Personal growth has often been described as being like an onion: every time you complete one layer, there's another under it. The one under it is smaller but more intense, challenging the person on that journey to use everything learned in other layers to continue to progress. Often, it is so much tougher, the traveler doesn't feel like it is actually progress.
Jungians describe personal growth as a "hero's journey," also a circular sequence of lessons, but they would say that the one on the journey of growth is learning a series of successively more challenging lessons in a repeated set of archetypes, such as the lover, the warrior, or the magician.
One of my weaknesses is my appetite for books which significantly exceeds my time and energy for reading. Another is that I am easily distracted by the lure of a new book when the one I am reading ceases to fully engage me. The consequence is that, at any time, my nightstand hosts anywhere from six to ten books in some stage of reading, often overflowing to the floor beside it.
At the first of the year, while flirting with another new book, I looked at the daunting pile, and, after a deep sigh, I decided that I had to surrender to some of the ones on my nightstand before starting another. I slowly looked through them, sorting into two stacks--ones that I really wanted to finish and ones with which I'd become bored and was ready to quit. Sadly, when I finished my sort, they were all in the same stack--those that I really wanted to finish. After another deep sigh, I decided to pick one to concentrate on finishing first.
The one that I chose to start with had been a gift from friends who are also consciously on a growth journey. Falling Upward by Richard Rohr takes a different spin on the journey. He says we have one set of lessons in the first half of life and a different set for the second. His book was to be a guide for the second half.
I remember struggling with the first third of the book. I wanted to stay with it because I knew that, if my friends thought it was a fit, there must be something of value for me. Yet struggle I did. Although I was solidly in the second half of life, was my resistance to admitting so?
For whatever reason I found the book difficult, I've picked the book up a few times a year, read a page or two, and then placed it back in the stack for a few more months. And, for whatever reason that it has a different appeal to me this time, Falling Upward has completely engaged me. There is an Eastern philosophy that says, when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Perhaps I had finally gotten to the place in the book that was interesting to me, or perhaps, I as the student was finally ready to hear its message.
The content that has intrigued me is about the role of exploring the shadow in the second half of life. The shadow is also a Jungian concept, but I've most often heard it described as our dark side--thus the name "shadow."
Rohr, by contrast, proposes that our shadow side is comprised as our weaknesses. Think of my overactive hunger for books and my habit of abandoning one I am reading for another. Those, who have read this blog for awhile, might also remember my addiction to sugar or my struggle to get back to my 30-year fitness regimen which was abandoned when I started working ridiculously long hours two years ago.
Suddenly, I had a whole different perspective on the shadow, and, almost as quickly, I realized much, if not all, of my posts in this blog have been an exploration of what Rohr described as my shadow side. It would seem that I have intuitively stumbled into this second half of life work without realizing what was occurring.
As I've laid my struggles with my "weaknesses" out in front of me for the whole world to see, I've often wondered why I would want to do that. Rohr says that owning our weaknesses results in a humility that is characteristic of the second half of life. I have certainly been humbled by my "weaknesses," which I prefer to call my life lessons.
While I haven't finished Falling Upward, I am near enough to know there is real truth in the shadow work. Yet on my journey, I've experienced a real sense of urgency about fully using my gifts and talents and being of service--an urgency to assure that I don't squander the precious opportunity that this life offers me to leave the world a better place--while feeling myself regularly thwarted in that resolve, often by my shadow.
A couple decades ago, someone wrote a book entitled something like The Destination is the Quality of the Journey. I never read it but I've loved the title. I have discovered that at this point in my life I am much less tolerant of goals and making things happen than I am with allowing and enjoying what wants to happen.
That change in perspective has certainly been enabled by the humility of admitting that some things are just not going to happen or at least not going to happen in my schedule. There was a time when I thought that determination and perseverance were good things. Now in my second half of life work I wonder if they weren't just part of my shadow, robbing me of the freedom to just enjoy life.
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