A Time to Live: Seven Tasks of Creative Aging

A guide that explores the spiritual and emotional dimensions of aging offers explains why each of us must confront certain issues in middle age, such as waking up to mortality, embracing sorrow, and savoring blessedness among others, in order to bring peace to our later years.

Raines, a former minister and retired director of a nondenominational retreat center, poignantly discusses the importance of facing certain issues as one moves forward into the elder years. Reflecting on his own experience, he presents seven tasks to resolve: facing mortality, embracing sorrow, savoring blessedness, reimagining work, nurturing intimacy, seeking forgiveness, and taking on the mystery. This last he describes as finding the key to new hopes and possibilities for our later years. This wonderfully readable book is a delightful and thought-provoking mix of psychology, spirituality, and literary allusions. A valuable bibliography is included. Highly recommended for general readers, this should be a priority purchase for popular psychology and religion collections.?Elizabeth Goeters, DeKalb Coll. Learning Resources Ctr., Dunwoody, Ga.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.