Author Archives: Karen Seashore

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About Karen Seashore

I am a sociologist, life coach, policy wonk, and tarot reader. Other than reading a book, I always prefer to work with other people. Creating small changes -- in myself and in the world around me -- is my calling. You can find my scholarly publications under Karen Seashore Louis (or Louis, K.S.).

Can an Abstract-Random Older Woman Find a Comfort Zone?

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When I logged into my e-mail today, I clicked on brainsparker (as I often do if there is nothing more pressing) This is what came up: 

“Great Things Never Came From Comfort Zones”

I found that both unsettling and soothing.  Most of the time I feel just a tiny bit uncomfortable.  I don’t quite fit it; I don’t look quite right today; My thoughts are jumbled; I put that meeting in on my calendar on the wrong day–damn!  Underlying this is my fading but still genuine love of chaos (aka, “real life”).  Just enough so that I am always a little on edge.  I hate lists (too confining), excel spreadsheets, and prefer making decisions (after some agony) based on heart rather than head.  

But it often feels as if my needs are changing.  Controlled anarchy that was fun in my 30s – two young children, multiple pets, an antique house that required endless maintenance, a demanding job – would feel unbearably complicated now.  I can’t multi-task the way I used to – and I don’t want to because it distracts me from things that I want to do (writing, knitting, and drinking coffee). 

Is it being older that makes me yearn for “flow” and the sense of being lost in one activity or thought?  Or, have I just worn myself out from years of struggling to find something that others might consider “balance”? 

I was talking to my friend Cryss today and she reminded me that both of us are “abstract-random”.  And we are still often uncomfortable, even now that we are Medicare eligible.  Julie King hints at the origins when she says that “People with this thinking style dislike dictatorial leaders, narrow boundaries, unfriendly people and competition. They also like to work on things at a high-level and can be frustrated when asked to focus on one thing at a time or to look at or share exact details” (Canadaone.com).  Ouch–too close to the bone.  But abstract-random can be creative – and creativity is what great aging is all about (at least according to gerontologist Gene Cohen).

But even now, when I am fully focused and “in the groove”, I am still a teeny bit uncomfortable because what I want is just out of reach. 

What is comfort anyway?  I dove into Google Scholar (one of my favorite places to be if I am restless), and searched for writing on “comfort zones” before the 1980s.  It was all about temperature control.  One title, “Thermal Sensations of Workers in Light Industry in Summer”, gives you a good sense of what I found.

There was a single startling exception, a 1978 article in Social Problems about women…

…and cultural mandates.  The authors concluded that “comfort zones” (in quotes) were medical specialties where married professional women did not feel the derision, rejection, and hostility that they experienced as normal most of the time. 

Patricia Bourne and Norma Wikler, the authors of the study, provided the “aha” moment that I was searching for:  women who wanted it all – marriage, children, and a professional career – were rarely comfortable.   And they were me.

When I went to college in 1963, I assumed that I would marry a nice man (preferably a professor), live in a pleasant home (preferably eclectic MCM) and raise creative, smart (preferably two) children.  By 1967, when I left with my BA, I knew that I would choose a different path .  But that path was not easy.  In 1968, no woman had ever been tenured in the sociology department at Columbia University.  When I finally left that was still true.  I married, but in New York at that time, keeping your “maiden name” required a huge bureaucratic and legal rigmarole, and finding an apartment with two last names (are they living in sin?) was not always easy either.  So I took my first husband’s name.  I saw only one woman in a senior position until I was in mid-career. 

So I made choices to feel as comfortable as I could. For a while I worked outside an academic job.  I then chose to work in education rather than sociology or a business school because it was felt more comfortable.   I enjoyed my small victories and a sense that being a bit unpredictable and on the edge would bring me a little strength in a world that was not designed for women.  Yup, that meant that I tended to “sweat the small stuff” because sometimes what other people saw as small I thought of as much bigger.  Sometimes I was right, sometimes I wasn’t…

But now the comfort of feeling that I belong seems almost within reach.  When I look around at work, men and women are more able to talk about balancing family and work.  My second marriage feels, as the British say, “bespoke” and we have figured out routines that allow an abstract-random person to live with someone whose way of being in the world is more concrete. Life just feels – well, mostly comfortable. And not boring. But it is hard not to ask whether feeling more comfortable will somehow diminish me. Do great things never emerge from comfort? Does thinking or writing in a way that is challenging to me and others require discomfort?

Or, is it just a result of aging — the much quoted finding that most people become happier as they get older?  A response to the zeitgeist, where comfort becomes an essential respite from the daily bludgeoning of the national and international news? Am I finally learning lessons that most people “got” when they were much younger? Reflecting on the connection between comfort and creativity/great things raises more questions….

And, as for the thermal stuff, they still keep all restaurants, movie theaters, and offices set for temperatures that men prefer – Olga Khazan says that most women like them warmer and perform better when the thermostat is up a few extra degrees.  Women and older people (older women?) are, as one article puts it “thermally dissatisfied” – out of their comfort zone. 


If I Don’t Know My Purpose Am I A Retirement Failure?

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Photo credit:  Ian Schneider

When I was in my 50s, I gave my mother (who was 30 years older) a copy of Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life.  She was in a funk, battling a tendency toward untreated depression, and I thought it might help her.  Of course, I hadn’t considered some underlying reasons why that was a poor idea (she was an avowed atheist and often frustrated by her generation’s limited expectations for what women would do outside the home).  My inappropriate choice was based on the title, which implied that everyone already has a purpose and our job is to accept and live into it.  My mother didn’t read it, so I feel only a smidgen of regret at the gift.  But I think that I was dead wrong….

Here I am, almost as old, inundated with a drumbeat of blogs, and aphorisms that urge me to FIND—REIGNITE–CREATE a purpose-driven life, which is typically described with an almost sexual PASSION at the center.  A sampling from the web includes: 

  • “Be fearless in the pursuit of what sets your soul on fire”
  • “Life – seize it and make it amazing. Discover your passion. Take chances. Follow your dreams. Today is the day. Don’t pass it by”
  • “There is no passion to be found playing small—in settling for a life that is less than the one you are capable of living.”
  • “The things you are passionate about are not random. They are your calling.”

Books extolling this certainty for later-in-lifers proliferate –now is the time to find that passion!  Directly or subtly, effort is at the core:  How to find your passion after you retire.  As one website, 60 & Me suggests, now is the time for people to become more purpose-driven and more passionate – and probably do something that looks like work (paid or unpaid):

“The overlap between what you are good at and what you are paid for is your profession. On the other hand, what you are paid for and what the world needs is your vocation or calling.  The point where what you love overlaps with what the world needs constitutes your mission. Then lastly, the combination of what you are good at and what you love is your passion.”

THIS QUOTE EXHAUSTS ME, in part because I had to read it three or four times to understand it.  MOREOVER, IT MAKES ME FEEL BAD ABOUT MYSELF. Not only do I have to have purpose and passion – I need a mission and a vocation in my retirement!  I have no idea where to start with this….

There is a dark underbelly to the mandate of finding purpose at all life stages.  I have a colleague, quite brilliant, a wonderful administrator who effortlessly makes things happen within a large bureaucracy, is exceptionally kind, and who suffers from a sense that her life is not meaningful because there is no focused PURPOSE at the center, nothing that DRIVES her daily work.  She feels that she is not enough.  Her work life lacks passion. Or focus. Or certainty.  Or something. 

I don’t blame Rick Warren, although producing a book that has sold 30 million copies provides impetus for others to adopt his words (but not his meaning).  Warren’s work focused on finding purpose by living fully into beliefs and a community shaped by a particular set of virtues and principles.  It has less to say to the self-motivated individual who tries to self-actualize through individual striving.  His title was highjacked.

So, back to age, retirement, and a redefined “purpose”. I find comfort in some ideas that I have come across, most of which involve making purpose more “right sized” in our lives rather than the driver of happiness and fulfillment.  Dmitri Pavluk talks about self-actualization, which includes insight (think of the Buddha!), awareness and clarity (look around; be observant!), and connectedness (Yay! Other people) – and, yes, something called purpose.  In other words, purpose can only be understood in the context of a whole life that has both inner and outer expressions. The elements that he defines as self-actualization are related, fluid, and inseparable.  We change.  We grow. Life does not always happen on the schedule that we had in mind. 

Mark Manson, whose blog often addresses questions of personal meaning, says it more simply:

So when people say, “What should I do with my life?” or “What is my life purpose?” what they’re actually asking is: “What can I do with my time that is important?”

I couldn’t make my mother happy, but I know that she adored her family and made my high school friends want to come over to our house because they felt so welcomed.  She exposed me to eggplant in the late 1950s, when no one else in Ann Arbor knew what an eggplant was, much less how to cook it.  She enjoyed living in several foreign countries during her adult life. She taught me not to stand on the sidelines when an important political question is on the agenda.  I am not an atheist, but her questioning of EVERYTHING has been an invaluable model for me.  I remember her (when not severely depressed) as “right sized” and adventuresome. 

When I look at Ian Schneider’s photo above, what I see is visual irony:  How often do passion-purpose lead us to a place where all we can (metaphorically) see is our tired feet in a featureless landscape?  That sense led one of my internationally recognized colleagues to retire earlier than he had planned.  However, a year later, as we checked in at a casual breakfast, he described his choices about how to spend his time—to read and think, explore awareness and joy of nature, create new connections with his wife –with a sense of gleeful gratitude

In the end, isn’t caring for a precious asset – time – at the core of purpose?  I can do the most important and meaningful things that are available today.  And tomorrow.  And stop worrying about BIG PURPOSE AND PASSION.  …To be continued….

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

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Stand still. The trees ahead and bushes beside you
Are not lost. Wherever you are is called Here,
And you must treat it as a powerful stranger,
Must ask permission to know it and be known.
The forest breathes. Listen. It answers,
I have made this place around you.
If you leave it, you may come back again, saying Here.
No two trees are the same to Raven.
No two branches are the same to Wren.
If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
Where you are. you must let it find you.

David Wagoner, from Collected Poems 1956-1976

Don’t we all long for the sense of place that David Wagoner’s poem describes?  A place where you belong, that reinforces your sense of being “right sized” and in tune with your surroundings?  

That is what I do not have….

Last December, I discovered that my friend Jane was leaving her condo overlooking a small lake just outside Minneapolis.  She sold all the carefully curated furniture (including a fireplace that she had recently installed) and moved to a house in Florida with her new-ish partner Dave.  Boom. A Minnesota native, Jane was not much of a traveler and had season tickets to every theater, orchestra, chamber music or other event in the arts-rich community in the Twin Cities.  In other words, this was not an expected next chapter in her retirement story. At least I didn’t expect it.

Then yesterday, I chatted with Susan, who confided that the 9 weeks she and Bob spend in Puerto Vallarta were just too long – ‘I feel so disconnected – Bob loves it, and would stay longer.  We compromised so that next year we will stay for 6 weeks and come back for a few. Maybe go away again for a couple of weeks on a road trip with the dog to see the kids.’ Disconnected in Mexico…..but looking forward to long summer weeks in their remote and rather primitive cabin in Northern Minnesota – Susan’s “happy place”.

Another couple, long-time Minnesotans, recently moved back into their house, remodeled to suit the vision they had when buying it decades ago.  It sits on a large city corner lot, where they are responsible for shoveling two long stretches of sidewalk. Even when we visit them in the glory of early fall, the house’s steep front entry invokes fears of slipping – and I fast forward to hospitals stuffed with elderly people with pneumonia and broken hips.  But for our friends, an adventuresome trip or two a year in a warmer continent (including lots of hiking), is enough. They never seriously discussed any other options than the major remodel….

What about Sue, who lives in a spectacular three-story mountain home in Colorado, but whose husband is tired of plowing the driveway and dreams of a tripped out Mercedes Sprinter and a couple of years on the road while they are still in great health? (Wait!  Even though they have no children, the dogs are still young…and where will they all live when life on the road gets old?)

As Joe Strummer and Mick Jones put it in The Clash’s famous lyrics:

Should I stay or should I go now?
Should I stay or should I go now?
If I go, there will be trouble
And if I stay it will be double
So come on and let me know…

We and our friends are all vigorous in our mid-60s to mid-70s. Not wealthy, but also not strapped.  We can do almost anything we want to — but not everything (and long ago redefined our fantasies to fit our budgets).  Blessed with the freedom to move or be “snowbirds” who fly away in the winter, we all have different stories that dance around the question of where and how to live once we are not tied to a job.   

Although I still have a year to work part-time, Dan and I have off-and-on been grappling where we want to be forever (or what seems that way). The dilemma of moving-or-staying may seem particularly acute for Minnesotans who, although a tough bunch, are mostly willing to admit that winter is challenging.  We love Minneapolis – the arts, friends, lakes within walking distance, good government, and fun restaurants on every corner – it is truly glorious seven or eight months of each year. But, as we say, there are two seasons: winter and road repair. (A local ice cream, Nicollet Pot Hole, memorializes the tire-busting crevasses that emerge every year after the incessant freeze-thaw of hard winters.)  

The question of staying or going is only partially a byproduct of weather.  We are living out the consequences of the tendency of better educated and more affluent Americans to wander.  Like many of our friends, Dan and I lack real roots. Our parents lived far from where they were born; we moved away from our parents.  My daughters and grandchildren live in Massachusetts and Colorado; Dan’s closest relatives are in Nebraska and New York. Easy enough to get to for planned visits, but not for Sunday brunch or occasional babysitting.  We have no role models (except Dan’s mother, who lived by herself and bought a new car at 92) and worry about creating mid-life drama for our loved ones if we age-in-place. We have vicariously experienced how frequent plane flights to deal with emergencies take an emotional and financial toll on friends in their 60s who are caring for parents in their 80s who live far away.  There is always an independent retirement community with affiliated health care. I AM NOT READY FOR THAT – I don’t want to live in an age-ghetto.  We will think about it again when I am 80!

That leaves us with the explicit or implied dilemmas faced by my friends.  Move to New Mexico, which is cheap-ish and has all four seasons, but requires starting over with friendships and community?  Split time between Boston-Denver-Minneapolis (none of which is a winter paradise), but feel a bit disconnected everywhere? Spend a few weeks away from deep winter (while postponing the issue)?  We have been through all of the options and none fits perfectly.  

Dreaming about alternative life styles is a playful “imagine a different future” activity when you are 25-35-45.  Now, we want to live each day to its fullest, and evaluating the many patterns of staying-going feels like a waste of time.  Why can’t a place just speak to me and tell me where to get off? Like a merry-go-round, the scenery changes and then I realize that I have been here before….

FALL FROM GRACE?

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…..retirement isn’t an event, nor is it a one-size-fits-all proposition. It’s a process that takes time, especially as we look toward post-career lives that are likely to last as long as our working lives…Whether it is through a new line of work, service, learning, or other meaningful activities, Encore Transitions emphasizes post-career engagement as a foundation for vitality, happiness, and healthy longevity (Encore Transitions Program, University of Minnesota).

To fall from grace is an idiom referring to a loss of status, respect, or prestige (Wikipedia).

The University of Minnesota, where both Karen Rose and Karen Martha worked, is busy developing initiatives to support “the successful transition” of their employees and others in the community to the world after retirement.  As we boomers arrive en masse to a time when we are expected to retire, an emerging cottage industry acknowledges that:  (1) most of us won’t die before we are 80; (2) we are terrified of settling in to a life that consists only of golf or babysitting for our adorable grandchildren; and (3) we, apparently, need to be taught how to retire.

At first, the idea of retirement struck me as simply unthinkable.  I would be like Pablo Picasso, who completed his most massive sculpture—the “Chicago Picasso” —  when he was in his late 80s.  I would continue to become a slightly quieter, but significantly more reflective version of what I had always been.  But then I began to observe what happens to most people – perhaps not Picasso or other artists whose creativity seems to expand with age – but most of us.  We just get a little slower, a little more tired.  Perhaps irritating features of work that we overlooked because we were enthusiastic about most of it begin to annoy us more.  Maybe we began to annoy our colleagues more.  Time to think about leaving before people started to hint that it might be time….

The Reality: I loved the external validation that came with being an “expert” in my work life – someone whose wisdom was sought by younger colleagues and whose insights were considered important on various “strategic planning committee” assignments.  It was not as if I didn’t have a life outside of work – an adorable husband, good friends, two adult children who gratifyingly produced grandchildren who were also lovable.  But, I was reminded of the time when my children were young, and I would be introduced as “Erica and Margit’s mother” – it didn’t feel bad, because I knew that was would follow shortly was “she is a professor at the U”.  If retired and introduced as “Margit’s mother,” it would end there.   Unless I became something else.  A new identity is what the “Encore Transitions” program at the U promised to provide – is that promise a shield from invisibility?

If that doesn’t feel like a fall from grace, I don’t know what else I could call it.  Hang up those academic robes.  Remember that every book you have every written ends up on the publisher’s remainder list at about 10 years after it comes out.  Remember that you haven’t kept in touch with people who were good colleagues but who retired a few years before you.  No office.  No one to fix your computer for free. 

What is at stake? Conventional ambition…a desire for visibility and influence?  An inability to be imaginative about the present, much less the future?   I could get a life coach!  But wait, I am a life coach. Oops.

Parker Palmer (who is not retired…although he is nearly our age) writes about this compellingly in Let Your Life Speak (Jossey-Bass, 2000).  Chapter III of his book is titled “When Way Closes”.  He goes on to say,

As often happens on the spiritual journey, we have arrived at the heart of a paradox:  each time a door closes, the rest of the world opens up.  All we need to do is stop pounding on the door that just closed, turn around – which put the door behind us – and welcome the largeness of life that now lies open to our souls…(p 54)

That is the good news.  But it took Palmer a decade to figure this out.  And he was in his 30s and 40s when he confronted losing his first career and finding something else.  And I just re-read a book that is nearly 20 years old and still selling well.  I probably don’t have a decade to figure it out.  Ok – stop wishing that you were Parker Palmer instead of Karen Rose Seashore. 

The less good news is the rather depressing list of course topics included in the U of Minnesota’s “Encore Transitions” classes.  They do not reflect soul work, but approach the topic of retirement as figuring out how to manage the logistics (money, health care, etc.) and get busy with something that looks a lot like work  — but different in an indefinable way (even less definable when it is posed as designing a third act career….). Many people have raved about this program, so I know that the discomfort I feel is in me…

And I am left with a puzzlement.  How often does retirement feel like a fall from grace?   Consider the sad “retirement party” syndrome, where many people stand up to celebrate who you WERE, and add a few vague phrases about what YOU MIGHT DO.  I think that I should ritually burn my academic gown and hood instead!  Except I found it on the back of a door when I moved to a new office after several years of using the cheap rental robes the university provides for people who don’t have their own.  A kind person left it there.  I added a zipper.  Maybe someone else should have it.  Is that falling into grace in this instance?