I’m undertaking a 1000-day reinvention project, blogging here daily to track my progress. In Tuesday Book Club, I share an idea from a book.
I’ve found myself restless lately, browsing homes in the foothills near Denver, thinking I want to live more simply, more rurally, with more space, and less heavily-maintained lawn.
But, having made such changes before, I know that what I’m really craving is soul-level change not a change in domicile. I know that even in my suburban golf-course house cozied up next to the neighbors I can seek and possibly find I’m seeking.
What am I seeking though?
Today’s book is Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life by Richard Rohr. Rohr follows Carl Jung in proposing that the first half of life demands you conform to society and in the second you break free. He quotes Jung:
We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.
And explains:
[The] task of the first half of life is to create a proper container for one’s life and answer the first essential questions: “What makes me significant?” “How can I support myself?” and “Who will go with me?” The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container is meant to hold and deliver. As Mary Oliver (1935–2019) put it, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” In other words, the container is not an end in itself, but exists for the sake of our deeper and fullest life, which we largely do not know about ourselves. Far too many people just keep doing repair work on the container itself and never “throw their nets into the deep” (Luke 5:4) to bring in the huge catch that awaits them.
My house, my investment portfolio, my relationships—these are the container I’ve built. To borrow Rohr’s idea: I don’t need to change the container (yet again). It’s time to focus single-mindedly on the tasks of the second half of life.
Stumbling into the spiritual journey of midlife
I have, in fact, been working on tasks of the second half of life for more than fifteen years, when I first fell into it. Rohr writes in chapter 5, “Stumbling over the stumbling stone,” that this experience of getting tripped up by life is inevitable (at least if you are to take on the spiritual journey at midlife):
Sooner or lager, if you are on any classic “spiritual schedule,” some event, person, death, idea, or relationship will enter your life that you simply cannot deal with using your present skill set, your acquired knowledge, or your strong willpower. Spiritually speaking, you will be, you must be, led to the edge of your own private resources. At that point, you will stumble over a necessary stumbling stone, as Isaiah calls it. To state it in our language here, you will and you must “lose” at something. This is the only way that Life-Fate-God-Grace-Mystery can get you to change, let go of your egocentric preoccupations, and go on the further and larger journey. I wish I could say this was not true, but it is darn near absolute in the spiritual literature of the world.”
I stumbled into it when I met a man not my husband, fell in love, and thought I could swap out one husband for another, leaving the rest of the container of my life largely the same.
It turned out I could not. It turned out that the affair I pursued and its aftermath led me into the tasks of the second half of life. I did what I was supposed to do — finished college and earned a master’s degree, got married and had children, built financial wealth — and then discovered that the life I built, the container I constructed, lacked the meaning and transcendence I felt driven to find.
I tried to maintain my ego during this transformational journey, but I failed to be able to. Rohr writes:
Any attempt to engineer or plan our own enlightenment is doomed to failure because it will be ego driven. We will see only what we have already decided to look for, and we cannot see what we are not ready or told to look for. So failure and humiliation force us to look where we never would otherwise.
I tried to put my life back together by finding new elements to replace the elements I no longer had: new corporate jobs, new boyfriends, a new house. This is Dabrowski’s unilevel disintegration: trying to fix a life by swapping out components rather than by questioning, and perhaps even tearing down, the entire structure.
Ultimately this only brought suffering, Rohr’s “failure and humiliation” that forced me eventually to look elsewhere.
Rohr writes that suffering through this process is inevitable:
So, we must stumble and fall, I am sorry to say. And that does not mean reading about falling, as you are doing here. We must actually be out of the driver’s seat for a while, or we will never learn how to give up control to the Real Guide. It is the necessary pattern. This kind of falling is what I mean by necessary suffering.
After stumbling and falling down
Rohr proposes that a kind of vita contemplativa could be the solution for the second half of life:
Basically, the first half of life is writing the text, and the second half is writing the commentary on that text. We all tend to move toward a happy and needed introversion as we get older. Such introversion is necessary to unpack all that life has given us and taken from us. We engage in what is now a necessary and somewhat natural contemplation.
This seems true for me, but I imagine it is only true for a certain sort of person.
He also suggests that you might seek solitude at this time: “One of the great surprises at this point is that you find that the cure for your loneliness is actually solitude!”
Indeed this is where I have landed, after the great tumble I took: a commitment to living alone, and a turning towards the contemplative and commentating life. An ongoing attempt to put down ego and the demands of our consumerist achievement society to instead focus on what is meaningful, what is transcendent, what is subtle and quiet.