The Four Hills

The ancients made sense of Cicero’s “stages” or Lin Yutang’s “rhythm and beat” by portraying human aging as a circle that nature and society divides into four parts. To several North American native tribes, life has been experienced as “four hills” (childhood, youth, maturity, old age), each corresponding to a wind and a season, and each possessing its own challenge, climax, and resolution. To the early Hindus, it was a journey through four ashramas, four phases of social and spiritual growth. Pythagoras was among the first western thinkers to interpret life as a cycle of four phases, each roughly twenty years long and each associated with a season: the spring of childhood, the summer of youth, the harvest of midlife, and the winter of old age. The Romans likewise divided the biological saeculum into four phases: pueritia (childhood); iuventus (young adulthood); virilitas (maturity); and senectus (old age). ~ Source