clay, he’s fully present and lost in the moment, in a creative flow state. “The reason for doing it is the sheer joy of the process, not the outcome.” He’s letting go of his ego’s goals of earning money or helping people and learning how to practice presence while sculpting, writing, eating, walking, or tying his shoes. He’s letting go of busyness and changing his pace by attuning to his body, conserving his vitality, and connecting to his inspiration.
In this way, creativity becomes more than a hobby; it becomes a practice. Responding to the clay in his hands, Howard is not the Doer. The creative muse is doing the work.
The link between creativity and aging is complex and profound. It urges us to ask: What is possible in late life? Not what is impossible due to the inevitable limits. Not what is possible despite aging. But what is possible because of it?
What can we create because of our extended life experience, because of our resilience, because of our decades long view of our life story? What can we create because of our personal history of wrestling with shadows, inner critics, or creative blocks? What can we create because of our ripeness, our capacity to get out of the ego’s way and open to soul time?
Stories of late-life creative renaissance abound. Marjorie Forbes retired as a social worker in New York City at sixty-eight and began to study the oboe. At eighty-one, she had joined chamber ensembles at the 92nd Street YMCA and at a community arts school. She told a reporter, Abby Ellin, “I’ve reinvented myself to do something I’ve always wanted to do.” Her colleague, Ari L. Goldman, plays with the New York Late-Starters String Orchestra and wrote a book about learning an instrument later in life. (New York Times, March 20, 2015.)
Research indicates that the range of creative potential across a life span has been underestimated. Ageism has robbed us of the vision of late-life creativity, leading in part to the disorientation many of us experience today. Our own internalized ageism, in collaboration with this cultural blind spot, stops us from engaging in innovative pursuits and engaging with them from the inside out.
The call to be creative may trigger inner obstacles. We may hear “I can’t learn that now.” “It’s too late.” “I can’t remember or concentrate.” “I don’t know how.” “I’m doing it wrong.” “I’m too slow.”
If our internalized ageism blocks our soul’s yearning to create, we can simply take a breath, observe it, and remember that it’s not who we are. Then we can look at the consequences of obeying it—stopping ourselves again—and make a different choice.
Ageist conventional wisdom tells us that creativity peaks in young adulthood or at midlife, so if we haven’t made a breakthrough discovery, written our novel, or painted a masterpiece by then, it’s over. But the whole truth is this: Late-life wisdom, nostalgia, longing, and mortality awareness are sweet ingredients for poets, novelists, composers, painters, sculptors, and more.
These people defy the peak-and-decline narrative: Verdi and Strauss wrote some of their greatest operas in their eighties and nineties. Georgia O’Keeffe, nearly blind, enlisted assistants to help her paint from memory into her nineties. Grandma Moses didn’t even begin painting until she was seventy-eight! Boris Pasternak wrote Doctor Zhivago at sixty-six. I. M. Pei designed the pyramid for the Louvre at sixty-six. Frank Lloyd Wright designed the Guggenheim Museum in New York at seventy-three. Margaret Atwood published the sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale at age eighty-one. Leonard Cohen released his last album just before his death at eighty-two. And Bob Dylan, now eighty, continues the never-ending tour.
These exemplars may be called geniuses, but they are not exceptions as late-life bloomers. Karl Pillemer, a gerontologist at Weill Cornell Medical College, and his team asked more than 1,500 people who were seventy or older a single question: What are the most important lessons you’ve learned over the course of your life? Many reported that they had achieved a creative life dream or embarked on a new and meaningful endeavor after reaching the age of sixty-five. They finally felt that they were “getting it right,” he wrote in 30 Lessons for Living. They were discovering the secret as Elders to creatively change their lives. Karl Pillemer’s work continues as The Legacy Project: Lessons for Living from the Wisest Americans.
In his seminal book The Creative Age, psychiatrist and gerontologist Gene Cohen explores the unique combination of creativity plus life experience, including creative stimulation as medicine for our brains, immune systems, and moods. He examines three obstacles to inventiveness that we face as we age: fixed psychological patterns, fixed ideas, and unresolved family relationships. In other words, he is calling for emotional, cognitive, and relational life repair to liberate repressed creative forces from the shadow. Free of anger, resentment, and disappointment, we may heed the call to explore brand new forms of self-expression.
There is yet another level that is rarely discussed: creativity as spiritual practice. Many decades ago, as a new meditator, I believed that sitting practice alone was a spiritual act; meditation alone constituted a spiritual life. I drew a clear line between sacred and profane activities.
But my heartbreaking experience of spiritual disillusionment led to a surprising discovery of writing as a spiritual practice. In 1981, after leaving my spiritual community, I met Marilyn Ferguson, author of The Aquarian Conspiracy, who hired me to write her publications, which explored innovations in consciousness research. I vividly recall my first day on the job: I sat with a blank mind facing a blank screen–paralyzed. As I began to take assignments, become engaged with cutting-edge research, and articulate fresh ideas, I found that journalism fit my temperament. I loved gathering information, synthesizing it, and transmitting it to others.
Then I submitted it to Marilyn. She took a red pencil (in those days!) and deleted or altered every word. The text came back unrecognizable. My heart sank. She demanded a dense, telegraphed style without a trace of me; in the objective voice, the subject disappears.
I wrote and rewrote . . . and rewrote . . . and rewrote. Finally, an article was accepted. And I began again.
One evening, staring at the screen, tears running down my cheeks, I threw up my hands. “I will never become a journalist. I will never please this woman.”
And yet I felt such joy in finding the right word to make a sentence fly. In that moment, I recalled a story from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition: A solitary monk named Milarepa lived in the woods, practicing meditation day and night and eating only nettle soup. For years, he tried to attain realization, but his fasting and prayers were not enough. One day, another man, Marpa, emerged from the woods. Their eyes met, and Milarepa recognized Marpa as his teacher.
Marpa told him to build a small stone house in a certain corner of the woods, “over there,” then disappeared among the trees. For the next year, Milarepa gathered stones, one by one, lifted them slowly, and carried them to the site. Then, with painstaking attention, he fit them together until they formed a sturdy structure.
Marpa emerged from the woods, glanced at the stone hut, and pointed in another direction: “Oh, no, over there!” Then he vanished.
Milarepa’s heart sank, but he set about his task as if he had no choice. He took apart the hut stone by stone, carried each one to the new spot, and fit it into place. A year later, the task was complete.
Marpa reappeared, shook his head, and proclaimed, waving in yet another direction, “Oh, no, over there!”
Again, Milarepa submitted. He took it apart and rebuilt it. Again, Marpa appeared and said, “No, over there.”
This time, as Milarepa placed the last stone, the story goes, he became enlightened.
I stared at the screen, tears dried, smiling. I had believed that only my sitting practice was spiritual practice. But the work of writing and rewriting, submitting and letting go, concentration and surrender, was a kind of yoga. It also could teach me about self-observation, unattachment, and impermanence, breath by breath.
I began to write as if setting words in a sentence were setting stones in a house. I wrote as if my awareness of the writing process were more important than the content. I saw fewer red marks!
Then another discovery emerged: I would do intensive research, then sit to meditate for an hour, emptying my mind, relaxing my body, letting go of all words and images. When I returned to the screen, words flowed through me in an easy river. No Doer. No struggle. No time. Writing practice, sitting practice, writing practice, sitting practice, became the rhythm of my life.
Slowly, I learned to trust this process: exploring ideas, sitting in pure awareness, filling the mind, emptying the mind, getting ego out of the way. And the red marks disappeared.
The cycle of mentoring was over. During the next few decades, the Muse came to me, through me, in quiet moments as my ego receded. And I opened to Her. The Muse has given me six books—literary children that gestated in my body/mind, entered my cells, married my soul, and moved through me out into the world. Like a mother, I have released them to live their own lives, to find their own way to those who seek them. My gratitude to Her is boundless.
Ultimately, we are not our stories or our wounds. And we are not our creative endeavors. Our egos may be tempted, as we age, to deeply identify with them, to build castles in the air in order to fend off the transitoriness of our own body and the impermanence of the world around us. We may be tempted to believe that our creative projects can trump our mortality.
When I began to gestate this book, I asked myself: Is this book my ego’s last stand? One more attempt to hold on to my name, my brand, my role in perpetuity? To compensate for the loss of charms and powers that comes with age? Or is it a call of the soul, something I must write or risk betraying myself?
As I sat with this inquiry for two years, a response eventually emerged. I would heed the call of my soul to write—and I would let go. I would sit at the screen and sit at the cushion. I would fill my mind and empty my mind. The work would be a practice in opening to the voice of my soul. It would be a gift that only I could give.
But I also would monitor my energy, my self-care, and my relationship needs. And I would not lose balance, as I had as a young, single person. I would not identify with the Doer and allow that internal character to pressure me or drive me from within toward a heroic achievement. Rather, I would open to flow and to my soul’s mission: transmitting information about consciousness.
With the inner work of age, a closure of unfinished business to release the past, emotional and creative repair, we can feel profound gratitude for how our lives unfolded. The psychological and spiritual practices that are offered in The Inner Work of Age eventually lead us to discover an advanced stage of human development that is hidden in plain sight—the shift from role to soul. This phrase was coined by spiritual teacher Ram Dass, a Harvard psychologist who returned from India in the 1960s and became a renowned guide and bestselling author. He describes this shift in identity from the active roles that we have fulfilled during our lives to something deeper, something connected to a spiritual essence that has inherent value and does not depend on our productivity, accomplishments, or self-image. Ram Dass calls this spiritual essence loving awareness. Whether we call it soul, Spirit, Higher Self, or God, when we begin to identify with That, we begin to become who we really are. With this next stage of development, we can unearth the deepest treasures of late life.
Connie Zweig, Ph.D., is a retired therapist, co-author of Meeting the Shadow and Romancing the Shadow, author of Meeting the Shadow of Spirituality and a novel, A Moth to the Flame: The Life of Sufi Poet Rumi. Her new book, The Inner Work of Age: Shifting from Role to Soul, extends shadow-work into late life and teaches aging as a spiritual practice. Connie has been doing contemplative practices for 50 years. She is a wife and grandmother and was initiated as an Elder by Sage-ing International in 2017. After investing in all these roles, she is practicing the shift from role to soul.