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Lifelong Learning
Center for Midlife and Meaning
You bring a lifetime of experience. You may also be bringing new questions.
Perhaps your work is changing, your children are leaving home, or you’re caring for someone you love. You may be approaching retirement, living through loss, returning to a long-held interest, or wondering what deserves more of your time. Familiar roles can shift. Priorities can change. Possibilities can emerge before you know quite what to do with them.
The Sarah Lawrence Center for Midlife and Meaning offers a place to explore these questions through learning, conversation, and creative discovery. Bringing together the liberal arts and the experience of adults in midlife and beyond, the Center helps you understand what is changing, consider what matters, and take thoughtful steps toward what comes next.
A midlife transition program creates structured time to reflect on your experiences, explore your priorities, and consider new directions alongside others asking similar questions. Guided discussion, individual reflection, and practical experimentation help you connect what you learn to the life you want to lead.
At Sarah Lawrence, that exploration begins with a question that matters to you. Who am I as my responsibilities change? What gives my life meaning now? What do I want to contribute? What would I like to learn, or try, for the first time?
You can arrive with a specific transition in mind or simply a sense that something is shifting. Your experience, curiosity, and uncertainty all belong in the conversation.
The questions that arise in midlife reach across every part of being human. Understanding them calls for more than one perspective.
Psychology and biology help us explore how we change, adapt, and continue learning. History and anthropology reveal how ideas about work, family, retirement, and aging have been shaped, and how they might be reconsidered. Philosophy invites us to examine purpose, responsibility, and what makes a good life. Literature, writing, and the arts offer ways to understand experience, imagine possibilities, and give expression to what can be difficult to name.
Together, these perspectives can make a personal turning point more understandable. They help us recognize inherited expectations, consider alternatives, and make choices with greater awareness.
Sarah Lawrence’s education is built around asking meaningful questions, connecting ideas across disciplines, and pursuing an individual direction with guidance and support. The Center brings that approach to midlife: close conversation, thoughtful mentorship, creative practice, and learning shaped by the questions you want to pursue.
The Center offers several ways to participate, from a single conversation to a sustained course of exploration.
An eight-week online seminar exploring how to understand a transition and shape a purposeful next chapter.
A supportive, multi-disciplinary and community-focused program to help you find purpose, meaning and explore all the possibilities that exist as you navigate transitions through life.
Drawing on literature, psychology, philosophy, sociology, and narrative practice, participants will explore how identity and purpose evolve during periods of transition.
This is an action-oriented course, and we want you to truly design your life’s next chapter.
Join Sarah Lawrence College faculty and guests for a day of lively conversations exploring what the arts and sciences can teach us about aging, finding purpose, and living well.
What does it mean to live well as we live longer?
We are living longer lives. Should we? What are the possibilities? How can we make the best use of those extra years? What questions become possible - and necessary – as we proceed through life?
To understand a longer life, we need to ask both what makes it possible – and what makes it meaningful.
This event is free and open to the public. Guests are invited to join the college community on campus (includes lunch) or join via Zoom.
Includes:
Courses and creative workshops, offered online and in person, exploring identity, retirement, connection, lifelong learning, and the stories we tell about our lives.
What is a poem? And why read one? Learn about poetry while taking a trip through history as we read and discuss contemporary and historical poems in dialogue with brief essays about poetry.
Thursdays, Jan 7 – Feb 11, 2027, 6:30 pm ET
Zoom · Tyler Mills
In this class, we’ll first read personal essays and excerpts from memoirs and discuss craft issues the work raises and then attempt to mimic a writer’s particular style through in-class freewrites, and short, voluntary assignments to do at home.
Wednesdays, Feb 17 – Mar 17, 2027, 6 pm ET
Virtual · Joanne Furio
For five weeks, we will study (and attempt!) the literary short story. Reading from authors who write short stories about everyday life, we’ll study the conventions they use to tell complex stories.
Wednesdays, Mar 3 – Mar 31, 2027, 12 pm ET
Virtual · Rachel Lyon
How do we write poetry to truly understand the emotional truth of our lives, to explain emotions we cannot name? In this four-week course we will examine how to tell our own stories through poems.
Wednesdays, Mar 24 – Apr 14, 2027, 6 pm ET
Virtual · Melissa Lozada-Oliva
This hands-on studio painting course will help you find your unique artistic voice through the creation of a series of self portraits. Suitable for beginner to advanced painters.
Wednesdays, Mar 24 – Apr 28, 2027, 7 pm ET
In-Person · Alyssa Klauer, MFA
Facilitated conversations that open new perspectives on the important questions people are asking in midlife and beyond.
Coming December 2026
One-on-one conversations with a Midlife Don / life coach to help you connect ideas, choose your next learning experience, or plan a small experiment in your everyday life.
What is a Midlife Don? Undergraduate students at Sarah Lawrence College, which has no majors, are assigned a ‘don’. Following the British system, a don is a faculty advisor who guides them on their individual journey through the curriculum. Midlife is similar in that no two people’s journey is the same. A Sarah Lawrence midlife don is your advisor, your coach, your guide, as you transition through life. You don’t have to do it alone!
One-off sessions or 5-session and 10-session packages available
Available November 2026
Through connections with Sarah Lawrence’s Writing Institute, Signature Learning Community, Extension courses, and community partners, the Center opens further opportunities to learn, create, and build relationships.
Midlife takes many forms. Your questions will be shaped by your circumstances, responsibilities, and hopes. Here, you can explore them in a community that values both your experience and your capacity to keep discovering.
Learn more about our upcoming coursesabout finding purpose, exploring possibility, and connecting to meaning as you navigate transitions in your life.
