Adapted exclusively for the American Society of Aging from Carol Orsborn’s Spiritual Aging: Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life (Inner Traditions, December, 2024)
Who among us does not know more now than we did 10, 30 or 50 years ago? Not just about what is right and what is wrong, but who we are and the nature of the choices that are ours to make. Do you know more now than you did even a short while ago? Of course you do. But don’t answer in the affirmative too quickly, for this is a trick question.
If you were to tell the whole truth, you’d have to admit to all the things you thought were true that you are now not so sure about. It is a sign of spiritual advancement when you admit that in some important ways, you know less now: how many things did you think you were certain of that turned out to be wrong? An even higher state of realization comes about when there are times you feel you don’t know anything at all for sure anymore.
For instance, you may have once thought you knew what it would entail to be a good parent and raise perfect children. You once thought you knew how to take care of yourself so that nothing much would ever go wrong. You once thought others in your family, community, even the world shared your understanding of right versus wrong. You used to believe your actions and contributions would make a difference on a massive scale.
The paradox of spiritual aging is that progress comes not from increasing control, but from having learned that you are ultimately powerless over others, especially those who trigger your most unsettling emotions. But this is just the low-hanging fruit. Using whatever degree of consciousness you can bring to bear on self-awareness, one soon learns that the only things one ever has control over are the ability to tell the truth about things, do what can be done to rectify whatever wrongs one has made in the past, and to make better choices going forward. Allowing spiritual aging to evolve over time is the central task of the journey through the higher stages of adult development as one becomes more accustomed to—and less afraid—of productive pain.
Central to this is the growing realization that in walking the path of aging as a spiritual experience, the losses that come about with advancing age—which so many of us dread—turn out to be the very means of progress. Here, the charge is to confront and then clear away the character flaws as well as the debris of regret, victimhood, blame, self-doubt, and all manner of misunderstanding from your path. In this, aging is our greatest teacher. Those of us who have attended retreats to loosen ego’s grip on us need now only look in the mirror to feel humbled. Your ambition to make something of yourself, which drove you relentlessly all your life, now sits at your feet like an old dog that has lost its bite. You already recycle, purchase your clothes at thrift shops and drive a hybrid, but it is far easier to become less materialistic when you have downsized to a room in your daughter’s house.
‘Things that once caused you pain or compulsion no longer carry the power to devastate.’
Author John C. Robinson writes in The Three Secrets of Aging that as you age, “Our familiar identity loses its importance … Our thoughts no longer seem so important and seem to disappear more quickly, along with all the underlying ideas that structure our conventional understanding of identity, time, reality, and story.” We clear away our old programming to see things more clearly—the beauty that had been overlooked as well as the disturbing aspects that confront us with our ultimate powerlessness.
The intrusion of reality can be unsettling, to say the least, but this can also be the initiation of new depths of character. Foremost among these expanded capabilities is the profound realization that things that once caused you pain or compulsion no longer carry the power to devastate.
Viewing the discomforts of advancing age not as loss but as holding the potential for spiritual culmination, you find yourself willing to lean into rather than deny discomforting truths about yourself and the world. You become increasingly attuned to the joy inherent in creation. And finally transiting to the peak of adult development, you become willing to take courageous risks to be true to yourself.
At the same time, as the mystics teach us, being fully alive does not mean that things always go your way. Growing old continues to raise the bar by accelerating the quantity of new occasions to which you must arise. When you least expect it, you can be shaken by your circumstances out of complacency and onto another learning curve that forces you to grow yet again through trial and error.
Of course, there are jolts, tendrils from the well-worn furrows of the past in which you become entangled from time to time. But forgiveness, whether for those times you think you should have known better or for new missteps, comes more quickly and easily, and less and less often do you find yourself taking seriously familiar but outgrown stories about your essential wrongness. In their stead, there is a softening that gives way to what the mystics experience as a wordless apprehension of your place in the whole of things, exactly as you are.
When you are fully alive, there is no end to experiencing the vastness of the human potential: not just the pretty colors on the rosier end of the spectrum we prefer, but the darker hues that younger eyes are unable to perceive. Growing old expands your capacity to see more and see deeper. You come to realize that coupled with this expansion of consciousness is the inability to block anything. You feel it all. And then, at last, life makes sense.
‘You feel it all. And then, at last, life makes sense.’
Even factoring in your newfound humility and surrender to powerlessness, what is it you can finally come to know: the unshakable truth that we find at path’s end? That regardless of your circumstances, you are beloved. You are cared for. You are authentic. You are flawed. You are forgiven. You are grateful. There’s nothing to be done but to surrender to the whole mess of it and feel the bittersweet gift of your life without feeling compelled to change a thing.
At this advanced stage, you will at one moment fall to your knees in wonder or find yourself staring out the window, doing nothing more than appreciating the play of light and shadow in the leaves. On another, you may find yourself with a megaphone to your lips, waking up the previously dormant heart of an activist, a prophet, a leader, a creator. And if you have already been these things, this time “doing” will be inspired, not driven. You won’t be spending time securing your legacy, worrying about what it all amounted to. Rather, you will simply be living life to the full, in all its intended intensity.
In the place where the cockiness of youth once held sway, there is now the bittersweet and welcomed groundedness of acceptance: of self, reality and divine mystery. Seeing your individual ego shatter into pieces doesn’t feel good. And yet here you remain, learning not to be afraid of questioning your assumptions. Being humbled by age, then, is not the abject surrender you fear it is, not evidence that you’re losing it, but rather, pays testimony to the fact that you’ve grown large enough to embrace it all.
Carol Orsborn, PhD, is the best-selling author of more than 36 books, including her most recent, Spiritual Aging: Weekly Reflections for Embracing Life. She leads the Spiritual Aging Study and Support Group (SASS) at Spiritual Aging@ Substack.com and for numerous groups globally including the leading organization in the conscious and spiritual aging field Sage-ing International. Her website is carolorsborn.com. She has served on the faculties of Pepperdine, Loyola Marymount and Georgetown universities.
Photo credit: Shutterstock/panophotograph
