Flourish As You Age
BRAIN HEALTH
MENTAL MANAGEMENT
A GOOD DEATH
Let's not just fade away; let's FLOURISH as we age!
The MINDRAMP Podcasts focus on three key components that have been shown to contribute to flourishing in the later years of your life. You will find mini-series of episodes that explore each component.
1) Keeping your brain and body healthy - see The Roots of Brain Health
2) Managing your mental states - see Flourishing
3) Planning the kind of death you want to have - (coming 10/1/24))
You will also find the occasional episodes that focus social concerns that I feel have an impact on our well-being, for example "Elections."
Flourish As You Age
Welcoming Wisdom #8 - Mature Creativity
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In this episode, Michael C. Patterson traces the creative landscape of later life — from Dr. Gene Cohen’s groundbreaking research on creative aging, to Twyla Tharp’s fierce manifesto for movement, to the wide horizons of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Sky Above Clouds. He concludes with a reflection on how artificial intelligence has become a collaborative partner in extending his mature mind. The episode is a compelling exploration of how creativity, adaptability, and new tools can help us flourish as we age.
This episode is part of a series based on Michael’s forthcoming book, Welcoming Wisdom: How Mature Minds Can Help Shape a Kinder, Wiser Future.
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MATURE CREATIVITY
Welcome to Flourish As You Age, where we explore how to live fully, age boldly, and contribute wisely in a changing world.
I’m Michael C. Patterson.
Today, we’re going to take a journey through the creative landscape of later life — from the pioneering research of Dr. Gene Cohen, to the living example of choreographer Twyla Tharp, to the expansive metaphor of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Sky Above Clouds, and finally, to a personal reflection on how I use artificial intelligence to extend my own mature mind.
These are separate stories — but they all point toward one truth: creativity isn’t just something we can enjoy as we age; it’s something we need if we want to flourish.
Segment 1 – Gene Cohen and the Rise of the Creative Aging Movement
Gene Cohen was a pioneer in shifting the narrative around aging from one of decline to one of potential and growth. Rather than focusing solely on the challenges associated with aging, Cohen emphasized the opportunities for continued development, particularly through creative expression. His work laid the foundation for what would become the creative aging movement.
Cohen's landmark Creativity and Aging Study provided empirical evidence that participation in the arts had significant benefits for older adults — including improved health outcomes, increased social engagement, and enhanced quality of life. This research challenged prevailing stereotypes about aging and demonstrated that creativity could be a powerful tool for promoting well-being in later life.
Recognizing the need to support and expand this work, Cohen helped establish the National Center for Creative Aging — the NCCA. The NCCA served as a national resource, advocating for the integration of the arts into aging services, and supporting artists and organizations working with older populations. It played a crucial role in promoting policies and practices that recognized the value of creative engagement for older adults.
In the book Arts in Healthy Aging, co-authored by Patricia Dewey Lambert, the authors discuss the significant impact of the NCCA and note that its closure left a void in the field. They argue for the need to restructure the arts and aging movement into a national network and advocacy coalition, emphasizing the importance of interdisciplinary collaboration across the arts, health, aging, and lifelong learning sectors.
Cohen’s vision — and the subsequent work of the NCCA — highlight how creative expression can support the development of the mature mind, fostering resilience, purpose, and fulfillment. By engaging in the arts, older adults can more easily navigate the complexities of aging, finding joy and meaning in the process.
With the right attitude, the aging process becomes a creative process and your aging self is your work of art.
Segment 2 – Extending the Movement: Twyla Tharp and the Art of Aging Creatively
One of the most vivid contemporary expressions of the creative aging ethos comes from dancer and choreographer Twyla Tharp. In her book Keep It Moving: Lessons for the Rest of Your Life, Tharp echoes many of Gene Cohen’s central insights — but through the lens of a fiercely physical, lifelong artist determined to stay in motion.
Tharp pushes back against the contraction that often accompanies aging — the shrinking of physical movement, social involvement, curiosity, and ambition. She writes not from theory, but from the lived experience of a body that has aged, been injured, and yet continues to work.
For Tharp, creative practice is not a luxury or pastime; it is a necessity for staying engaged with life. “If you want to keep doing it, you’ve got to keep doing it,” she writes — summing up the creative aging mindset in one crisp line. This principle applies to everything from climbing stairs to staging choreography. Movement is both literal and symbolic. Creative engagement, she insists, must be active, deliberate, and adaptive.
She doesn’t sugarcoat the physical realities of aging. She acknowledges loss, limitation, and the shock of decline. But she treats these as creative constraints — conditions that can inspire innovation rather than defeat. In this, her perspective mirrors Gene Cohen’s conviction that older age can foster not only resilience but reinvention.
Importantly, Tharp extends the idea of creativity beyond the studio. Her book is full of advice for anyone seeking to move — mentally, emotionally, and physically — through life’s later stages with vigor and intention. Like Cohen, she insists that aging need not diminish our capacity to grow. On the contrary, it offers us a new palette: experience, perspective, clarity, and the freedom to act without apology.
Taken together, Gene Cohen’s advocacy for the arts in later life and Twyla Tharp’s personal manifesto of movement provide a robust framework for understanding the creative potential of aging. They remind us that engagement — be it through dance, painting, singing, or simply curious living — is not a detour from aging well. It is the very path.
Segment 3 – A Sky-Wide Mind: The Ongoing Journey of Developmental Intelligence
Gene Cohen loved to use the imagery of Georgia O’Keeffe’s Sky Above Clouds — a painting. This series of paintings captured Gene vision of aging as a movement not into decline, but into spaciousness. It’s a metaphor I keep returning to, with new understanding.
The mature mind, as Cohen described it, is not simply a consequence of growing older. It is a cultivated state of awareness, born of reflection, experience, curiosity, and the creative urge to keep growing. But it is never too late to begin this journey. Aging can open doors that remained closed in earlier stages of life. Many older adults discover hidden dimensions of themselves — talents long buried, interests long deferred, or ways of thinking that were once inaccessible.
To cultivate a mature mind is to choose development over stagnation. It asks us to engage life not with resignation but with resolve. In a culture that tends to overlook the subtle brilliance of older minds, postformal thinking — relativistic, dualistic, and systematic — can be quietly revolutionary. These ways of thinking allow us to navigate ambiguity, hold paradox, and synthesize the insights of a lifetime into deeper understanding.
In the metaphor of Sky Above Clouds, we recognize the duality of old age. There’s no denying the dark clouds of old age, but they are only one side of the picture. When we find ourselves surrounded by clouds it is easy to lose our perspective. Visibility is low. We feel disoriented. But rather than feeling stuck we can heed Twyla Tharp’s advice and keep moving - up and up through the gloom, through the clouds. And, if we keep climbing — if we trust the process — we may break through into clarity. Into that fabulous expanse of bright blue sky that is always found above the clouds.
This movement mirrors the arc of transformation found in myth and literature. Like the hero’s journey, we are called into the unknown, dislodged from familiar ground, and forced to wander in the wilderness. It is there, in that liminal space, that the transformation occurs. Only by going through the cloud do we gain the sky.
The sky is not a fantasy. It is a way of seeing. A way of being. One that integrates challenge and grace, sorrow and joy, the visible and the unseen.
Gene Cohen reminded us that creativity is not a luxury, but a necessity. Not just in painting or poetry, but in how we relate, how we think, and how we choose to live. Creativity helps us shape our responses to aging, even when we cannot change the facts. It helps us reframe limitations as invitations — to see differently, to act more wisely, to deepen rather than diminish.
You don’t have to have been a lifelong learner or artist. You can start now. You can begin today to think more flexibly, see more deeply, and live more creatively.
The sky above clouds is always there. Let your mind expand to meet it.
Segment 4 – Reflection: Extending the Mature Mind
I’m in the process of writing a book called Welcoming Wisdom: How Mature Minds Can Craft a Kinder, Wiser Future in which I’m trying to organize all of my thoughts about aging well. And it can be a humbling process.
There are moments when I’m working on this book — usually with multiple strands of thought in motion — when I’m struck by the limits of my working memory. I lose track of where I placed an earlier idea. Have I already made this point? I find I circle back to questions I’ve already asked or forget to address key parts of an argument. I sense the limited borders of my own capacity, especially when trying to hold too many conceptual pieces in mind at once.
But now, these moments - these limitations no longer lead to frustration and discouragement. Because now, I have help. I have been learning how to work affectively - collaboratively - with artificial intelligence programs.
Working with AI has become, for me, a way of externalizing and extending my mind. It holds threads I might drop. It reminds me of what I’ve said before. It scaffolds the larger cognitive structure I’m trying to build. In many ways, it functions as a collaborative working memory — an ever-attentive partner that helps me retrieve, sort, and refine my own thinking. I don’t see this as a sign of weakness or deficit, but as an indicator of mature cognitive adaptation.
One could call my use of AI “compensation,” but I don’t think that word fits. I’m not compensating for failure. I’m orchestrating my resources and effectively leveraging my strengths — which is exactly what mature minds learn to do. Just as I use calendars to extend my sense of time, books to extend my knowledge, calculators to help me compute figures, and conversations to extend my insight, I now use AI to extend and amplify my thought processes.
One of the most remarkable aspects of working with AI is how it allows latent connections to become actionable. There are times when I sense — dimly — that something we’re working on resonates with a book I read years ago. I can’t recall the title, or the author, or even the exact argument. But I know the connection is there. The synthesis has already happened somewhere deep in the folds of my mature mind.
In the past, that insight might have remained unrealized — a forgotten node in a vast mental network. But now, with AI, I can describe the vague shape of what I remember — an argument about cultural evolution, a metaphor involving a garden, a critique of rationalism — and the system can retrieve and reconstruct it for me.
What was once a faint echo becomes a clear reference, ready to be examined and woven into present thinking.
This isn’t just a trick of memory. It’s a way of making the implicit explicit. It’s a bridge between the stored potential of accumulated knowledge and the real-time demands of generative thought. In this way, AI enhances not only my memory but my creative momentum. It helps me enter and sustain flow — that state when the challenge is high, but so are the resources.
AI raises the ceiling of what I can hold in mind and work with. It extends my working memory. It retrieves what I’ve dimly intuited. It helps me connect the dots and keep moving. This is not about being outsmarted by a machine. It’s about being more fully myself, with a new kind of cognitive ally beside me.
In a way, AI has become a partner in the orchestra of my mind — an instrument I can call on, not to play for me, but to deepen the harmony.
In this way, artificial intelligence enables me to pull closer to my creative potential and to more deeply engage in the process of creative aging.
Closing:
From Gene Cohen’s research, to Twyla Tharp’s fierce commitment to movement, to the wide skies of mature creativity, and even to AI as a partner in thinking — the message is clear: aging well is an active process. Creativity, in all its forms, is the path forward.
The sky above the clouds is always there. Let’s keep pushing through the dark clouds climbing toward the sunshine.