Finding True Purpose and Making the Most of Your Life
In the foreword to the revised and updated edition of Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward: A Spirituality for the Two Halves of Life, Brene Brown talks about a subject we all can relate to: homesickness. Just the word summons up a longing we know too well, the desire to return to the familiar and comfortable.
Yet, the ache we feel inside isn’t always about home. Our yearning can also take on a spiritual dimension. Brown calls it “a predictable and always reoccurring desperation to find a sense of sacredness.” It’s something we can’t explain in words, yet we know our heart longs for it. We want to connect to something greater than ourselves.
Rohr points out that our “homesickness” is often called “loneliness, isolation, longing, sadness, restlessness, or even kind of a depression.” We may be seen as successful, with a solid job and a splendid home and family, but there’s an internal longing for more. For many of us, it is the calling of the second half of life.
What follows are Rohr’s lightly edited words from Falling Upward in quotes. My thoughts, influenced by Rohr’s teachings and using some of his language, follow.
First, You Navigate the First Half of Life
At some point we reach a midlife malaise, where a part of us says is this all there is? Is this the best I can do? There must be more than getting a job and having children.
The first major tasks you encounter in life, building a network of friends, a career, a family, are vitally important. But at some point, you wonder if there isn’t something more to life. At that point, you may feel a malaise, a melancholy, even an overriding sense of loneliness. Something isn’t quite right. But what is it?
Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find, when we get to the top, that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall.
You have done the things that society expected of you, yet it feels like it’s not enough. Some call it a mid-life crisis, but you are simply passing through the first part of life. A second, deeper, mysterious and more meaningful part of life calls us. We can choose to pursue it—or, if we are lazy or fearful, decide to stay on the path we are already on. A path we may come to regret.
On the New Path, You Move from Ego to Soul
Real life is always a much deeper river, hidden beneath the appearances. Most people confuse their life situation with their actual life, which is an underlying flow beneath the everyday events. This deeper discovery is largely what religious people mean by finding their soul.
That “deeper river,” the “underlying flow,” is the domain of the soul. It has been with us all along, intertwined with the ego. But in the first half of life, the ego has completely overshadowed it. As you move into the second half of life, the soul makes itself known. It often whispers but sometimes shouts. When we listen to its voice, we can better tune it to our life’s true purpose and act on it.
Like skaters, we actually move forward by moving from side to side. We grow, but by a far different path than the ego would ever imagine. Only the soul knows and understands.
The path is not always clear. Sometimes you can’t see clearly and must “feel” your way ahead. You may move sideways, before moving forward. Pursuing this path requires courage, because while many of our friends and associates are zigging, we are zagging. It’s not the easiest route but is necessary. As Rohr points out “merely to survive and preserve our life is a low-level instinct that we share with good little lizards…you were meant to thrive and not just survive.”
In the Second Half of Life We Find Our True Self
The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container (your body) was meant to hold and deliver. No Pope, Bible quote, psychological technique, religious formula, book, or guru can do the journey for you.
Rather than wallow in “homesickness,” Rohr says we must leave home “to find the real and larger home.” We have to leave what we know, as familiar and comfortable as it may seem, because there is something better and more satisfying that awaits us. It’s the journey to discover our True Self.
It is your True Self who you objectively are from the beginning, in the heart and mind of God, the face you had before you were born. We are created with an inner drive and necessity that sends all of us looking for our True Self, whether we know it or not.
The good news is we are not on our own. Rohr says that “the instructions are in the box,” within our innermost selves. “There is a guide, a kind of advocate, an inner compass that resides within each of us.” It is a voice that steers us to our fate or destiny, our purpose. It is our job to listen that voice and go where it takes us. We are never too old. It is never too late.
10 Signs You’ve Found Your Purpose
When you have successfully moved into the second half of life, you will know it. The change in your life may be dramatic, even temporarily unsettling, but as Rohr writes “what looks like falling can largely be experienced as falling upward and onward, into a broader and deeper world. When you reach this place, “the soul has found its fullness, is finally connected to the whole, and lives inside the big picture.”
What follows are ten signs you are on the right path, culled from Falling Upward, using Rohr’s lightly edited words. See how many of the ten points you can relate to.
- You’re not preoccupied with possessing, collecting, and impressing others with your things, your house, your travels.
- Your concern is not so much to acquire what you love, but to love what you have.
- You no longer define yourself by differentiating yourself. You’re more likely to look for the things you have in common with others.
- You no longer feel the need to change or adjust to other people to be happy yourself.
- Your desire is to pay back, to give to the world a bit of what you have received.
- You no longer need to define every moment as totally right or totally wrong, with me or against me. It just is.
- You find your daily life now requires prayer and discernment more than knee jerk responses.
- Your actions are less compulsive. You’ve moved to an utterly new kind of doing that flows quietly and almost organically.
- You feel a calm that allows you to confront what must be confronted with even greater clarity and incisiveness.
- You aid and influence other people simply by being who you are.
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