Reading Our Lives

Against the background of Socrates'' insight that the unexamined life is not worth living, Reading Our Lives: The Poetics of Growing Old investigates the often overlooked inside dimensions of aging.

Despite popular portrayals of mid- and later life as entailing inevitable decline, this book looks at aging as, potentially, a process of poiesis: a creative endeavor of fashioning meaning from the ever-accumulating texts - memories and reflections - that constitute our inner worlds.

At its center is the conviction that although we are constantly reading our lives to some degree anyway, doing so in a mindful manner is critical to our development in the second half of life.

Drawing on research in numerous disciplines affected by the so-called narrative turn - including cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and the psychology of aging - authors Randall and McKim articulate a vision of aging that promises to accommodate such time-honored concepts as wisdom and spirituality:

one that understands aging as a matter not merely of getting old but of consciously growing old.