“A long life makes me feel nearer truth, yet it won’t go into words, so how can I convey it: I can’t, and I want to. I want to tell people approaching and perhaps fearing age that it is a time of discovery. If they say – of what? I can only answer, ‘We must each find out for ourselves, otherwise it won’t be discovery.’”

“You need only claim the events of your life to make yourself yours. When you truly possess all you have been and done, which may take some time, you are fierce with reality. When at last age has assembled you together, will it not be easy to let it all go, lived, balanced, over?”

These two quotations come from Florida Scott-Maxwell, a woman who successively was a short story writer, a playwright, and psychologist. Her words here come from a small book of reflections, “The Measure of My Days,”   published in 1968 when she was 85 years old.

I frequently distribute these quotations to audiences to whom I have spoken about growing old because I consider them full of wisdom. This woman at a time of physical decline gives expression to the beauty found in the search for truth and in its discovery at the last.

The search for truth cannot be put into words, the writer says, nor can the spirituality that supports it. In talking about truth, she reveals something vital about later life that most people who have not yet arrived there know nothing about. This well-kept secret is that old age is a time of and for discovery.

American culture is notoriously dubious about the value of later life and makes us fearful about approaching it. Too often, it is seen in almost exclusively negative terms: decline, disintegration, death.

A woman who is nervously approaching her 50th birthday gave expression to this conventional view in the New York Times Magazine, two Sundays ago. Daphne Merkin wrote: “All I can see in front of me is a decades-long campaign of vigilantly keeping the forces of decrepitude at bay.”  If this is truly all she can see, then she remains terribly ignorant about the experience of Florida Scott-Maxwell and huge numbers of other older people.

Were you to listen to attitudes like Ms. Merkin’s, you would never realize that advancing age can be the best time for development of the soul. If you truly care about your soul, you can be like an explorer of a new world, the inner world marked by breakthroughs into the light.

In the second quotation, I love the phrase “fierce with reality.” This is a kind of fierceness that endows human life with a special value. To judge by her writing, that is what Florida Scott-Maxwell had as she moved into her middle 80s and eventually into her 90s.

She speaks of coming to possess “all you have been or done,” a mysterious interior work of reviewing life and embracing its precious parts. In doing this, we draw from the events of our life the value that has lain hidden in them. At least, this is the way I interpret what the author is talking about but I am confident meditation on her words can produce further meaning.

Notice that she calls attention to the need for time. An interior agenda of this kind cannot be rushed. It will probably take years to accomplish this spiritual task. We will have to resist the typically American approach whereby everything has to be accomplished ASAP and devote much leisure time to this exploration.

The writer sees it as a task of assembling ourselves, putting ourselves together spiritually in a new way, piece by piece as if in a jigsaw puzzle, until we have become a new whole. Obviously, in thinking this way, we are forced to use imagery to describe spiritual realities that cannot otherwise be grasped at all.

Then we are prepared to let it all go. When the interior work is accomplished we become no longer resistant to surrendering ourselves to God or the light, or ultimate reality. In this view, there is a time for everything and this is the time for final gift of ourselves.

Scott-Maxwell speaks of the final surrender as “easy.” Surely it will not be that way for everybody. However, doing the interior work would seem to be the ideal preparation for whatever may come.

Richard Griffin