Today my mother asked me a very relevant question. She is now 69, her husband has passed 80, and it’s something that plays for them both. She asked,
And it struck me that all of these life directions are ways where we define ourselves more narrowly. If you call yourself a musician or a painter, you focus on a limited area of your skills, and that is where you invest your attention and how you define yourself. So what happens when you lose a life direction like that?
In a way it is the start of a journey, a movement back from a narrow definition to the entire core of what you are. It is an opportunity to refind yourself, and perhaps create a new definition, or just to stay at the centre.
It is of course different if you are older and are retired, and the psychological journey has more to do with letting go, rather than starting again. But it’s an area where someone who suffers from a psychic vulnerability later in life has an overlap with the elderly, both are confronted with this same psychological movement.
If a dancer has to stop dancing,
And a painter has to stop painting,
And a musician can no longer play any instrument,
And a mother can no longer care for her kids,
What then stays?
And a painter has to stop painting,
And a musician can no longer play any instrument,
And a mother can no longer care for her kids,
What then stays?
In a way it is the start of a journey, a movement back from a narrow definition to the entire core of what you are. It is an opportunity to refind yourself, and perhaps create a new definition, or just to stay at the centre.
It is of course different if you are older and are retired, and the psychological journey has more to do with letting go, rather than starting again. But it’s an area where someone who suffers from a psychic vulnerability later in life has an overlap with the elderly, both are confronted with this same psychological movement.