Editor’s note: Meridian is pleased to partner with the Eyres in presenting their new online course called HOW TO LIVE The Second Half of Life. The pre-course began last Spring and was announced by two Meridian articles on March 28 and April 11 (read them here and here) and has been unfolding on Instagram @richardeyrehtl and on the Eyres on the Road podcast. Meridian readers can still join the pre-course for free at https://valuesparenting.com/how-to-live/ until August 11.
Starting on August 15, on the same website, registration will open for the official course. The Eyres will lead the teaching, but several “adjunct faculty,” including the Proctors, will also contribute. Meridian is pleased today to present the third part of the three-part overview from the Eyres.
Why it is Beneficial to Mentally Separate the “Two Halves of our Lives”?
Most people live their entire life on one continuous spectrum, essentially living and thinking the same way for all of their 50 or more adult years, and approaching life and its goals and challenges pretty much the same way when they are 70 as they did when they were 40. The problem is that they have changed, and their circumstances have changed, and their mental and physical capacities have changed—and they have not re-invented their approach to life or altered their paradigm of life to match who and what they are now.
The thesis of the How to Live the Second Half of Life online course is that there are new ways of approaching our lives physically, mentally, socially, emotionally, spiritually, familially, and financially that we are better suited for now, and that can increase our abilities to contribute and to enjoy in remarkable new ways.
As the years pass, we lose some of our physical capacity but compensate for it with new effort and regimens; and in the words of Arthur Brooks, our “fluid intelligence” declines a bit even as our “crystalized intelligence” incorporates our experience and wisdom to form a whole new level of mental ability.
And while ageing suggests the need to “manage” and minimize our hopefully very gradual physical and mental decline, we continue to grow and expand and “ascend” in our social, emotional, and spiritual lives.
If we fail to make important adjustments in the second half, we will just keep on doing the same old things in the same old ways—but we will do them less and less well and will find decreasing satisfaction in them.
But if we consciously and deliberately shift our paradigm and redesign how we live all seven facets of our lives, the second half can be incredible! And the second half of the second half (the all-important “fourth quarter” when all games are decided) can be the best part of all.
Why an online Course on How to Live the Second Half?
First of all, in today’s world, our “second halves” and “fourth quarters” are getting longer.
Some young grandparents can expect to be grandparents for 30 or 40 years, and people who are in reasonably good health in their 60s have an excellent chance to live into their 90s.
If we put in the effort to make it so, 70 can be the new 50, and 80 really can be the new 60.
Do we want to live long? In many of our seminars, we ask our audience (usually in their 40s or 50s) how long they want to live. Interestingly, the two biggest groups of respondents are the ones who say they want to live forever—or as long as humanly possible, and the ones who say they think they want to pass on before they are a burden on anyone—perhaps checking out in their 70s. (We have a strong feeling that they will change this view once they are 70!)
Linda and I find ourselves in the first group. We are curious about what will happen in this world (and in this Church) in the next 20 years, and most of all, we want to see our grandchildren marry and have kids of their own.
And we are open to the idea (naïve?) that there is at least a feasible chance that if we work at it, we can stay reasonably able and healthy for quite a few more years and continue to be a blessing rather than a burden to those we love most.
Fortunately, a lot of our speaking and writing of late has been to like-minded (and like-age) people—many of them business and community leaders and CEOs who want not only to live long but to make their fourth quarter a time of recalibrated broadening and contributing.
So, we have been working, for decades now, on the kind of physical, mental, social, emotional, spiritual, familial, and financial approaches that can really work in life’s second half, and we find that they are very different than the way most of us lived our first half. We are putting those approaches into this How to Live the Second Half of Life online course. Take a look at https://valuesparenting.com/how-to-live/ for more details.
We all need a balanced approach in this business of deliberate, managed ageing. Some of us get very good at physical fitness, but don’t pay much attention to the mental or the spiritual. Some really focus on the financial, but let the social and familial facets of their lives slide. The best results come when we develop a plan for how to live our best in all seven life-facets—physical, mental, social, emotional, spiritual, familial, and financial. Doing our best at each one of these benefits the other 6!
Not a Bed of Roses
I remember my ageing grandmother saying something like “getting old is not a bed of roses.”
We imagine that many of you are saying (or thinking) “The Eyres are trying to make ageing sound happy and exciting, but he doesn’t know what I’m facing.”
You might identify more with what one old crotchety uncle said, “Getting old is the Pits!”
We just want to reassure you that we do empathize with what so many of you (and us) are feeling. Some have lost their health in ways that are impossible to recover from. Some are frightened that their cognitive ability is in decline. Some have recently lost parents or spouses, or children. Some have had financial reverses and lost their self-sufficiency. Some are just in new phases of life where they don’t feel needed or appreciated, or relevant anymore. Some are pretty depressed by the directions the world is going—the world their grandchildren will live in. Some have experienced a faith crisis and begun to doubt the very beliefs they have based their lives on. Some wonder what is really left for them and feel underused, underserved, and underappreciated.
No…that certainly doesn’t sound like a bed of roses.
But there is one principle that we will be basing this course on, which can mitigate (not eliminate but mitigate) a lot of the woes that we face.
We began learning it a long time ago from a book called Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. As a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp, Frankl suffered in unimaginable ways, including having medical experiments done on him. But he essentially decided that the ONE freedom he still had was the freedom to decide how he would respond internally to the abuse and the abusers. He could choose whether to hate or forgive, whether to look for doom or for hope.
It is not our circumstances or situation that determine our joy or our motivation. It is how we perceive and respond to what happens to us.
Frankl observed that among the fellow inmates in the concentration camp, those who survived were able to connect with a purpose in life to feel positive about and who then immersed themselves in imagining that purpose in their own way, such as conversing with an (imagined) loved one. According to Frankl, the way a prisoner imagined the future affected his longevity.
That is what we are trying to do in HOW TO LIVE—to imagine our future at its best—to live well-examined lives. We will each try (and help each other to try) to magnify the joy and the good in our lives, to make the most of what we have, to improve wherever we can, to serve those we love a little better, and to find new ways to view our lives and our abilities to broaden and contribute and to make the second half or fourth quarter the most consequential and blessed season of our lives.
How does all this relate to Meridian Readers?
Nearly 600 people (perhaps around 1,000 if we count husbands and wives separately) have already registered and have been participating in a pre-course on WHY to live the Second Half differently…which leads up to the official course on HOW to Live the Second Half of Life, which begins on September 1.
A significant number of those who have registered as members are Meridian readers, and you can still sign up for free for the remainder of the pre-course (until August 10) at https://valuesparenting.com/how-to-live/. Doing so and becoming an HTL (How to Live) member will give you access to all of the posts and podcasts that have led up to this point.
You will then have two or three weeks to review those WHY-TO materials and decide if you want to commit to the 7-month course, which starts September 1.
In teaching the course, we will continue to be assisted by the Proctors and two dozen additional “Adjunct Faculty” who we admire and who we believe can teach us all a lot about living the second half of life artfully, creatively, and fully. Thanks to these additional teachers, all of whom we respect and want to learn from. Together, we think we can offer second-half-ers a balanced and proven pattern for a truly awesome “Autumn” of life!
Richard and Linda Eyre have been called “America’s most trusted voices on Families and Grandparenting.” Read the recent national cover story on them at https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/grand/2025summer/
