Meaning in Later Life: Why Staying Fully Engaged Matters
At 62, I thought I knew what my life was supposed to look like. I thought I understood what it meant to have "failed." And I was absolutely certain that the best parts of my life were behind me.
I was wrong about all of it.
When Success Becomes a Prison
There's a particular kind of pain that comes from watching your carefully constructed life unravel. A successful career in education. Financial security. A marriage. By my fifties, I had built what looked like a solid life until redundancy at 52, followed by divorce, forced me to sell my home and confront a reality I had not planned for.
Maybe you know that pain too. The moment when everything you worked for, everything you believed defined you, suddenly disappears. And you are left standing in the rubble of a life you no longer recognise, wondering how you ended up here. It is a question I have sat with deeply, and one I explored more fully in How Did I Get Here?, a reflection on how we arrive at places in life we never quite intended to reach.
Going back into teaching felt like the ultimate defeat. Every morning, I walked into that classroom carrying resentment like a weighted backpack. I told myself I was only there for the money, that this was just a pit stop, that I deserved better than this. I had withdrawn from life itself, convinced that at my age, I should not have to give any more of myself.
After all, is that not what we are promised? Work hard, reach a certain age, and then you are done. You have earned the right to coast.
The Moment Everything Shifted
Then illness forced me to stay home for a month. And something unexpected happened. I could not stop thinking about those children. The class I was letting down. The child who would be unsettled by my absence. Despite my resentment, despite my insistence that I did not care, it mattered to me.
When I returned to work, I was still clinging to my armour of indifference. Just show up, I told myself. Nothing more.
Then came the teacher conference that changed everything. A young man stood before us and shared his story, growing up in care homes, moving through foster placements, carrying the weight of abandonment and uncertainty. The pain in his voice was palpable. But so was something else: triumph. He had made it to Cambridge University, nearly won a major talent show, before choosing to follow his true calling.
When he spoke about what made the difference, he did not talk about luck or talent. He spoke about two key adults who gave him self belief. One of them was a teacher.
I went home that night and felt ashamed. Because I knew, deep down, that I had not been giving those children my best. I had not been giving anyone my best, not even myself.
The Question That Changes Everything
That night, I sat with a question I had been avoiding for years: What if I am not done yet?
What if, instead of viewing this chapter as a step backward, it was actually where I was meant to be? What if comparing myself to friends my age who were travelling and enjoying retirement was not just unfair, but missing the entire point?
Here is what I realised: somewhere along the way, I had started using my age and circumstances as permission to withdraw from life. I had decided that being in my sixties meant I was finished growing, finished contributing, finished becoming. And the most sobering part? I had no physical ailments, no real limitations, just a mindset that had surrendered to a story about ageing that was never really true.
Perhaps you have told yourself a version of that story too. That it is too late. That too much has gone wrong. That the person you were before the setbacks is someone you can never get back to. It is a question many of us carry, and one I have written about before in Is It Too Late to Start Over After 50?, because beneath so much regret lies the fear that our opportunity for renewal has passed.
But that young man at the conference had not survived his childhood because someone decided they were done giving. He survived because someone chose to show up fully, despite their own struggles, despite their own pain, despite everything.
Letting Go of the Battle
What I eventually came to see was this: the struggle was not really about the job, or the divorce, or even the redundancy. It was about the battle between where I believed I should be and where I actually was.
That unspoken but relentless resistance was exhausting me. The illness, the persistent unhappiness, the constant dissatisfaction, all of it was rooted in that internal war. I was fighting reality rather than inhabiting it. And in doing so, I was turning up in life as a lesser version of myself.
At some point, I had to let go.
Not in defeat, but in trust. Trust that where I am is exactly where I need to be, even if I cannot yet see the wider purpose of it. Trust that this chapter is not a mistake, not an error in the story, but part of something larger than my own expectations.
There was also something more difficult to acknowledge. In my resistance, I had lost sight of gratitude. I had overlooked the privilege of playing even a small part in the lives of so many children. I had measured my worth against an imagined alternative life, rather than recognising the true significance of the one I was actually living.
Many people my age may be easing back, stepping away, taking things more lightly. But that is not my calling. I can either step fully into the life in front of me, or continue fighting a battle that serves no one.
What I am learning, slowly, is that real freedom is not control. It is trust. There is wisdom in the recovery tradition that speaks of powerlessness and surrender, not as weakness, but as release. Much of my suffering came from the need to control outcomes, to force life back into the shape I preferred. When I began to loosen that grip, something shifted. Not the circumstances, but my relationship to them.
And in that shift, engagement became possible again.
What Wisdom Traditions Know
We talk about freedom in later life as if it means freedom from responsibility, freedom from effort, freedom from having to show up. But across very different traditions, the wisdom points to something far more alive than that.
Sadhguru teaches that the depth of your experience is directly proportional to your level of involvement. When you are fully engaged with life, not performing, not enduring, but truly present, life becomes profound. When you are not, you do not just miss out. You miss the very essence of being alive.
The Bible speaks to a similar transformation from a different angle. Romans 12 calls us not to be conformed to the patterns of this world, including perhaps the narrow story about what ageing means, but to be renewed in our minds. To discover what is good, acceptable, and purposeful. Not through self centred ambition, but through offering our gifts in service of something beyond ourselves.
What both are pointing to is this: freedom in later life is not the freedom to disengage. It is the freedom to finally become our most authentic, most present, most generous selves.
The Gift Hidden Inside the Setback
Now I ask myself a different question each morning: what if having an impact is not a consolation prize for a life that did not unfold as planned, what if it is actually a privilege?
What if the real measure of our later years is not how many beaches we have visited, but how many lives we have touched? How many times we have chosen presence over protection?
Our later years are not meant to be a slow retreat from life. They are meant to be a deepening into it.
Every morning now, I show up differently. Not because everything is fixed or perfect. Not because I do not still carry some sadness about how things turned out. But because I have stopped using my age, my circumstances, or my disappointments as reasons to withhold myself.
And here is what I have discovered: when you stop withdrawing from life, life stops withdrawing from you.
Your Turning Point Is Waiting
If you are reading this in your fifties, sixties, or beyond, and you have been telling yourself that your best years are behind you, consider something radical: what if they are not?
What if the losses you have experienced have not ended your story but deepened it? What if the unexpected path you are on is not a detour but the very road you were meant to travel?
Your turning point is waiting. Not the life you planned. Not the one that looks like everyone else's. But the one that is uniquely, powerfully yours, shaped by everything you have been through and offered back to the world as something only you can give.
The only question is: will you show up for it?
Freedom in later life is not about having less to give. It is about having the freedom to give what truly matters.
