If done right, the second half
of life is about wisdom and understanding
Kyrie O'Connor December 3,
2015 Houston
Chronicle
BY the time she hit her late 40s, Pamela Stockton knew her career
and spiritual life were empty.
Oh, she was
a successful Houston lawyer who'd passed the bar at 23. Raised a
Methodist, she had a solid religious background as well.
"But I had
the intense sense that something was calling me," she says
now.
After the
"incredible blessing" of a buyout from the law firm, Stockton began
a personal,
spiritual quest that may never
end.
The first
half of life is "acquire, compete, win," says Bill Kerley, a
Jungian therapist with a doctorate in theology who practices out of
St. Paul's United Methodist Church in Houston. It's about "being
very interested in winning, being right and having
stuff."
The second
half, if done right, is about "wisdom and
understanding."
Sadly,
Kerley says, the airwaves and highways are full of people stuck in
late adolescence, regardless of their calendar age. Psychologist
and writer Bill Plotkin, he adds, has pegged about 80 percent of
adults as out of touch with nature and far too involved with
themselves.
And you're
not imagining it, Kerley continues: Many adults today fit the
profile of the narcissistic personality.
"Success is
understanding that life is not about them," he says.
'Finding a religious outlook'
Kerley
likes to quote Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung on the topic of
spirituality and aging:
"I have
treated many hundreds of patients. Among those in the second half
of life - that is to say, over 35 - there has not been one whose
problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious
outlook on life."
Nancy
Gordon, director of the California Lutheran Homes Center for
Spirituality and Aging, doesn't have statistics. "But it does
seem," she says, "that the last quarter or half of life, the
question is raised: What has it all meant?"
Often, that
question arises when some of life's outward markers have been
reached - or passed. If the kids are launched, the career goals met
(or not), what next? "Who am I, and what does it mean when the
labels don't apply anymore?" Gordon says. "If people get serious
about it, they look to spiritual answers to help make sense of it
all."
Stockton,
the erstwhile lawyer, tried the Episcopal church,which
she says had a "more expansive feel" than her earlier
Methodism.
Still, she
felt she didn't truly understand. She went to Perkins School of
Theology (part of Southern Methodist University) in Galveston "to
figure out what I didn't know," she says, and studied women in the
early Christian tradition.
"By the
time I graduated from Perkins, I figured out the problem was not
that I didn't understand," she says.
As old
as modern civilization
It's
tempting to think of midlife spiritual questioning as a
21st-century issue, but that's just ego. The quest is at least as
old as modern civilization and probably older.
Dante's
"Inferno" famously begins: "In the middle of the journey of our
life I found myself within a dark woods where the straight way was
lost."
Is that a
metaphor for midlife spiritual questioning?
Yes, says
Cristina Giliberti, who teaches Italian at Rice University. At the
time of the writing, around 1302, Dante was in exile from Florence,
likely close to 35 years old ("the middle" of the biblical
three-score and 10), uncertain of his future and writing a great
poetic work on heaven and hell. His outer hopes dashed, he turned
inward.
It's
tricky, Kerley warns. The opposite of faith is certainty, and
religion isn't an insurance policy.
"It's so
ironic that many Christians treat religion like an evacuation plan
to the next world," he says. "The Kingdom of God is not a place to
get to, but a place to come from. In the second half of life we
have to heroically pick up the tools and embrace that."
Earlier in
her life, Stockton had explored holotropic breath work, which
combines breathing and music. She decided to become a facilitator.
"That's when the journey really deepened," she says. "I could get a
glimpse of the patterns of life that caused me to go in search in
the first place."
She went
back to school again, this time to become a psychotherapist. "I
love the work," she says. "It's so rich and meaningful."
Gordon
believes learning to age well is one way boomers can help reshape
the conversation. She plans to downsize and move into a tiny house
on her daughter's property. "I want to strip down to what I need
and love," she says.
Kerley
thinks certain behaviors can help people live well during the
second half of their lives.
"Learn to
be less reactive," he says. "Learn how to accept life on life's
terms. You have to be in some community. You can't love by
yourself."
Stockton,
who had "already been a little attracted to Buddhism," found
herself visiting the Dawn Mountain Center for Tibetan Buddhism in
Montrose. "I came to realize that the Buddhist path speaks to me in
a way that the Christian path never did," she says. "Over the
years, the Christian identity fell away."
Fifteen
years on from the start of her quest, it continues.
"The
spiritual journey keeps going on and deepening," Stockton says.
"There are many, many practices" in Buddhism, she adds. "I don't
think there's an end until we die."
And if, as
Tibetan Buddhists believe, we are reincarnated, "it doesn't end
there, either."