Act II

PT: You mentioned infidelity. How do you cope with those seemingly inevitable urges?

MG. Affairs are like dynamite. They get a couple's shadows out in the open. My opinion is that affairs are a last resort. If all your efforts don't help, then you or your mate will probably fall in love with someone else. How it resolves depends on your personal biographies, but you should recognize it for what it is-dynamite that's trying to wake you up. But you can't build a family with dynamite. You can't do a whole lot with dynamite except blow things up.

Of course Shelley and I are sometimes attracted to other people. Fortunately, we've found gentler, more effective ways to wake each other up than dynamite.

PT: Let's talk about that shadow. That's a very powerful image and a very personal one to anyone who's been in a dose personal relationship. What is the shadow and how do you face it?

MG: We spend, I would say, a major amount of our time and energy making ourselves look right. Interviews with people in the second half of life are interviews with people who are saying, "I don't give a damn anymore. I'm old enough to be myself." My experience is that one of the gifts of the second half of life is learning to stop posturing and to be ourselves. That, I think, is the good news about growing older-that it becomes harder and harder to hide the shadow, harder and harder to hide from death, harder and harder to fake it, harder and harder to pretend. So the incentives for being yourself truly increase.

A lot of illnesses in the second half of life are, again, to wake us up. When I was young, I'd get an ache or a pain or an illness and I would think, "Damn it. How can I get rid of this as fast as I can? What an irritation. For the last three or four years I've noticed in myself and the people I've interviewed that we're listening to our bodies and that our bodies are teaching us about our shadow. That's where we usually put the stuff that we don't like.

I tell a story in my book about a man whose heart was in worse shape in his early forties than when he was sixty. That runs absolutely counter to all my images of the life-cycle that I grew up with. My image was that your arteries get dogged, you go downhill, etc. But here was a guy at the bottom in his forties and he climbed up all the way through sixty. That's the story of healing and we're not telling that story in our culture.

PT: Taking that one step further, what about fears of death?

MG: In the second half, your awareness of your own mortality is increasing, that's why I call midlife a "nearer-death" experience. I became more afraid of it in the first flush of this experience, but then came a kind of peace because I was no longer running away from it. I felt it in my body, my own mortality. I didn't have to read Ernest Becker's The Denial Of Death to know I had been denying it. I could see it by the way I lived.

That's why people on their death beds don't say, "Gee, I wish Id spent more time at the office' " They say, "I wish Id spent more time with my wife, or with my kids, or exploring nature.'

PT: The paradigm in this culture is that adults don't grow. That challenges the premise of your book in some sense.

MG: I wrote this book because I had a war going on inside me between the voice that said, "You're finished growing, you're done, it's a done deal:' and another voice that said, "You've only begun to explore what life is about.' For me, writing this book was a way of strengthening and deepening and consolidating the voice that said, "You're going to grow for the rest of your life.' That other view-that grown ups are done growing-is a myth that needs to be retired.

PT: Which voices tell us that we're done growing?

MG: I once had this same conversation with my wife. She said, "What do you mean voices? I don't have any voices like that inside me that say we're done growing." I said, "Shelly, go back to being a child. Now tell me the story of some adult around you a profound transformation or growth experience.' She was silent for a moment, then said, "I can't think of anyone." I said, "That's what I mean.'

When I was growing up I cannot remember a single story of an adult whom I was aware of who had a positive transformative growth experience in adulthood. And if all the growth that happens is hidden from you, that's a pretty powerful message.