Bright Sadness, Sober Happiness

I have approached an age that brings me halfway to something, assuming I get to be a centennial. While these milestone years tend to bring forth self-reflection, I find myself getting less sentimental than I have in years past. This is an interesting phenomena that can only come about if one has a rich inner life. In the horizontal sense I have not accomplished some things my self-imagination would have expected by now, but vertically I have gone further than I could have imagined. It's as if a paradox ensues: as the body ages, the soul regenerates.

Richard Rohr says, “There is a gravitas in the second half of life, but it is now held up by a much deeper lightness, or “okayness.” Our mature years are characterized by a kind of bright sadness and a sober happiness, if that makes any sense.” In regards to the second half of life, he does not necessarily mean chronological age but soul arrival, where “instead of being ego driven, you will begin to be soul drawn.”

I can't say when this started to happen to me for sure, but sometime in the last decade it did creep in (without being creepy at all). My 20-somethings were full of hedonic cravings, although I intuited there had to be something beyond the raw enthusiasm of youth. As Shakespeare said, “God has given you one face, and you make yourself another.” I suppose this is a more sophisticated way of saying youth is wasted on the young.

“Basically, the first half of life is writing the text, and the second half is writing the commentary on that text.” Maybe that is why I started this blog. After all, if I was just writing text, I would be bored to tears. But commentary seems to have an unbounded flow to it that comes through me, where I can look back at all that text from a different vantage point.

“Whole people see and create wholeness wherever they go; split people see and create splits in everything and everybody. By the second half of our lives, we are meant to see in wholes and no longer just in parts. Yet we get to the whole by falling down into the messy parts—so many times, in fact, that we long and thirst for the wholeness and fullness of all things, including ourselves. I promise you this unified field is the only and lasting meaning of up.” — Rohr

So it is, and I know it is the best choiceless choice I can make from here on up. 

Now, if I can only remember that other bit of wisdom that came from Sunset Boulevard. Oh yeah, “there's nothing tragic about being 50, unless you're trying to be 25.” Time to get rid of the hipster pants.