The middle and later years of the adult life journey should be filled with new growth, new learning, fresh creative enterprise and rich productivity. But many adults turn off their ability to learn because they accept the self-fulfilling myths about age and the aging process.

Some myths about aging are:

Most adults become senile if they live to an advanced age

Attitudes and opinions inevitably become rigid and unchangeable in later adulthood

Powers of learning drastically decline in middle and later adulthood

Sexual powers fail in the later years

Creative powers inevitably decline as one passes into later adulthood

By the time one is 60 plus, time has run out for learning and creative enterprises

The Ulyssean Society, founded in 1977 by Dr. McLeish and a group of his students, is named after Ulysses, the legendary Greek explorer and hero whose final voyages took place in his later years. His love of life was extolled in ancient times by Homer, and in more recent times by Tennyson:

                Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved the earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

Some of the founding members are still quite active in the Society, but our spiritual mentor, Dr. John McLeish, died at the age of 82 in December 1995, studying and writing until the very end. In 1994 he published a book of poetry, The Far Shore Dimly Seen.

A recently revised edition of The Challenge of Aging by Dr. John McLeish is available to members of the Society at a special rate.