Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life Quotes

“In the end we will only be transformed when we can recognize and accept the fact that there is a will within each of us, quite outside the range of conscious control, a will which knows what is right for us,”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“we are, paradoxically, obliged to thank our symptoms, for they catch our attention, compel seriousness, and offer profound clues”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Finding what supports you from within will link you to transcendence, reframe the perspectives received from your history, and provide the agenda of growth, purpose, and meaning that we all are meant to carry into the world and to share with others. The soul asks each of us that we live a larger life.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Even when surrounded by many others, your journey is solitary, for the life you are to choose is your life, not someone else’s. Alone, we nonetheless move amid a community of other solitudes; alone, our world is peopled with many companions, both within and without. Thus, this paradox stands before each of us, and challenges: We “must be alone if [we] are to find out what it is that supports [us] when we can no longer support [ourselves].”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Wholeness is not about comfort, or goodness, or consensus—it means drinking this brief, unique, deeply rooted vintage to its dregs.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Despite the blandishments of popular culture, the goal of life is not happiness but meaning. Those who seek happiness by trying to avoid or finesse suffering will find life more and more superficial. As we have seen, in every swampland there is a task, the addressing of which will enlarge one’s life not diminish it.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Despite the blandishments of popular culture, the goal of life is not happiness but meaning. Those who seek happiness by trying to avoid or finesse suffering will find life more and more superficial. As we have seen, in every swampland there is a task, the addressing of which will enlarge one’s life not diminish”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“And yet the task of life asks that we embrace this agenda of apparent loss as much as the agenda of acquisition that the first half of life served.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Moreover, the test of meaning is not a cognitive decision, so one should not suddenly quit this present life for any quixotic mission. Meaning is found, over the long haul, through the feeling of rightness within. No one can give that to us, although we may allow others to take it away from us.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“As Jung has concluded, “We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning—for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“In the first half of life there is a place for ambition, for the driving powers of the ego, which compel us to overthrow our fears and to step into the world. As we have seen, the chief task of the first half of life is to build a sense of ego strength sufficient to engage relationship, social role expectations, and to support oneself.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Too often we remain in service to the agenda of the first half of life when the soul has already moved on to the agenda of the second.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Each of us, from childhood on, engages in magical thinking similar to Job’s, believing we can strike deals with the world and with the divinities. These “deals” are part of how we attempt to protect our vulnerable selves in an omnipotent and often inscrutable universe. (As a youth I believed that right conduct, right intention, and a lot of learning would bring control into one’s life. But the psyche had other plans. Being so humbled by the psyche was the beginning of discerning the difference between knowledge and wisdom.) But such deals with the universe are our fantasy alone, and have little to no bearing on reality. Just as we try to live in smaller fictions in order to feel more secure, so our “deals” unwittingly diminish the world and those around us by seeking to contain and control their autonomy.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Job experiences a revelation, a transformation of perspective, and declares that his widely proclaimed piety was based on a hubristic assumption that his compliant behavior compelled God to treat him well. Job realizes that there is no deal, that such a deal is a presumption of the ego in service to its now familiar agenda, which promotes its own security, satiety, and continuity.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“The flight from loneliness drives people to mill amid malls, to stay in bad relationships, to abuse substances and worst of all, to avoid a relationship with the self. How can we ever have a good relationship with another when we cannot have a good relationship with ourselves?”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“The chief disorders of our time are the fear of loneliness and the fear of growing up.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Friedrich Nietzsche once observed that the teacher is ill-served whose student does not surpass him. So our parenting is less effective if our children do not grow beyond us toward an enlarged vision of life’s many possibilities for satisfaction of the soul.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Our dilemma was best described in the nineteenth century by the Danish theologian Søren Kierkegaard when he noted in his journal the paradox that life must be remembered backward but lived forward.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“What, in short, is the second half of life about—the time today between thirty-five and nearly ninety years—if it is not to repeat the script and expectations of the first half of life?”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“invites. In 1900, the average life expectancy of a North American was only forty-seven.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“So what has brought you to this point in your life? Have you chosen this life you lead, these consequences? What forces shaped you, perhaps diverted you, wounded and distorted you; what forces perhaps supported you, and are still at work within you, whether you acknowledge them or not? The one question none of us can answer is: of what are we unconscious? But that which is unconscious has great power in our lives, may currently be making choices for us, and most certainly has been implicitly constructing the patterns of our personal history. No one awakens in the morning, looks in the mirror, and says, “I think I will repeat my mistakes today,” or “I expect that today I will do something really stupid, repetitive, regressive, and against my best interests.” But, frequently, this replication of history is precisely what we do, because we are unaware of the silent presence of those programmed energies, the core ideas we have acquired, internalized, and surrendered to. As Shakespeare observed in Twelfth Night, no prisons are more confining than those we know not we are in.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“the inner split between soul and world widens. In most lives, permission to live one’s life is not something one is given; it is to be seized, if not in early ego election then later in desperation, for the alternative is so much worse.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Moreover, virtually all of us lack a deep sense of permission to lead our own lives. We learned very early that the world exacted conditions that, if not met, could result in punishment or abandonment. That message, overlearned and internalized, remains a formidable block to the ego’s capacity to elect its own path. Only when the ego has reached a certain measure of strength, or perhaps more commonly, is driven by desperation to make a different choice, can we overthrow this tyranny of history.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“As Jesus is reported to have said in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas, “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” This is the essence of what Jung means by individuation. It is a service not to ego, but to what wishes to live through us. While the ego may fear this overthrow, our greatest freedom is found, paradoxically, in surrender to that which seeks fuller expression through us. Enlarged being is what we are called to bring into this world, contribute to our society and our families, and share with others. It is wholly false to think that individuation cuts a person off from others. It cuts a person off from the herd, from collectivity, but it deepens the range in which more authentic relationships can occur. It may be necessary for us from time to time to absent ourselves from the world in order to reflect, regroup, or revision our journey, but ultimately, we are to bring that larger person back to the world. Jung describes the dialectic of isolation and community in this way: “As the individual is not just a single, separate being, but by his very existence presupposes a collective relationship, it follows that the process of individuation must lead to more intense and broader collective relationships and not to isolation.”5”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“We all suffer from the lingering message of childhood: that the world is big and powerful, and that we are vulnerable and dependent.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Perhaps Jung’s most compelling contribution is the idea of individuation, that is, the lifelong project of becoming more nearly the whole person we were meant to be—what the gods intended, not the parents, or the tribe, or, especially, the easily intimidated or inflated ego. While revering the mystery of others, our individuation summons each of us to stand in the presence of our own mystery, and become more fully responsible for who we are in this journey we call our life. So often the idea of individuation has been confused with self-indulgence or mere individualism, but what individuation more often asks of us is the surrender of the ego’s agenda of security and emotional reinforcement, in favor of humbling service to the soul’s intent. This is quite the opposite of self-indulgence; it is the service of the ego to the higher order manifested to us through the Self.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“Each of these three approaches, valuable as they may be in any given situation, can represent a failure of nerve to take on the larger questions of the soul. We may improve our chemistry or our behaviors, but in service to what ends?”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“As Jung wrote in his memoir, “Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable—perhaps everything.”3”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“A life that constricts meaning wounds the soul. How often I have sat with couples who profess good intentions toward each other, but whose archaic agendas continue to impose themselves on each other. When I ask them, “How much do you want to live with a depressed, angry, reluctant partner?” each quickly responds that they desire the contrary. Yet their own actions, driven from hidden sources, create precisely that fractious, reluctant partner they dread. Relationships that are supposed to make both partners larger so often diminish both. The soul of each is constricted, and expresses itself through the familiar pathologies of daily discord.”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up

“when we live without meaning, we suffer the greatest illness of all. An ancient Egyptian text, The World-Weary Man in Search of His Ba (soul), illustrates the universality of this dilemma. Though thousands of years old, how modern is this tide! Do you not see the tired commuter, the depleted homemaker, the businessman with the third martini—all longing, yearning, for something larger in their lives?”
― James Hollis, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life: How to Finally, Really Grow Up