Description |
It used to be said the life is short and art is long, but now in our supposed high point for the era of the ?scientific management of aging? (Cole, 1992), our goal is instead ? the art of living longer. Our current landscape for understanding the experience of aging is representing by the following descriptors of the ?received view? which illustrate but do not exhaust the examples in the literature in the last two decades: age wave (Dychtwald, 1990); fountain of age (Friedan, 1993); from age-ing to sage-ing (Schachter-Shalomi, 1997) and that we have entered into phase of age power (Dychtwald, 2000), and the power years, (Dychtwald, 2005), and the creative age (Cohen, 2001); third age (Sadler, 2001; Weiss & Bass, 2002); successful aging (Bowling, 2007; Dillaway & Byrnes, 2009; Inui, 2003; Rowe and Khan, 1999); prime time and encore (Freedman, 2000; 2007); aging well (Valliant, 2002); positive aging (Hill, 2006); healthy aging (Stanner, Thompson & Buttriss, 2009; Weil, 2007); the art of aging (Nuland, 2007); productive aging (Bass & Caro, 2001; Morrow-Howell, Hinterlong, & Sherradan, 2001); transcendence in later life (Tornstam, 1999-2000); vital aging (Achenbaum, 2005); selfempowerment (Maples & Abnet, 2006); empowerment (Haber, 2009), and elder culture (Roszak, 2009). Thus, I propose that the culminating curvature ? or inflection point - we now find ourselves in is the operations and supreme goal of optimal aging (Aldwin & Gilmer, 2003). |