The value of preparing for retirement with early financial investing is not lost on anyone. However, if we’re invested in our elder years reflecting purpose and meaning, then it will call for investing in our psychological portfolios. The mythologist Michael Meade distinguishes elders from olders. Olders simply accumulate years. Meade suggests, “Everyone gets older, but not everyone gets wiser, and the elders are those who get wiser from their own failures, woundings and awakenings.”
Building Enough Ego
Financial assets make up a financial portfolio. Borrowing from Meade’s suggestion, we can consider our psychological assets as our failures, woundings, and awakenings. In order to creatively work with these psychological assets, we need to possess enough ego. There is no particular chronological age needed in order to invest in our psychological portfolio. The only prerequisite is having a healthy ego and a desire to make modifications with that ego. A healthy ego can be characterized as endowed with a consistent feeling of self-worth. It also entails feeling clear about personal values and allowing them to guide major decisions. A robust ego affords us the opportunity to feel, identify, and live from our desires. It provides the drive to employ effective boundaries, protecting who and what we love. A strong ego enables us to know our strengths and weaknesses as well as to accept them.
Working With the Ego
With a relatively healthy ego in place, we can begin to work with the ego using the psychological assets of failures, woundings, and awakenings. Original ego focuses—such as achieving, producing, acquiring, building, and being impressive—begin to lose their luster. The ego certainly can continue to help us be of service; it simply loses its sovereignty.
Here are some suggestions for how to apply your psychological assets and invest in your psychological portfolio.
- Exercise stewardship for wounds and gifts. This is about getting honest about how you have been wounded. This means getting honest about being wounded. We exercise stewardship for our wounds as we offer them care. Wounds typically fall into two categories. There are wounds resulting from being abused or violated, and there are injuries caused by neglect. Stewardship entails being curious about what a wound is asking for. We sometimes need professional support in order to understand how to best care for a wound. Wounds ignored tend to show up in our lives over and over again, preventing us from accessing an elder vision that transcends being on survival. Our gifts also need stewardship. This means becoming familiar with our strengths and how to best develop them, and serve with them.
- A greater curiosity about serving. What I ask of life is a valuable ego orientation. Emerging elders are curious about what life is asking of us. There’s a willingness to live the question of how and where life wants us to serve.
- The creative holding of failure. The psychological asset of failure from an elder’s perspective is significant. The asset is not only composed of a willingness to learn from failures. It is also about accepting life’s immensity and understanding that participation in such a journey inevitably leads to failure. If you’re not failing, you’re not fully participating. Holding failure creatively also entails the humility needed in order to avoid viewing failure as wrong or inappropriate.
- Awakening as an apprenticeship. As an apprenticeship, awakenings do not imply hierarchy, in which the person awakening is more evolved than others. If we have an awakening, then we’re simply clear about what we need to learn.
- Elder apprenticeships. One valuable elder apprenticeship is unity consciousness. The ego favors duality consciousness as a way to confirm our separateness and uniqueness. Unity consciousness connects us to others rather than separating us. It may also have us connected to all living things. Another apprenticeship involves letting go of trying to get life right, which is one of the ego’s favorite pastimes. The elder alternative is to allow life to get us right. Such an allowance can be viewed as a commitment to live in accordance with the Serenity Prayer: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” There is also the apprenticeship or the awakening to living an adversarial relationship with life. The entrapment has us either attempting to triumph over life or feeling like a victim of life. The elder alternative is to live from gratitude and generosity. We remain thankful for all we’ve been given and are willing to be generous with our time, energy, and gifts.
If you believe you’re in possession of a well-developed ego, then it may be time to contribute to your psychological portfolio. It is only too easy to try to skip the work, resulting in aging prematurely.
Aging does not have to be a list of losses and regrets. However, with a strong ego, you can only hope to be in possession of a sound psychological portfolio by accruing assets now. It may be too late when you turn 70.
