Long before we reach our teens our ability to pick up a language has hugely deteriorated. At twenty or so our table tennis starts falling off, at twenty-five our figure skating and gymnastics, at thirty our football or tennis.
However, our ability to play chess or run a business or make a speech or write or paint or compose may well have been growing all the time and perhaps we’ve only just begun to do philosophy in any disciplined or creative fashion.
And so on, gaining skills and losing skills all the way up to – well, up to what age? While there’s still life there’s still the question: ‘What to do now’ what’s the right job for me, what do I enjoy most, at this time of my life?
Which leads to: ‘what – if anything- can I do as well now as in my fifties and sixties? Or even – is it possible? – better than then, provided I keep up the needful practice? In short, what’s appropriate now?’
It’s not for nothing that, traditionally, wisdom is expected to come with age, that the Sage is generally pictured as an Ancient Sage, that the Wise Old Man is among the more convincing of Jung’s archetypes.
I’m certainly not suggesting that enquiry into your essential Nature and destiny – into the great questions of life and death – is best put off till hoary old age, which has all too obvious reasons for specializing in such weighty (not to say heavy) matters. On the contrary, the enquiry can’t begin too early in life. What I am saying is that – even if you’ve left it rather late – this is just the job for you to pursue now, through old age to very old age. It’s exactly what you have an excellent chance of becoming very good at indeed. And this for a variety of reasons.
It’s likely you have now either realized your ambitions and find yourself as unsatisfied as ever, or else you have given them up as unrealistic or unachievable. In either case you are being helped towards that measure of detachment which is just what’s now needed.
You have all the leisure free from pressing duties and responsibilities, which you could want for this, the most engrossing of all the enterprises of your life.
According to Carl Jung (and all the evidence I have suggests he’s right) you are now psychologically ripe for this great endeavor – which is coming to terms with your own death, and (much more than that) having death itself as your goal.
On the other hand, if you deny or actively resist your built-in need to devote much of the energies of the closing decades of your life to that goal, you are likely to be unhappy for no outwardly discernible reason, deeply afraid of what’s to come perhaps clinically sick.
You now have in the bag all the raw material all the loose pieces of information, all the experience of life you need in order to make sense of it. What more fitting task therefore – what more urgent duty – awaits you than this one: assemble the jigsaw puzzle of your life till the master-design suddenly takes shape: enabling you to look back on the those once so poignant and absorbing concerns as trivial in themselves, yet revealed as indispensable now they are subordinated, to the great concerns: What’s it all in aid of? What, above all, is my true identity, and therefore my true role and fate?
Am I made of god and accordingly indestructible; or am I made of the less hardwearing stuff and accordingly soon for the cosmic dump where everything that is not God ends up?
Excerpted from ‘The Little Book of Life and Death’
Douglas Harding
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