Lessons From – Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life

TL;DR – You’ve probably lived your life with a lot of assumptions, ideas, foundations that were imposed on you by nature or nurture. Coming into the second half of life and look back on the first half, you probably realize you’ve had your fair share of screw ups along the way – relationships, career, family, etc. You’ve probably asked yourself why you make the mistakes over and over again; you may have questioned the meaning of life and what your purpose is. This book asks you to look within and understand the differences between the ego and the soul. Leaning in to the discomfort of anxiety versus falling back to the comfortable, secure, and depressing.

Most books I can get through in about 3 days. This book took me 2 weeks. I came out of it with 17 pages of notes; here are the condensed questions and lessons I took away.

The book starts by asking you, “Whose life have you been living? Why, even when things are going well, do things feel not quite right? Why does so much seem a disappointment, a betrayal, a bankruptcy of expectations? Why is the life you are living too small for the soul’s desire?”

The purpose of life is to answer the large questions of the soul. This process starts by growing up and passing through the trials of life.

“The journey is your journey, not someone else’s. It is never too late to begin anew.”

The chief cause of human error is to be found in prejudices picked up in childhood. No one awakens in the morning, looks in the mirror, and says, “I think I will repeat my mistakes today,” but frequently, this replication of history is precisely what we do, because we are unaware of the silent presence of those programmed energies. No prisons are more confining than those we know not we are in.

We all live with expensive ghosts in memory’s unmade bed, for what we do not remember remembers us nonetheless.

The goal for the second half of life should chiefly be to not repeat the script and the same mistakes in the first half.

In our era, the most common characteristic of this kind of passage, is the deconstruction of the “false self” – the values and strategies we have derived from internalizing the dynamics and messages of our family and our culture.

Most of us live our lives backing into our future, making the choices of each new moment from the data and agenda of the old – and then we wonder why repetitive patterns turn up in our lives. Life must be remembered backwards but lived forwards.

“They might still fondly gaze at the old world, but they risk engaging in a larger world, one more complex, less safe, more challenging, the one that is already irresistibly hurtling towards them.”

We all walk in shoes too small for us. Living within a constricted view of our journey, and identifying with old defensive strategies, we unwittingly become the enemies of our own growth, our own largeness of soul, through our repetitive, history-bound choices.

Within the journey of the second half of life, how many of us really know enough to grasp that we really do not know enough? It was Plato who said, “I know that I know nothing.” The second half of life is a continuing dialectical encounter with divergent truths, truths that are generally quite difficult to bring to consciousness until we are forced to do so. These truths include the recognition that this is our life, not someone else’s, that after our thirtieth birthday we alone are responsible for how it turns out, that we are here but a fleeting instant in the spinning shuttle of eternity, and that there is a titanic struggle going on within each of us for the sovereignty of the soul.

— Becoming who we think we are

The birth of life is also the birth of neurosis. We are in service to twin agendas – the biological and spiritual drive to develop, to move forward and the archaic yearning to fall back into the cosmic sleep of instinctual subsistence.

To be recurrently intimidated by the task of life is a form of spiritual annihilation. The daily confrontations with these gremlins of fear and lethargy obliges us to choose between anxiety and depression, for each is aroused by the dilemma of daily choice. Anxiety will be our companion if we risk the next stages of our journey, and depression our companion if we do not.

When faced with choice, choose anxiety and ambiguity, for they are developmental, always, while depression is regressive. Anxiety is an elixir and depression a sedative.

The struggle for growth is not for us alone; it is not self-indulgent. It is our duty, and service, to those around us as well, for through such departures from the comfortable we bring a larger gift to them. And when we fail ourselves, we fail them.

As I read through this section about becoming who we think we are, I asked myself a lot, “How much of my life is really my own?” How much of my life has been truly mine and not some spectral agenda derived from an overcompensation for the unrealized potential of my parents lives.

Our predecessors discerned that we often intend a certain outcome, work diligently towards its achievement, and yet wind up in an entirely different place than expected in our lives.

And, most disturbingly, this altered course derives in substantial measure from the choices that a presumably conscious being made. Our tendency towards the wrong choices, or unintended consequences, is fuelled by these two liabilities: 1. Our temptation to believe what we wish to believe. 2. The assumption that we know all we need to know to make a wise decision.

As we repeat these patterns of choices that lead to our repeated mistakes, we suffer a wound of insufficiency. This wound tells us that we cannot rely upon the world to meet our needs. We might tell ourselves stories such as “I am not met halfway because I am not worthy of being met.”

When we meet conflicts, our reflexive responses can be very predictable, falling into 3 actions. 1. Avoid – retreating, procrastinating, hiding out, denying. 2. Seize control - you must hurt first or be hurt instead. 3. Give in – succumb and give them what they want.

The patterns we may elect in response to the insufficiency of our early environment setting is to overcompensate and seek power, wealth, the right partner, fame, or some form of sovereignty over others. What we denied inwardly will seem to come to us from our outer fate. Therefore, what one lacks within one will seek in the outer world.

I used to be massively guilty of this; frequently be drawn to someone who is relationally impaired as well, hence ensuring the comforting misery of the familiar. We tend to get what we unconsciously expect, and may even go to great lengths to bring it about.

Remember that the place of origin for all these patterns is: 1. Past trauma. 2. Disempowered world of the child. 3. Confined within the limited range of choices and values of the world.

— The collision of selves

“He has a terrible fear of dying because he has not yet lived.”

None of us can help the things life has done to us. They’re done before you realize it. And once they’re done, they make you do other things until at last everything comes between you and what you’d like to be, and you’ve lost your true self forever.

The ego wishes for comfort, security, satiety; the soul demands meaning, struggle, becoming.

Moving through life, we can see the ego manifest through ‘projections.’

These projections always pass through 5 identifiable stages.

1. A project feels magical at the onset; they literally alter our sense of reality and have a compelling power over us.

2. After the luminescent power of a projection does its work on us, the second stage is disillusionment. The projection does not carry through as expected.

3. Thirdly, we begin to do whatever we can to reinforce the projection, to recover its pristine attraction.

4. The fourth stage is to suffer the withdrawal of the projection. This stage almost never occurs voluntarily because we did not recognize that we were projecting in the first place.

5. The last stage - if we reach this point at all, is to become conscious that a projection has occurred.

This transition to listening to more of the souls demands is turbulent and violent. As youths, we believe that the right conduct, right intention, and a lot of learning would bring control into one’s life. But the psyche has other plans. Being humbled by the psyche is the beginning of discerning the difference between knowledge and wisdom. As the child once fantasized that its wishes governed the world, the youth fantasized that heroism could manage to do it all, so the person in the second half of life is obliged to come to a more sober wisdom based on a humbled sense of personal limitations and the inscrutability of the world.

We are really forced to grow, or we will regress and die, because the soul, the eternal dimension of our quite mortal lives, demands growth.

— Barriers to transformation

It is when we ignore their inner presence that they are most present in our outer lives. Standing up to our fear is perhaps the most critical decision necessary in the governance of life and the recovery of the soul’s agenda.

Growing up is difficult and one’s position in life has absolutely no correlation with one’s emotional maturity.

— Intimacy and Relationships

Diving into the dynamics of intimate relationships, the long-sought soul mate, the one who will truly understand us, take care of us, meet our needs, repair the wounds, spare us the burden of growing up and meeting our own needs is the fantasy in us all.

So why is it then, longing for relationship, we repeatedly sabotage the few we have?

The question, then, is not avoidance of the demands of desire, or the more complicated question of relationship, but how to live with them consciously.

Generally speaking, whatever moves us, whether consciously or not, will somehow be found as touching a deeply buried aspect of ourselves.

First, what we do not know about ourselves, or do not wish to know, has a tendency to be projected onto our “beloved.” Second, we have a predisposition to project our childhood agendas, our infantile longing, and the burden of our assignment for personal growth onto the other. Thirdly, since the other cannot in the end, and should never carry responsibility for the task of our life, the projections inevitably wear away and the relationship has a tendency to deteriorate into a power struggle. And lastly, it stands to reason that the best thing we can do for ourselves and for the other is to assume more of the developmental agenda for ourselves.

The inescapable truth of any relationship is that it can achieve no higher level of development than the level of maturity that both parties bring to it.

What another brings to us, their greatest gift, is not an imitation or confirmation of our limited vision, but theft of their quite different vision, their otherness as otherness.

Sidebar: A life lived only in search for highs will prove in the end to have been a transient, superficial life. The chief disorders of our time are the fear of loneliness and the fear of growing up. The cure for loneliness is solitude. Solitude can be defined as learning that we are not alone when we are alone. Accepting the journey as our home will free the relationship to serve the agenda of life; love of this life, this journey, and love of this task of soul.

— Family

Family. “When I hear someone waxing sentimentally about family, I often detect nostalgia for what family is supposed to mean, rather than what they experienced. Those who experienced loving, supportive relationships in their family do not need to long for what they experienced, for now they carry with them an internalized stable and empowering ground to their being.

Remember, home is where you go and they have to take you in.

The ultimate test of the film is not whether it provides safety and predictability, but whether or to what degree each person can leave it, freely, and return, freely, as a larger person.

— Career and Vocation

How many times have we asked the question: What am I to do with my life? So often the question is answered by the grim necessities of economic reality, or by the internalized voices of our parents or culture.

More of our conscious energy is directed toward our work than any other venue. Our work also carries a larger invisible burden, the presumption that it will provide our lives with meaning and energize our spirits. Making a living is the easy part, but far more critical is what liberates us from the limits of our family and cultural history.

College students labouring away, often in good faith, believing that their elders had their best interests in mind, that it would all add up to something in time.

What I recognized through these passages were the important differences between what we do and who we are.

Hell is not other people; it is ourselves, constrained by the world we have constructed for ourselves or allowed others to construct for us.

If one has the strength to accept the necessary solitude of the journey, one can appreciate the gifts of friendship and relationship all the more for their precious moments in the face of transience and decay. We price something called “success” yet grow the more miserable for having achieved it. If our life ends in ruin, from a collective societal standpoint but has fulfilled the calling intended by t gods, it has been a life well lived.

— The new myth

Transient nonentities are catapulted to fame, followed by cameras throughout the course of their ordinary days, and described with hyped banalities of the unexamined life. Romances, survival contests, sensationalized corporate greed - all feed the ever-increasing lust for sensation. Apparently, where one has no personal life, no depth of character, one must have an artificial life, with someone else’s values.

We flee solitude, the only serious treatment for loneliness. We avoid dialogue with ourselves, the only person present in all scenes of our drama. We dismiss dreams, the ongoing commentary offered by the Self as to just how things are going and how they might be better. We ignore our history, with its many clues as to the autonomous agents that are making those self-defeating patterns for us.

Highly paid people study our psychos in order to persuade us, to manipulate us, even to create values that serve their special interest. And we wish them to seduce us. It is so much easier to be seduced than to assume sole responsibility for our consciousness, for ourselves. This is the deepest psychopathology of daily life – the routine flight from the summons of the soul.

— Recovering mature spirituality

God is the name by which I designate all things which cross my willful path violently and recklessly, all things which upset my subjective views, plans and intentions and change the course of my life for better or worse.

The first task is the recovery of personal authority.

— Swampland visitations

How many of us have not at one time or another confused material progress with spiritual advance? Those most preoccupied with appearance are typically those most resistant to the task of inner authority, for they continue to seek validation from the world out there.

One needs to distinguish pain from suffering. Suffering is spiritual, for it inevitably raises questions of meaning. Only the dead have their feet symmetrically lined up. In life, our feet, like our lives, are forever living contradictions and paradoxes.

Loss seems to be the price of abundance, the counterpoise to the richness of life, and remains always, even in moments of attainment, its silent, necessary companion. What is depression but life wishing to express itself but being pressed down. What wishes to live within us? Find that and give it energy. The purpose of life is not happiness, but meaning.

— The healing of the soul

“If you don’t break your ropes while you’re alive, do you think ghosts will do it after?”

We are not summoned to perfection; that is the realm of the gods; we are rather called to mindfulness, to approach such fields of divine reference with sensitivity, respect, and humility. The failure of nerve leads us to smaller questions and smaller lives.

It is possible to get back and to live a larger life if we are humble enough to confess that what we have been doing with our lives has not proved sufficient.

Finding what supports you from within will link you to transcendence, reframe the perspectives received from your history, and provide the agenda of growth, purpose, and meaning that we are all meant to carry into the world and to share with others. The soul asks each of us that we live a larger life. Each day, this summons is renewed and leaves you, unspeakably, to sort out your life, with its fearsome immensities, so that, not boundaries, now limitless, it transforms itself as stone in you and star.