This article first appeared in The Kenwood Press March 1st, 2026.

When I was young, I thought old folks were those who were long past their prime—the slower ones, doddering and dozing. For me, back then, there were the stern, commanding adults who watched over us like hawks, and then the others—the fading, middle-aged ones who were beginning to fall behind.

In graduate school, I was introduced to developmental psychology and to authorities like Piaget and Erikson, whose frameworks were helpful as forecasts, yet didn’t prepare me for the weather that lay ahead. Their maps left me wondering what really happens when we actually enter the territory, and grow old. I told myself to be patient, that understanding would come in its own season. Now, half a century later, and having completed the traditional Wheel of 84—the esoteric imagining of human life in twelve seven-year turns—I’m beginning to understand.

I remember the day my daughter became a grandmother. How strange it seemed at first, until she said she was beginning to understand my relationship with her daughter—my granddaughter. She found herself feeling the same way about her own granddaughter—my great-granddaughter. With the responsibilities of parenting no longer so obligatory, hearts become freed up to simply love.

The seed of who we will become begins to stir in youth, as we seek nourishment through stem and root to support the life to be lived. Then, in adult life, we provide that nourishment for ourselves as leaf and flower. In time, as elders, we achieve the purpose of it all—the fruit that bears the seed that we shelter and offer up to what will come. This is true not only of the aging vehicle of the body, but also of its passenger—the maturing mind, which grows, flourishes, and bears eventual fruit in the gardens and orchards of humanity.

One afternoon in the early Sixties, while working as an animal technician in the psychology department at Berkeley, a fellow technician in Palo Alto told me his company was on the verge of a breakthrough and that I should buy stock. The company was Syntex, and the breakthrough was the birth control pill. I remember answering, with the offhand candor of youth, “I’m just a kid. I spend money on what interests me, not on the stock market.” I later learned their stock split three times that year, and began regretting that exchange with a condescending attitude toward my foolish youth.

I learned since then that attitude is primarily an aeronautical term, not a psychological one. It describes the way an airplane sits in the sky—nose up or down, wings level or tipped. The landscape below doesn’t change, but the view from the cockpit does. Nothing about that day at Berkeley has changed; what has changed, as I age, is my attitude toward it. We can’t alter what has happened, but we can change how we see it.

From this higher, slower level of flight today, I see that young man’s resistance not as folly but as fidelity. He was investing, in his clumsy way, in the possibilities of being human, rather than in pharmaceuticals. Aging well is less about correcting opinions of the past than about trimming the aircraft of the present—bringing the nose and wings into such an attitude that the landscape comes into view with mercy, and a quiet respect.

There is a threshold between childhood and adulthood, a phase beginning with pubescence in which a looming cathexis—an investment of psychic energy—gathers a rising tide of hormones and evolving neural circuitry. Then comes the explosive catharsis of adolescence, in which that potential is seized, explored, and ever so slowly realized as competence. As well studied and understood as this threshold is, there is another threshold—less familiar—between adulthood and elderhood.

Here we find, at first, a collapsing cathexis known as senescence, as the body begins to decline. This, too, is followed by a catharsis, equivalent to adolescence, which I call liminescence—the seizing, exploring, and realizing of the purpose of being a seasoned human being, once the obligations of adulthood have been met. If senescence is the waning of the body, liminescence is the waxing of the soul.

Navigation of these thresholds is never easy and always uncertain, yet the success of what follows depends upon how well we cross them and move into the worlds that lie beyond. The child depends upon the care of others in many ways, while the adult must be independent and care for family, career, and society in useful ways. The adult who still clutches at childhood and to being cared for becomes codependent, and often caught up in addictions. Likewise, the elder who clings to the competent responsibilities of adult life may become nostalgic for past days of triumph, grieve the loss of vigor, become lonely, and grow old and bitter. The healthy elder, on the other hand, recognizes and realizes the meaning and value of contentment.

Aging is not a matter of wearing out but of wearing in, and continuing to evolve in a gradual shift toward a wider, more cosmic perspective. My neologism “liminescence” combines the liminal, transitional nature of thresholds with the light that permeates the shadows of the human condition—the frustrations and the tragedies—to illuminate the soul. It names a mode of elderhood in which we do not simply arrive at a final stage, but one in which we learn to live in both worlds, firmly, in everyday familiarity as well as in galvanizing transcendence.

To become a healthy elder, then, is not simply to age successfully or to avoid decline. It is to ripen, to share a patient awareness of the tides of loss and gain, and to appreciate the limits of the body as well as the vastness that lies beyond. Without liminescence, we risk merely growing old and grieving what adulthood once allowed us to have and do, caught in the sadness of nostalgia and a silent, yearning loneliness.

With liminescence we find another, ultimate, and final way of being human—standing in a doorway between worlds, and at home enough in each to offer comfort, clarity, and courage to those who still believe the sky above this land is all there is.