The Second Half of Life:
An Opportunity,
A Spiritual Threshold
Last evening, in a book study I'm fortunate to take part in, we finished Fr. Richard Rohr's *Falling Upward*. We spent the night sharing about the opportunitie offered in the second half of life ~ the chance, from across very different eras and traditions, to meet a single recurring conviction:
That the second half of life is not decline but a turning inward. Youth builds a self for the world; age, rightly met, asks us to meet a deeper one.
I've found pointers to this motif across the ages and nearly every tradition ~ the Buddha's teaching that awakening only ripens with age, Aristotle's contemplation as the proper work of a life already settled, Rumi's late turn toward ecstatic, inward-facing devotion. And on through Rabia of Basra, Hildegard of Bingen, Dante Alighieri, Meister Eckhart, Catherine of Siena, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Schopenhauer, William James, Carl Jung, Erik Erikson, Angeles Arrien, and of course Fr. Richard Rohr.
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I offer the list not as scholarship but as evidence ~ a sign this isn't confined to one tradition, but something closer to a shared human knowing.
For me it doesn't represent some grand extinguishing of the ego, but rather honoring the ego's necessary role in the first half of life. And yet that role, like the toys of a child, must eventually be set down ~ relegated to a chapter that's finished.
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This has been the most challenging opportunitie I can imagine. Symbolically dying a thousand deaths, each one a letting go of who I thought I was, or what I thought I was ~ Now I Move
Into the Grand Mystery.
Not of who I'm supposed to be ~
But through Faith, Trust, and Love,
being shaped & molded, into
something beyond....
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~ and tonight, I carry that same question back into the room ~ grateful to sit with others doing the same slow, unglamorous work of letting go.
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