Creative Aging: Rethinking Retirement and Non-Retirement in a Changing World

Discover Your Unique Gift

"Creative aging is a choice…. If we remember that transition always begins with endings, moves on to a wilderness period of testing and trying, and only then do we reach the beginning of something new, then we can embrace this encore period of life with hope and curiosity, remembering always that it is our true nature to be creative, to be always birthing new ways of sharing our planet together."
―from the Epilogue

In a practical and useful way, Marjory Zoet Bankson explores the spiritual dimensions of retirement and aging. She offers creative ways for you to share your gifts and experience, particularly when retirement leaves you questioning who you are when you are no longer defined by your career.

Drawing on stories of people who have reinvented their lives in their older years, Bankson explores the issues you need to address as you move into this generative period of life:

• Release: Letting go of the vocational identity associated with your career or primary work
• Resistance: Feeling stuck, stagnant, resisting change
• Reclaiming: Drawing energy from the past, discovering unused gifts
• Revelation: Forming a new vision of the future
• Crossing Point: Moving from stagnation to generativity
• Risk: Stepping out into the world with new hope
• Relating: Finding or creating new structures for a new kind of work

Marjory Zoet Bankson, an artist and spiritual guide, is author of The Soulwork of Clay: A Hands-On Approach to Spirituality and Creative Aging: Rethinking Retirement and Non-Retirement in a Changing World (both SkyLight Paths) and many other books. Former president of Faith At Work (now called Lumunos) and editor of Faith@Work magazine for over twenty years, she now travels nationally to offer retreats and workshops. She currently teaches on spiritual companionship at Washington National Cathedral, the Servant Leadership School, and Virginia Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C.