The adventure of aging: Rethinking our metaphors for later life

For many of us, aging can be viewed and experienced in what are implicitly tragic terms: in other words, as a narrative of decline, as a downward trajectory toward decrepitude and death. Such a way of “storying” later life can set us up for (among other things) narrative foreclosure, which may feed the mild-to-moderate depression to which we are susceptible in the face of aging’s challenges and changes. This paper offers a more positive narrative of later life. Borrowing ideas from narrative gerontology and narrative psychology, it outlines how aging can be “re-genre-ated” from tragedy to adventure in at least four intersecting directions: outward, backward, inward, and forward.