Entering the Third Act

What does it mean to find ourselves living nearly 90 years these days?  There seems to be plenty of interest in discovering effective ways to provide initiation into adulthood for late teens and early twenties, but nothing that looks at initiations into the third act of the human life.

I suppose in some cultures people don't live as long, or the culture has long established the value and stages of the third act within its own boundaries.  But in western cultures that focus on the first and second acts of life–birth to age thirty and thirty to about sixty–those entering the third act become extraneous at best, or invisible at worst, particularly the women.  This is odd, since the women outnumber the men more and more as years go on.

I'm interested in discovering effective initiations into the third act of life.  I suspect that most of us have few role models for vibrant, happy, healthy, creative elders. When I was growing up aging was considered tragedy or worse, misery, yet I suspect that there are gems hidden to be mined that cannot be discovered at any earlier stage.  I want to know what they are and how we come by them.

Something tells me that this huge generation of Baby Boomers might be motivated to discover the real gold available to individuals in the third act of life, and in discovering it, to make immensely valuable contributions to humanity.

One of my mentors, Aftab Omer, President of the Institute of Imaginal Studies, says that the "Great Transmission" is lost to humanity from time to time, but that the dropped thread is found once again through the rediscovery or recreation of meaningful ritual.  I believe this is one clue to how people in the third act of life may begin to discover who they really are and how much their awareness of this can create new avenues to human wholeness.

I want to explore this idea in preparation for my sixtieth birthday.  I have only five more years to prepare for that movement into my own third act.  Thriving courageously, creating fearlessly, and leading with freshness and humor that go deeper that ever before.  Yep.  That's the direction I want to go.  I want to be surprised by how much richness and magic is there that I was never told about.  I know it's out there and I'm coming to get it.