At or after midlife, you may have noticed a change in the way you respond to the world around you.
Maybe you feel a vague emptiness when you rise in the morning. When you least expect it, a quiet melancholic yearning may seem to lie like a blanket over your outlook. Perhaps you find yourself wondering what value you bring to others or how your life will be significant.
These are the moments to treasure for they can alter the course you are on and deliver you to a richer, deeper, more fulfilling way of life.
Sometimes you may do your best to avoid these deep, thoughtful moments, treating them as annoying distractions. You may switch on the television, see a movie, read a book or magazine, go shopping — do anything to avoid confronting the unsettling feelings that you may feel percolating up from somewhere within you.
If you avoid these feelings, you may subvert the very meaning and purpose of your life. You need not be intimidated by the call of your own soul. The soul calls you to that great adventure of living the life you were born to live.
In the First Half of Life We Build Ego Strength
The first half of life is largely about finding our place in the world. We get acquainted with ourselves as dependent children deriving our sense of identity from the family and the parents. We learn what we naturally do well, what we naturally enjoy, who we tend to attract as friends. We find our place, if we are lucky, with a caring family.
When we mature and venture out from the nest, we begin to forge our own differentiated identities. We find a job or a career, we meet many new people, maybe find a mate. We have some carefree fun yet also begin to address some of our biggest choices in life regarding career, love, sex, friends, family, social standing, military duty, organizational affiliations, education, home, community, neighborhood, and religion. We create our own new home, perhaps also creating a new attentive family.
We learn the value of hard work, the need for effort, the necessity of experiencing hardship and loss. We revel in our successes, sometimes bursting in awe at our remarkable accomplishments, testing our newly found strengths and talents. Our future feels abundant with possibilities. There is little that we are not willing to do or try. We are eager to drink in the full experience of living.
In the process of testing ourselves and pushing the envelope of our own capabilities, we discover much about ourselves. We learn how we fare with failure; sometimes we taste the sweet nectar of success. Life is more challenging — physically, emotionally, and intellectually — than we ever thought it could become.
By the time we reach midlife, we have been rejected, accepted, denied, praised, recommended, smeared, hampered, aided, disappointed, charmed, and bewildered. Through it all, we have also been forging the our identities — who we claim to be. Sometimes that identity has been forged on the anvil of time by the hammers of anguish.
By midlife, if we have not been derailed by the circumstances of life, we have a strong self-concept, gained a confident ego, and found our “place” in the world. So we think. Actually we have been set up for the transformation that is to occur in the second half of life when we will be called to become whole.
In the Second Half of Life, We Become Whole
We have been duped. We thought we had found our authentic individuality in the first half of life; we found instead a workable persona — a serviceable identity for traversing the many complications, relationships, and responsibilities of life. If we have fared well, a firm, confident ego stands behind that persona — not an inflated ego, but a strong one. If hubris is our issue, then we are destined to fall, for pride does inevitably precede a fall, and until we fall if we are inflated, we cannot be made whole.
If the ego is strong rather than inflated, if we are comfortable both with humility and strength, then we are primed for further growth in the second half of life — the further unfolding of the unique person we were born to become. We have the opportunity to learn more fully who we truly are.
The first half of life has usually developed our natural orientations to consciousness — our gifts. In the second half of life, if the full and replete person is coming into being, we are developing all the other gifts that were not so well cultivated the first time around. The cultivation of a full range of gifts is the outcome of the flowering of our unique personalities.
Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung referred to this personal growth as individuation — the full expression of the whole and unique person. In the first half of life, we brought to fruition only a part of ourselves — those attributes and gifts that come most easily to us. In the voyage of individuation through the second half of life, we develop the other half of ourselves — the side that has remained almost hidden, displaced by our natural abilities.
The first half of life was about developing our strengths and finding our “place” in the world; the second half of life can be about becoming whole and discovering the treasures on the other side of our natural gifts. The resounding urges from within that prompt us to find a new and more meaningful path in life are orchestrating continued growth to wholeness. We will find our authentic selves in the second half of life not so much by building our strengths, but by growing our significance.
In the first half of life, we are building what David Brooks calls, “resume virtues” — our capabilities respected in our world. In the second half we can attend to the “eulogy virtues” —our capabilities respected in our universe. In the second half of life, if we have the courage and the enthusiasm for full personal growth, we discover the rich, nuanced qualities that we never knew we had; we find the balance inherent in being a whole person — not an individual dedicated to preserving a precious ego identity, but a person dedicated to becoming more real. The second half of life can be the richest, most enchanting, invigorating, and meaningful time of our lives.
J. G. Johnston is co-founder of Life Atlas and architect of the Gifts Compass Inventory (GCI) — a self-awareness inventory for discerning one’s best gifts and navigating personal transformation. He is the author of Jung’s Compass of Psychological Types, a guide to understanding types and their role in personal transformation, and The Call Within: Navigating Life with Inner Guidance.