Reading Our Lives: The poetics of growing old

Against the background of Socrates' insight that the unexamined life is not worth living, Reading Our Lives investigates the often overlooked inside dimensions of aging. Despite popular portrayals of mid and later life as entailing inevitable decline, this book looks at ageing as, potentially, a process of poeisis: a creative endevour of fashioning meaning from the ever-accumulating texts - memories and reflections - that constitute our inner worlds. At its centre 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 - including cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and the psychology of ageing - this book presents a vision of aging that promises to accommodate such time-honoured concepts as wisdom and spirituality; one that understands aging as a matter not merely of getting old but of consciously growing old.