If you’ve read this newsletter over the past few weeks, then you know I’ve been having a lot of conversations with people going through personal or professional transitions at or about the middle part of life; people trying to figure out an answer to the question, “given where I am now, what should I do?”
I recognize my work provides me with a skewed sample, but it does seem to me that this question is everywhere right now. Indeed there is a larger post-pandemic cultural movement in this direction, one that you’ve likely read about recently (e.g., the great resignation, quiet quitting, etc.). All questions and actions that presuppose a changing relationship with work.
Also over the past few weeks, I’ve discovered the Canadian rock band Arkells.
They are by no means a new band, having released their first album in 2008, but I just stumbled into them because of a collaboration they did with Wesley Schultz of The Lumineers in 2022. The song they did together is a great vibe (“Nowhere to Go”), but the one that’s really stuck in my mind is “Past Life,” a song that includes the following chorus:
I'm sick of running from a past life,
I don't care about the next one.
Am I running from the moment,
Or the city where I come from?
Right now I'm feeling like a stranger,
Don't recognize the voice inside my head.
'Cause I've been running from a past life,
I wanna live, I wanna live, I wanna live, I wanna live this life instead.
These lyrics reminded me of a book I read a good long while ago by the Franciscan priest Richard Rohr called Falling Upward, about what he calls the “two halves of life.”
Here’s what I remember from that book:
The task of the “first half of life” is to make decisions and strive in order to build the container that shapes your identity.
The task of the “second half of life” is to figure out how to get out of the container you’ve built.
That is to say, at some point you will take a step back, look at your work, what you’ve been trying to achieve, how you’ve been thinking about yourself, and wonder what am I doing this for again?
Or as I like to think of it - why the hell am I building this container?
It is an uncanny feeling to arrive at a point in life where you feel like a stranger to yourself, standing in the breach between what you’ve been doing and what you might want to do, wondering at the same time what’s still possible.
It seems to happen in the wake of milestone moments - life changes, great failures and great successes, when our expectations are met with reality, when our values get tussled a bit and we have to reconsider (or consider for the first time) where our solid footing is, how we make important decisions, how we find meaning.
Rohr believes we get addicted to the first task of life.
We work so hard to build our identity through achievement that when we finally run down our goals (or they fall apart), we struggle to make sense of things. And then we must undergo some necessary amount of suffering in order to reckon with our new understanding of reality.
So many times, though, I’ve spoken to people who run from this reckoning. They keep pressing on, diving right into the next thing, picking up the next project, pressing on toward bigger goals so they don’t have to encounter The Big Question.
What is it that you’re doing? What are you trying to accomplish exactly? How do you get to know that strange voice inside your head?