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little or no energy. My mother, who lived to be ninety-four, taught me that the secrets to a good life are staying active and continuing to grow. If and when to retire are the proverbial $64,000 questions.”

    Jim Levinson can trace his fifty-year career in international development (nutrition and public health) to the influence of numerous heroes, role models, and mentors. Heroes included Mahatma Gandhi, Mother Teresa, Rabindranath Tagore, Martin Luther King Jr., and Dorothy Day.
    Role models included activist Father Daniel Berrigan and Catholic Worker leaders. Under their influence, Jim moved with his young family to Haley House, the Catholic Worker house in Boston, where he and his wife provided food and hospitality to homeless people and the elderly. Two years later, the family was living communally at Catholic Worker’s Noonday Farm in Winchendon, Massachusetts; they farmed there for ten years. Through the Catholic Worker community, Jim also met Quakers, Protestants, Buddhists, and a mentor, a young rabbi who rekindled Jim’s interest in his Jewish heritage, coached Jim in the oral tradition, and taught him to lead religious services. At seventy, he continues as a consultant on nutrition in Pakistan and Afghanistan, officiates at weddings, and conducts religious services, in part because the work is so satisfying and in part to pay for home improvements and for his daughter’s wedding.

    Profile: F. James Levinson
    Jim Levinson was one of many people in or near their seventies who responded to New York Times columnist David Brooks’s invitation in October 2011 to write a brief autobiographical essay on their lives to that point, an evaluation describing what they did well and not so well and what they learned along the way. Brooks suggested several categories of modern adulthood, such as career, family, faith, community, and self-knowledge, and asked respondents to grade themselves in each area. He thought that engaging in self-appraisal would be salutary as well as potentially useful to younger persons who could benefit from their elders’ life experience. Although Brooks did not publish Jim’s “life report,” writing it helped Jim to crystallize his current thinking, especially about work and retirement.
    Jim has long subscribed to the idea that life is circular, that the first half of the circle is for becoming , doing , acquiring , while the second half is for being , giving , divesting . Turning the “wheel” to make a circle takes conscious effort and hard work; modestly, Jim doesn’t claim to be doing that as well as he might. To the despair of his family who beg him not to take on an additional endeavor unless he drops two, he seems to add instead of cutting back. Still, at age seventy, what remains most important to him is living consistently with the values he has honed over a fifty-year career in international development (nutrition and public health). As he wrote in his life report, “Despite the in-fighting, the nutrition work, mostly in South Asia and Africa, plus university teaching, has been deeply rewarding and makes me feel like a citizen of something larger than a single nation.”
    Jim lives in a house in the woods near Marlboro College in Vermont, the summer home of the Marlboro Music Festival. He plays the piano and sings, goes canoeing with his wife, and is still consulting part time on malnutrition and poverty in Asian and African countries, which requires extensive travel. He would like to be doing the tough but personally rewarding hands-on work that junior staffers do, but has resigned himself to writing government policy and preparing agency documents. He also teaches an online course on international nutrition to students located all over the world. He is nearly fluent in Urdu and Hindi and can sing in those languages, which, sad to say, often makes the Pakistanis and Afghans he meets doubt that he’s an American.
    If a picture is worth a thousand words, the Heroes Wall in his