“Well, dear, life is a casting off. It’s always that way,” Arthur Miller said in “Death of a Salesman.”

Angeles Arrien, in her wise book “The Second Half of Life,” calls on aging adults to cast off and cross necessary frontiers in order to bring our lifetime to fruition.

Arrien says that from age 50 on — that is, moving into the second half of life — adults have four frontiers to face. We face the frontier of retirement. We face the frontier of becoming a mentor (including grandparenthood). We face the challenge of maintaining the health and function of our aging body. And we face dealing with mortality, both in suffering the deaths of loved ones and in facing the reality of our own death.

Each of these frontiers, she says, challenges us to have courage in the face of something we fear.

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