Yes, forgetting can be a curse, especially as we age. But forgetting is also one of the more important things healthy brains do, almost as important as remembering.
—Michael Pollan1
I’m sitting with a client, a sixty-five-year-old man who is a therapist himself. I’ve been impressed with his understanding of human nature and the absence of conflict in his life at the moment. He seems to have resolved many issues of his past and is quite comfortable with himself. He has many close friends and is interested in science, the arts, and the spiritual life. As I listen to him talk about his role in his family—his children, of course, are grown and married—I admire the calmness of his soul and the richness of his life. I’d like to be his friend, though I know that it isn’t easy to be relaxed in a friendship when you are also the therapist.
We spend most of our formal time together focused on his dreams, which hint at how he might deal with some of the issues that are current in his life. But there is no bloodshed, fright, paranoia, construction, or wandering that is the stuff of many people’s dreams. Even his deep inner life appears calm and in order. Not much is happening.
One day he presents me a dream in which he is teaching a group of young people, when a member of “the board” appears and tells him that the board doesn’t approve of what he’s teaching. They’ve decided to let him go, and he feels sad to leave his students behind. He loved being a teacher, but there is nothing he can do if the board doesn’t support him.
We talk about the dream for a while, and I feel unusually at a loss for meaning. With this man and with most of my clients I usually arrive at a point where the dream elucidates some aspect of life. I don’t mean that we solve the dream or apply it in a final and obvious way. But this time I have no idea what the dream might be saying, how it might connect to my client’s life, or what general theme or truth it might convey.
I did know that my client had a history of getting into trouble with organizations like churches, schools, and other groups. He was a quiet gadfly, taking positions that were not popular among establishment people. He was a reluctant rebel, I thought, who lost his job more than once because of his public stands.
But now he is retired and has no organizations in his life to answer to. There is no board to give him any grief. He is free and easy and doesn’t have to answer to anyone. So what could the dream be about?
I don’t believe that dreams are meaningless. We are the ones who have the problem of not grasping the meaning. I said to myself: This session is going to feel worthless to this man, who, retired, doesn’t have the money to spend on a therapist who can’t help him. I felt challenged.
But then I thought of the man’s life story, where the theme of taking unpopular positions and being threatened by a board kept coming up. Maybe he is not living this pattern now in retirement. Maybe he is still trying to work it out as a piece of his past. Maybe the pure emotion in being rejected still floats in his system, not yet settled, still causing some discomfort.
As I think this through, another thought comes to me, one that is more typical of a dream image. I have been too literal about the board. Everyone has a board in his mind that he has to answer to and that he or she sometimes fails and disappoints. That board doesn’t let us feel satisfaction about what we have done. I wonder if my friend is sad about all the rejections life has given him, as if they were one overall punishment.
In later sessions we had the opportunity to move more directly into the feelings my client had of being a failure. They were not dominant in him. He was generally a happy and content person. But even in the midst of comfort he might have some unfinished material from his past. That is how I felt about his “board,” a leftover from his early days that was still gnawing at his present happiness. We were able to sort out the personal history and arrive at a place of deeper contentment.
Digesting Past Experiences
Aging with soul means becoming who you are essentially. You keep going over your experiences in a spirit of wonder, telling your stories again and again. You get to know more about yourself and you act from that knowledge. As you tell your stories, you sink further into your fate and you find your identity. None of this is superficial. Identity has nothing to do with ego; it emerges gradually from deep in the soul.
My friend who dreamed of answering to “the board” may have to reflect on his experiences on a college campus the way I continue to think about my near-death accident in a boat with my grandfather. It isn’t obvious to either of us what those past experiences mean or how and why they continue to impact us. But clearly they are asking for something. All we can do is remember, consider, explore, and take them seriously. This is what older people do when they are sitting quietly.
The Essential Raw Material
Some events need working through more than others. I see this principle lived out in therapy. In every life a few events give a person’s overall experience a certain direction or tone. For some people it’s a parent’s emotional issue, a traumatic event, abuse of one kind or another, a helpful relative or teacher, a serious illness, an accident, or a big move to another geographical area. The possibilities are many, but everyone can tell a life story and see significant turning points or influences that leave a mark.
Working through these events, especially the unsettling ones, is a big part of aging, in the sense that I am using the word. If we do nothing with them, they tend to block the flow of life and interfere with the aging and maturing process. These thoughts and dreams keep coming up in conversation, begging for attention.
In my therapy practice I’ve worked with a number of women in their late forties and early fifties who had particular difficulty getting their lives on track. They couldn’t secure a settled relationship or satisfying work. The one issue they all shared was their parents’ failure to enjoy happy lives together.
Typically the fathers didn’t know how to be in a close relationship with another person and expressed their frustration in overbearing efforts to control everyone in the family, therefore not only depriving their children of love but also making them the victims of empty authority and chronic anger. The mothers were often appeasers, not standing up for their daughters or retreating into the materialism of a proper and comfortable home.
I generalize, but this description summarizes many life stories I have heard. You could say that it’s a picture of modern Western life. We’re not good at the dynamics of marriage, and those difficulties pass down to the children, who eventually discover the effect bad parenting has had on them. In their middle age they feel the impact painfully. The parents’ difficulty in being married is part of the child’s life story and sometimes prevents the child from aging well.
It’s clear that we need to reassess the very institution of marriage and attitudes toward parenting. Today these important roles are largely carried out unconsciously, and so a great deal of shadow material creeps into them, presenting obstacles to children. As adults these children still have to deal with the impact of unconscious marrying and parenting. It would be better to be aware of the deep issues and be more conscious.
Some people like to divide life into halves, the first half of life having its own tasks, and the second half turning in a different direction. I prefer to imagine a whole life unfolding in multiple phases.
Perhaps I’m influenced by my own experience, a life full of surprises and many turning points. I had a long period of apprenticeship: leaving home at thirteen and embarking on a unique and very engaged life in a monastery. People are often intrigued by this part of my story, though it doesn’t feel quite as remarkable to me, probably because it wasn’t so unusual in the 1950s. I wandered for a few years, looking for a personal path, and then found focus through my doctoral studies in religion. These were obviously an outgrowth of my monastic life, but they also expanded my outlook and brought me to my ultimate life’s work: writing about the soul. My doctoral studies at Syracuse University opened worlds to me, and then my later apprenticeship to James Hillman and his community completed that education, adding depth psychology to spirituality.
By fifty, I was ready to “graduate.” I was married, for the second time, and had a daughter and a successful book, Care of the Soul. My life changed radically, if rather late. Most of my colleagues had children and success in work much earlier in life. I detect five or six significant turning points in the arc of my life.
The first fifty years had clear segments: general childhood unconsciousness, with a taste of death; the move into a bigger and more intense world of spirituality and study; a period of uncertainty and wandering; further study and experience bringing soul and spirit, or psychology and spirituality, together; and finally, a productive, fulfilling life as a husband, father, and public spiritual leader.
Fifty was the fulfillment of many experiments. I was able to transform a happy childhood into happy parenting, and an early wish to be a priest into an odd and unexpected secular priesthood as a spiritual writer and teacher. The women in therapy I mentioned turned fifty feeling that it was time to find a solid base in work and a relationship. But their troubled childhoods kept getting in the way. They had to work hard with their raw material before they could make the turn and age well.
One of my clients keeps remembering one scene from when she was about twelve, when her father screamed at the top of his lungs at her for breaking one of his annoying, minor rules. This impatient, unaccepting, and unreasonable father shouting his wrath is one of the first scenes that defined her place in life. As an adult she has made progress, through several different forms of therapy, by finding her own “rules,” and not caving in to many father figures in her life. But the work isn’t done, and she still struggles with the old pattern. Being a truly aged self, for this woman, would mean learning how to be in a relationship with a man where this pattern was far in the background. You can never expect complete resolution or perfection.
We all have raw material that needs working through. When I use that phrase “working through,” I have in mind the alchemy that Jung studied so extensively and used to elucidate many life processes that can bring us to a happy old age. Alchemy refers to the process of becoming an aged or ripened person as The Work. This Work isn’t a demanding ego effort to make sense of life and do it properly. No, it is going through the processes, the initiations, and rites of passage that we need in order to become mature persons, and consciously employing various methods of reflection that can release us from old inhibiting habits.
Alchemy is the process of becoming the person you are equipped to be, and finding the golden self that is hidden beneath all obstacles. Alchemy is a process the way a chemistry experiment is a careful work on the properties and possibilities of various materials. In this case, life itself processes you with the promise of making you a real and unique person.
How to Deal with Specific Raw Material
Reflection is a rich word. It means “to bend back.” So when we reflect on the past, we bend back to see what has happened. It is also what happens in a mirror. We see what is in front of the mirror reflected back to us. We see ourselves from a different perspective, appreciating the many facets of the self.
When we reflect on experiences in our lives, we bend back, placing ourselves back in time. The past is our rich storehouse of images and narratives that make the present meaningful and possible. We are sometimes afraid of it because of the pain it has caused, but we are stronger than we think and can carry that past into the future, making the present multilayered.
How do you bend back and reflect? By having real conversations with people, for a start. Many of our encounters are small and protective because of our fear of the past. Having an open conversation, where we tell our stories without excessive censoring, is a form of reflection, and it’s an effective one because we hear the story and make it public. You can easily tell the difference between revealing yourself in a story about your life and hiding details that you fear would show too much.
You can also reflect by simply thinking about old times again and again. You can make a point to meet with a close friend or family member with the purpose of saying something about your life that is revealing. The revelation is a first step toward acknowledging what has happened to you. It may even be a discovery. You may begin the story in a familiar way and then mention details that you had forgotten or repressed. Owning your past allows you to feel the weight of your own experience. You can go on from there more as yourself than if you are hiding and disowning elements of your identity.
A person will say, “I’ve never told anyone this before.” This is a special moment. A revelation is pending, and that revelation may be helpful to the one making it. He or she is letting down a barrier so that something new may happen. Although it may not seem that way at the moment, such an opening up is a kind of reflection. The breakthrough allows you to reflect on events that you’ve kept hidden. That is a step forward.
As I mentioned, Jung used the imagery of alchemy for the process of soul-making or working through your raw material. The material itself was called, in the Latin of the alchemists, prima materia. Prima means “first,” but it can also mean “primal” or “raw.” We usually say “raw material.”
The alchemist accumulated actual raw material, various substances that he put into the glass vessel, where it could be mixed with other material, heated, and observed. That is exactly what we do with our memories and other thoughts. We bring them out of hiding and put them in a container where they can be seen. An open conversation is such a container. It allows us to keep putting material into the collection for processing, and it allows us to look at it all closely—reflection. Other containers might be formal psychotherapy, a family reunion, or writing in a diary.
Psychotherapy is a particularly intense form of conversation where you focus on the material of the soul: memories, ideas, emotions, relationships, successes, and failures. It all goes into the pot of reflection, where it can be seen, heated up with intense analysis, and transformed. We need containers that hold the material of our lives, allow us to observe it, and encourage emotional heat and transformation.
In therapy, the first problem may be one of creating the vessel. One day, a woman came to see me; she was quite eager to find out what therapy could do for her. At the first session she walked into the room, sat down, and did nothing. She didn’t say a word. I asked a number of questions, which only elicited some grunts or stillborn one-word answers. Nothing happened. After an hour there was no material in the vessel. She never came back.
Maybe another therapist could have handled that situation better than I did, but I felt that the woman was at a point where she just couldn’t open up. Without any material, there wasn’t much we could do. I can imagine my wife getting her to make drawings or paintings or do yoga postures to pry loose some of the material, but I didn’t have those resources. Besides, it didn’t seem right for me to take the role of encouraging a confession. In fact, I felt that the material was the plain fact that this person was not ready to look into her soul. Or maybe I was not the right person to help her do so. I honored that material by not forcing anything different. The therapy became the place where nothing could happen.
Today it seems that many people are not interested in living a reflective life. Modern life is dedicated to action or planning for action. We may evaluate what we have done, so that our future action will be better. But this is not reflection, it is not truly bending back into the past. It is using the past for a better future.
Reflection does its job without serving as an evaluation or plan. In itself it deepens our state of being. We become more thoughtful people through reflection, and that transformation is part of aging.
For a short while when I was living in the monastery, as a community we would meet after an event and talk about it, under the leadership of a young but wise prior. Our purpose was not to evaluate it with the hope of doing it better next time, but simply to see what came up in our reflections. We thought our community would benefit from sheer conversation centered on a common experience.
Reflection fosters being rather than doing, and aging has to do with who you are more than with what you do. If you keep having plain experiences without thinking back on them, you develop your external life but not your interior life. With reflection, you draw closer to your emotions and to the meaning of events.
I understand that people differ on the scale from active to reflective. I happen to be on the far end of reflective myself, and I admire people who make more of an active contribution to society. But since the culture as a whole is given to action and doesn’t understand reflection, I put the accent there.
A reflective person develops an interior life, but what do we mean by that? Interiority is the capacity to hold an emotion without acting on it, to feel its layers and meaning and tone, to connect it with other experiences and to appreciate its value. It’s the ability to think things through to their depth.
When you have an interior life, you are somebody. You are more than a cardboard personality. You’re complex, layered, and sophisticated in a genuine way. I’ve used these words before to describe what it is to age with soul. Developing your interiority is the same as aging well.
Ultimately you become like two persons—one that people see and the other less visible but equally important. A hidden self doesn’t have to be a bad thing. It may be a quiet interior life that doesn’t show itself often. This hidden interior can make you interesting and give you dimension.
One of my closest friends—we met around 1980—is Pat Toomay, a former professional football player. When I’m out with him, people often notice his Super Bowl ring and are excited about this active side of his life. But Pat and I met because of our common interest in European Renaissance magic. When you discover this very different side of Pat, you realize that he is a very intelligent person with an amazing depth of knowledge and understanding. These are two of Pat’s “selves,” quite different from each other: one prominent in the world of sports and entertainment and the other less visible but now the primary source of Pat’s life work in his more mature years.
Some people go through a depressive collapse or at least a flattening of energy when their public life ends. But Pat’s intellectual inner self went into high gear when he retired from football. He is a good model for aging well, because he has an inner life that began to flourish as he got older. This is the pattern I’m looking for: As you get older, your life becomes more active than ever in certain ways, and aging means an increase of vitality, not a decrease. But this works best when the inner life has a base and can become more important as the years go by.
Pat is a reflective person, not only when writing about his experiences in football, but also when thinking about the big questions of myth, symbol, religion, and art. People often endlessly discuss the externals: politics, entertainment, and the weather. There may be some reflection in these conversations, but they could be more substantial if they included the bigger questions of meaning, history, and social justice. We could all become philosophers as we get older and start thinking more and doing less.
It’s difficult for a person to age with soul if the intellectual life is stagnant. But just think of things we talk about, the books we read, the movies we watch. They are mainly external and unconsciously play out the issues in our lives, especially those that have little reflection: sexuality, violence, power, love, and intimacy.
The older years offer a perfect time to reflect more often, more deeply and more seriously on these important aspects of life. Of course, we need to begin this kind of reflection in our youth, but it can reach its depth in old age. Being part of a culture that has lost its interest in profound ideas and intense reflection on experience makes aging more difficult.
Discovering the Kernel of Your Existence
I had a dream recently in which I was in Ireland in a shop talking with an Irishman. I asked him how old he thought I was. “I’d say thirty,” he said. “Well, I’m seventy-six,” I said. He didn’t seem interested in my information and just asked me to join him in some project he was involved with.
I thought it was interesting to have a dream about aging just when I’m writing a book on the subject.
The first striking thing about the dream is the notion that to the Irishman I’m thirty years old. He sees my younger self and is not interested in the fact that I’m seventy-six. I first visited Ireland when I was nineteen and still in monastic life. I studied philosophy in Northern Ireland from ages nineteen to twenty-one.
In Ireland I discovered the ways of a new culture that coincidentally was the homeland of my ancestors. I met Irish cousins and quickly grew to love the country and to feel at home there. I also began to think philosophically and was introduced to existentialism, a big step toward a different view of religion.
This was one of the first intense experiences I had of aging, leaving some of my youth behind, discovering new worlds, and learning how to think. I can recall experiences before my trip to Ireland that helped me age, but none were quite as powerful. In another chapter I describe in some detail my friendship with Thomas MacGreevy, an important mentor who was part of my Ireland experience.
During that first stay in Ireland I also began reading many writers, especially James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, who steered me away from an innocent view of religion, another aging process. Why did the Irishman in the dream think I was thirty rather than twenty? Maybe because I have grown some since those early days and yet still retain some of my “twenties in Ireland” youthfulness. Certainly, the dream is saying that I am younger in some ways than my literal seventy-six years.
The dream also invites me to reflect on my feelings about Ireland. At fifty I began to travel to Ireland regularly. One year I brought my family to live in Dublin for a year and put our children into Irish schools. It was not an easy year, and we all agreed that the family aged considerably during that time. We all loved and still love Ireland, but the experience of being in a different culture had its challenges.
There is also the fact that I come from an Irish family, completely Irish on my mother’s side. My wife is fully Irish in background, as well, and soon after we all arrived in Ireland we discovered a big, warm, and talented family of relatives who are still important in our lives today.
I often travel to Ireland by myself now, and I know I’m looking for and experiencing something important and quite deep for me. When I’m there, I often just walk the streets of Dublin, taking in all the sights that by now are very familiar to me. I seem to be looking for lost parts of my self, and I wish I had even closer ties to Ireland. I wish my grandparents, instead of my great-grandparents, had been born there so I could now be an Irish citizen. What is that wish, except some desire to be more closely connected to that important part of my identity? I’m looking for a past, perhaps a lost sense of myself, which seems essential.
Years ago a therapist advised me not to confuse the Ireland of my dreams with the actual place—this isn’t my first dream of Ireland. In that sense maybe there is a part of me that is Irish in not so literal a way. One memory makes this clear to me.
After publishing Care of the Soul I had many opportunities to create a new life and new work. People asked me to set up training programs and create study guides and courses, maybe a center somewhere for people to visit. But I kept thinking of Samuel Beckett and James Joyce. I wanted to be a writer, not the founder of a school. I was clear about that. And so I created the life of a fairly isolated author. I traveled a lot, but I didn’t found anything. I have lived like a writer in the fashion of my Irish idols.
These thoughts about my life in relation to Ireland are an example of how reflection can contribute to aging with soul. I am bending back to Ireland. As I continue to think about my Irish roots and experiences and about Ireland as the home of my ancestors, I develop an identity. I become someone with an ancient past and a broad level of belonging. Because of this Irish connection I am more of a person, more layered and deeply established. Every contact with Ireland has aged me by bringing out my interesting complexity and giving me a colorful and potent background. By becoming a richer personality, I am aged. I have not just gone through life on a single, thin plane of reality.
I have found that I have to actually visit Ireland to know the place and the people before I can fruitfully reflect on my Irishness. I feel at home there, and that sense of home gives me a base even when I am at my other home in New Hampshire. There, the longing for Ireland fills me with fantasies of the place and of being there, which are another form of reflection. When I am in the United States I am thinking about Ireland, and when I’m in Ireland I feel my American soul with greater intensity.
In spite of my love of Ireland, I choose to live in New Hampshire. I love this home, too, and largely because of my knowledge of American history and culture, I am dedicated to the well-being of America, as well. I count among my neighbors Emily Dickinson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Walt Whitman, and among my compatriots Louis Armstrong, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Anne Sexton, Alvin Ailey, Woody Allen, Joyce Carol Oates, Oprah Winfrey, Susan B. Anthony, all of whom let their talents shine and dedicated themselves to the American vision.
Reflecting on these creative Americans has inspired me to make my own contribution to the positive, utopian vision of what humanity can be. The more I feel part of this movement, the more mature I become, the more I age in soul. Anyone can do this—age by becoming a visionary and advocate for the human experiment.
I have an Irish soul and an American soul, and the two seem to coexist fruitfully. One of the things I look for in Ireland is an “old country.” I love the old buildings, the many ruins, and the traditional ways that pepper the very modern culture there. It sounds as though I am looking for age itself, not growing older as much as gaining an awareness of the old, old self that resides deep in my soul.
Developing a Clearer, Deeper Sense of Self
Aging with soul is the process of becoming a full, rich, and interesting person. It happens over time and requires your active participation. It isn’t automatic. Often when we use the word aging we give the impression that aging just happens in spite of our wishes or our participation. But when you look closely and see that to age means to become somebody, then you understand that the process can’t go on without your involvement. You age yourself. You do things that make you an interesting, evolved, and ripened person.
Here are some guidelines for being proactive as you age with soul:
1. Accept promising invitations from life for greater and deeper experiences. It’s easy to excuse yourself when the opportunity arises to try new things. It might be traveling to unfamiliar places, developing new skills, trying a new job or career, or cultivating new friendships and relationships.
2. Reflect on your experience so far through open and probing conversations. Use your friendships for meaningful talk. Reviewing your experience in a probing manner can give you depth and complexity.
3. Look far into your past to see where you have come from and what your heritage has to offer you. I wrote about my Irishness. You may reflect on your European, African, or Asian roots. This kind of reflection helps you know what you’re made of and what kind of person you can become as you age.
4. Use travel as way to discover who you are and what you are capable of. Travel does not have to be unconscious, or merely for entertainment value. It can have a purpose, a personal point for your development. You may choose where to travel by knowing how pieces of your self are scattered around the world. For example, I find many parts of myself that I’d like to embody in England, and I discover other different parts of myself in Italy, a place I also love.
5. Read authors who allow you to hold a mirror up to yourself and give you ideas on who you might become. Learn skills in the arts and crafts, for instance, that surprise you with hidden talents and pleasures. Much of the self lies undiscovered unless you experiment and allow yourself to open up outward. Experimentation is an important part of aging well. If you hide in inactivity you may never know who you are and will never have a self to become as the years go by.
Processing your life is being an alchemist to your own experience. You observe it closely, watching it change, noticing hidden colorings and smells. You remember sensually. You help all your experiences focus on your current life and identity. They are the raw stuff of your soul. Out of them emerges a person the world has never seen before. This process is called aging.