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Crisis? What crisis?

William T Grant was a businessman. He made a small fortune out of selling people the things they needed at prices they could afford.

Being rich is fine, but is it enough? William Grant didn't think so. He wanted to be remembered for more than being the guy who founded the WT Grant dime stores. So in 1936 he established a charitable foundation called (you'll never guess) the Grant Foundation.

The very first gift the Foundation made was to a couple of doctors, Arlie Bock and Clark Heath. They thought medical research was focused too much on the causes of disease; they wanted to study the causes of wellness. William Grant, a grateful patient of Dr Bock's, agreed to fund the research.

Thus it was that, between 1939 and 1942, 268 healthy Harvard sophomores were selected for intense long-term study. Their lives and medical histories have since been tracked for over sixty years. (They have proven to be an uncommonly healthy bunch, far surpassing the longevity norms for white males born around 1920.)

Ripples in a pond

And what has the study shown? It has shown that healthy adults do what William Grant did. They broaden out. After they reach middle age, they become less self-absorbed, less focused on their own careers and immediate families, more interested in the larger community and future generations.

For the last thirty years or so, the researcher responsible for continuing the Grant study has been Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant. In his wonderful book Aging Well (Little Brown, 2002), he consolidates the results from several long-term studies of both women and men.

The popular notion is that aging means decline. Not so, says Vaillant: aging, if allowed to occur as nature intends, means progress.

Adults, he says, face six life tasks. Broadly speaking, they are undertaken sequentially:

Identity:   Achieve independence from the family of origin.

Intimacy:   Learn to live in a close reciprocal relationship with another person.

Career consolidation:   Establish a social identity through one's work.

Generativity:   Take on broader citizenship responsibilities, showing a special concern for future generations.

Keeper of the meaning:   Help to conserve and preserve the culture in which one lives and its institutions.

Integrity:   Achieve a sense of peace and unity with respect to one's own life and the world generally.

These tasks, if accomplished, lead to an ever-widening social radius. Vaillant writes:

Imagine a stone dropped into a pond; it produces ever-expanding ripples, each older ripple encompassing, but not obliterating, the circle emanating from the next ripple. Adult development is rather like that.

The success trap

At least, it should be like that. But all too often it isn't. One task or another may prove too much for us. We get stuck, and fail to move on.

So where do successful people get stuck? Typically on the career consolidation task. It's normal to be caught up in our work in our 30s. But trouble comes if, as we move through our 40s, we focus on maintaining what we have, instead of allowing a larger self to unfold and accepting the uncertainties implicit in that.

If this happens, we risk a tightening and closing in, a stagnation, a growing sense of resignation despite the outer trappings of success. The highly specific, achievement-oriented goals that have motivated us in the past seem increasingly shallow.

The so-called midlife crisis is often a signal. We are being called to move on. Our intense career focus has served us well, but the time has come to broaden out. The generativity task beckons.

Awkward questions

We may find ourselves grappling with some pretty fundamental questions. Who am I? What does my life mean? What will I leave when I'm gone?

Rabbi Harold Kushner puts it this way: 'I no longer ask the young man’s question, "How far will I go?" My questions now are those of the mature person, "When it is over, what will my life have been about?" '

Such questions may be unsettling, for they challenge the safe and familiar world we have so carefully constructed. But ironically they are dangerous only if suppressed. When people aren't willing to open up to an inner inquiry, they misinterpret their mid-life restlessness, and often change the outer circumstances of their lives in foolish ways.

Opening out

Healthy life change is usually incremental.

If we are open to generativity, we may make a carefully-managed career shift. Or we may undertake new activities outside work, thereby gradually enlarging our sense of who we are and what our place in the world is.

When William T Grant encountered the impulse to move beyond success, did he give away his business? No. Did he trade in his wife? No. Did he uproot to a commune. No.

But he did heed the call. He gave his life more meaning by allowing its orbit to expand.

Are you, too, heeding the call?