Celebrating Creativity in the 4th Act

The Fourth Act of our lives, if we are lucky enough to live into our seventies and wise enough to stay humble and full of grace, can be a time of deep creativity. Our final years can be lived with abundance and joy if we find a way to unite all of the disparate pieces of ourselves into an integrated whole. The conflicting parts of our psyches and the paradoxes we’ve struggled to reconcile before, have the potential to become material of a unique, vibrant tapestry, woven together with the thread of our creative energy.

Unlike the creativity of our younger years, when insights and innovations would seem to explode onto the canvas of our consciousness – iconoclastic, wild and unsummoned – creativity at this late stage of life unfolds slowly and steadily, emerging from years of inquiry, observation and experience, and brought into fruition with even greater technical mastery honed through years of practice.

Carl G. Jung calls this process individuation. Erik Erikson characterizes the final stage of life as the crossroads between integrity and despair.

Creativity in the Fourth Act is the antidote to despair.