Autumnal stages in life and work

I read a transcript today of an Inaugural Lecture (2008) at Henley School of Management by Prof Mike Pedler, an Action Learning facilitator and writer. In his lecture (All in a Knot of One Another's Labours - learning, self-determination and organising) he includes this extract from an article in The Guardian on 26.8.08 by the arts journalist Mark Lawson writing about writers' 'work' in later life:

"The conventional expectations of late work - the serenity of seniority, the perfection of philosophy - have been challenged by the literary critic Eric Said in his influential book 'On Late Style' (2002).

Said, a dedicated contrarian, argued that what made autumnal culture most interesting was not that the writer had come to some form of final understanding of their world and their work, but that they had failed to do so.

The career codas such as Beethoven's Grosse Fuge or Missa Solemnis - dark, dense, dragged out of deafness - were a statement, he argued, of 'intransigence, difficulty and unresolved contradiction'."

These phrases (my italics) stood out for me. As the year moves to into autumn, there are people who have a sense of that difficulty - the transition from one season to another. Some move into it easily - with serenity - while others struggle with the 'dark'. On a bigger scale, how do we approach our work as we move into this later stage? What is the nature of our own 'career coda' (Italian term meaning'tail' - to describe a section at the end of a music composition to give a greater sense of finality). And going back to the topic of mergers or the close of a business, how many people move stubbornly, with difficulty with a relation to their work/organisation left unresolved. There is something romantic about the notion of 'serenity of seniority' which in these times may be out of reach.