Excerpts from this beautiful text by Rohr. Got directed to this book by David Brooks who mentions it in his new book “Second Mountain”. Both books talk about the second half of life and how it complements and completes the first half. Rohr’s book has to be read a couple of times before the message sinks in.
- The first task is to build a strong “container” or identity; the second is to find the contents that the container was meant to hold. The second task, I am told, is more encountered than sought.
- We are a “first-half-of-life culture,” largely concerned about surviving successfully. We all try to do what seems like the task that life first hands us: establishing an identity, a home, relationships, friends, community, security, and building a proper platform for our only life.
- I find that many, if not most, people and institutions remain stymied in the preoccupations of the first half of life. By that I mean that most people’s concerns remain those of establishing their personal (or superior) identity, creating various boundary markers for themselves, seeking security, and perhaps linking to what seem like significant people or projects.
- The supposed achievements of the first half of life have to fall apart and show themselves to be wanting in some way, or we will not move further. Why would we?
- Most generations have seen boundary marking and protecting those boundaries as their primary and sometimes only task in life.
- In our formative years, we are so self-preoccupied that we are both overly defensive and overly offensive at the same time, with little time left for simply living, pure friendship, useless beauty, or moments of communion with nature or anything.
- The greatest and most important problems of life are fundamentally unsolvable. They can never be solved, but only outgrown.
- Integrity largely has to do with purifying our intentions and a growing honesty about our actual motives. It is hard work. Most often we don’t pay attention to that inner task until we have had some kind of fall or failure in our outer tasks.
- The familiar and the habitual are so falsely reassuring, and most of us make our homes there permanently.
- Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
- Death is largely a threat to those who have not yet lived their life.
- Only when you have begun to live in the second half can you see the difference between the two. Yet the two halves are cumulative and sequential, and both are very necessary.
- When you get your “Who am I?” question right, all the “What should I do?” questions tend to take care of themselves.
- “More suffering comes into the world by people taking offense than by people intending to give offense.”
- There is a symbiosis between immature groups and immature leaders, I am afraid, which is why both Plato and Jefferson said democracy was not really the best form of government. It is just the safest. A truly wise monarch would probably be the most effective at getting things done.
- This resistance to change is so common, in fact, that it is almost what we expect from religious people, who tend to love the past more than the future or the present. All we can conclude is that much of organized religion is itself living inside of first-half-of-life issues, which usually coincides with where most people are in any culture. Yet even the intelligence of animals is determined by their ability to change and adjust their behavior in response to new circumstances. Those who do not, become extinct.
- Ken Wilber says that most of us are only willing to call 5 percent of our present information into question at any one point—and again that is on a very good day.
- “In essentials unity, in nonessentials liberty, and in all things, charity.”
- “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” as William Butler Yeats put it.
- Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events.
- A “hero” now is largely about being bold, muscular, rich, famous, talented, or “fantastic” by himself, and often for himself, whereas the classic hero is one who “goes the distance,” whatever that takes, and then has plenty left over for others. True heroism serves the common good, or it is not really heroism at all.
- “When we are only victorious over small things, it leaves us feeling small.”
- Basically, if you stay in the protected first half of life beyond its natural period, you become a well-disguised narcissist or an adult infant (who is also a narcissist!)—both of whom are often thought to be successful “good old boys” by the mainstream culture. No wonder that Bill Plotkin calls us a “patho-adolescent culture.”
- To quote Archimedes once again, you must have both “a lever and a place to stand” before you can move the world. The educated and sophisticated Western person today has many levers, but almost no solid place on which to stand, with either very weak identities or terribly overstated identities.
- We cannot each start at zero, entirely on our own. Life is far too short, and there are plenty of mistakes we do not need to make—and some that we need to make.
- People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with. Please think about that for a while.
- Life is inherently tragic, and that is the truth that only faith, but not our seeming logic, can accept.
- In much of urban and Western civilization today, with no proper tragic sense of life, we try to believe that it is all upward and onward—and by ourselves.
- Some who get to the top have the savvy to recognize that there is nothing up there that lasts or satisfies.
- Before the truth “sets you free,” it tends to make you miserable.
- Only that which is limited and even dies grows in value and appreciation; it is the spiritual version of supply and demand. If we lived forever, they say, we would never take life seriously or learn to love what is.
- As we move into the second half of life, however, we are very often at odds with our natural family and the “dominant consciousness” of our cultures.
- What passes for morality or spirituality in the vast majority of people’s lives is the way everybody they grew up with thinks.
- Instead of our “Don’t leave home without it” mentality, the spiritual greats’ motto seems to be “Leave home to find it!” And of course, they were never primarily talking just about physical home, but about all the validations,securities, illusions, prejudices, smallness—and hurts too—that home and family always imply.
- Your false self is your role, title, and personal image that is largely a creation of your own mind and attachments. It will and must die in exact correlation to how much you want the Real.
- “Life is a luminous pause between two great mysteries, which themselves are one.”
- For postmodern people, the universe is not inherently enchanted, as it was for the ancients. We have to do all the “enchanting” ourselves. This leaves us alone, confused, and doubtful. There is no meaning already in place for our discovery and enjoyment. We have to create all meaning by ourselves in such an inert and empty world, and most of us do not seem to succeed very well. This is the burden of living in our heady and lonely time, when we think it is all up to us.
- Remember Odysseus’s oar that an inland wayfarer saw as a winnowing fan? His oar (or occupation) had become a tool for inner work, a means for knowing the difference between the wheat and chaff, essentials and nonessentials, which is precisely the turn toward discernment and subtlety that we come to in the second half of life. His sailing and oaring days of mere “outer performance” are over, and he can now rest in the simplicity and ground of his own deeper life. He is free to stop his human doing and can at last enjoy his human being
- The classic spiritual journey always begins elitist and ends egalitarian.
- Pope John Paul II said that heaven and hell were primarily eternal states of consciousness more than geographical places of later reward and punishment.
- It takes a lot of learning to finally “learn ignorance”.
- I don’t need to push the river as much now, or own the river, or get everybody in my precise river; nor do others have to name the river the same way I do in order for me to trust them or their goodwill.
- If you have forgiven yourself for being imperfect and falling, you can now do it for just about everybody else.
- The great irony is that you must go through a necessary complexity (perhaps another word for necessary suffering) to return to any second simplicity.
- There is still darkness in the second half of life—in fact maybe even more. But there is now a changed capacity to hold it creatively and with less anxiety.
- If you talk too much or too loud, you are usually not an elder.
- If we know anything at this stage, we know that we are all in this together and that we are all equally naked underneath our clothes.
- When you are young, you define yourself by differentiating yourself; now you look for the things we all share in common.
- They now enjoy the moon itself instead of fighting over whose finger points to it most accurately, quickly, or definitively.
- “It does not matter much [now], because no despair of ours can alter the reality of things, or stain the joy of the cosmic dance which is always there. … We are [now] invited to forget ourselves on purpose, cast our awful solemnity to the winds and join in the general dance.”
- Ironically, we are more than ever before in a position to change people—but we do not need to—and that makes all the difference.
- Our actions are less compulsive. We do what we are called to do, and then try to let go of the consequences.
- Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—right now. This is a monumental change from the first half of life, so much so that it is almost the litmus test of whether you are in the second half of life at all.
- By the second half of life, you have been in regular unwelcome contact with your shadow self, which gradually detaches you from your not-so-bright persona (meaning “stage mask” in Greek) that you so diligently constructed in the first half of life. Your stage mask is not bad, evil, or necessarily egocentric; it is just not “true.” It is manufactured and sustained unconsciously by your mind; but it can and will die, as all fictions must die.
- Spiritual maturity is largely a growth in seeing; and full seeing seems to take most of our lifetime, with a huge leap in the final years, months, weeks, and days of life, as any hospice volunteer will tell you.
- I am afraid that the closer you get to the Light, the more of your shadow you see. Thus truly holy people are always humble people.
- Men are actually encouraged to deny their shadow self in any competitive society, so we all end up with a lot of sad and angry old men.
- People who have had no inner struggles are invariably both superficial and uninteresting.
- The bottom line of the Gospel is that most of us have to hit some kind of bottom before we even start the real spiritual journey. Up to that point, it is mostly religion.
- The cure for your loneliness is actually solitude!
- A kind of double belonging is characteristic of people at this stage. No one group meets all of their needs,desires, and visions.
- Normal sequencing of the dualistic mind: it compares, it competes, it conflicts, it conspires, it condemns, it cancels out any contrary evidence, and it then crucifies with impunity.
- Much of the work of midlife is learning to tell the difference between people who are still dealing with their issues through you and those who are really dealing with you as you really are.
- The only final and meaningful question is “Is it true?” Not “Who said it?”
- Failure and suffering are the great equalizers and levelers among humans. Success is just the opposite.