The Iron Chef is handed a bag of ingredients and challenged to create a culinary masterpiece. You are handed a bag of faculties and circumstances and challenged to create an autobiography. Calcified recipes don’t work well in either case and prizes are awarded on the basis of the creation rather than the materials. This concept is particularly important during adolescence, midlife transition, and old age; which sometimes overlap.

     During development, a personal and professional identity is forged from stereotypes that are floating around in the family and the society, combined with the actual resources that each kid happens to have received in his bag. Hopefully he is not pressed to follow a recipe for which he does not have the ingredients, but is allowed to utilize what he does have in something like his own way.

     Around midlife the contents of the bag start to change, but the established recipe often does not. Short term memory degradation and back pain are among the most notorious midlife losses but, for men, fluid depletion and the loss of immortality and omnipotence are actually more troublesome. On the other hand, experience and the possibility of wisdom have been added and these can be potent resources that enable new autobiographical possibilities. Hopefully the midlife transition goes well and there is no red sports car or 26-year-old hottie.

     And then eventually we should expect to lose everything and die. It may sound strange to say that this does not have to be regarded as any loss at all. It depends upon who you think you are and what you think you are doing. If you have prepared yourself with an appropriate philosophy, then you may regard these losses as new ingredients for your evolving creation. You may be the sort of person who can do this naturally or you may have to work on it. In the last few of my mother’s 92 years she released each faculty without apparent resistance or regret and she was happy throughout, so I know it can be done.