At age 74, I've embarked on a campaign to expand the range of my emotional experiences. I want to discover the ways that life can be savored more fully than what I've been able to manage so far. So I joined a local "men's group", one where the leader claims to be able to help men envision new goals and to work more effectively to achieve them. I had to pay up front so it was only later, when the group first met, that I discovered there was a problem. The men in this group range in age from 30 to 48. That turns out to be important, very important. Because they're still caught up in that whirlwind that Zorba the Greek called "the full catastrophe"--they're still striving to find the right career, to win the recognition for skills that brings advancement; to find the right mate and then, once the pantomime of courtship is over, to actually get along with each other; to raise children to feel loved, and to be emotionally resilient,  to be the best they can be, taking care not to pass the pain of one's own childhood trauma down in the next generation. So those  young men in my group are immersed in myriad "exchange networks" where the nexus (which often exists at an unconscious level) is giving to others with the expectation that others will give back so that you and your colleagues will keep rising together into a future that's ever-better. These young men are consumed by the need to conform to expectations that many of them can't identify or can't comprehend. Emotionally authenticity is a foreign country to them. So what does someone like me learn in this group where I'm such an outlier? A lot. I'm witnessing my younger self. I'm able to see now how, for so many years, I believed that the primary meanings in my life arose, in large part, from meeting the obligations and expectations imposed by other people or by my external allegiances or by what the culture prescribed. Now the culture doesn't have any paradigms to offer. Not for those of us who've reached the ripe age of 74. We're on our own. We have to search within ourselves to discover a passion, one that's big enough and powerful enough to give our life a personalized sense of meaning that can be sustained even as health deteriorates and as opportunities to "achieve" and "produce" gradually recede. This group has given me the gift of knowing what it is that I'm "free from." So now it is time to take the next step--to learn  how to be "free to," to be free to become a better person who's more emotionally open and who's eager to help make life better for fellow beings. Are there any classmates our there who can recommend a good group? And should there be an age limit: no one younger than 65! Let me know.