Sit down and be quiet.
You are drunk, and this is the edge of the roof.

— Rumi

The Heart's Desire

Life is always inviting us to WAKE UP and live more deeply. A new urgency — an urgency captured inimitably in the short poem above by Rumi, the 13th-century Sufi poet — colors this invitation as we approach elderhood. The heart's fourfold desire — to rediscover ourselves, to live more simply, to recover a sense of place, and to live in community — is stirred.

The Call to Rediscover Ourselves

Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?
— Mary Oliver, “The Summer Day”

In the passage from midlife to elderhood, the personal challenge we face is “that of confronting the lost and counterfeit places within us and releasing our deeper, innermost self — our true self. [We are called] to come home to ourselves, to become who we really are” (Sue Monk Kidd, When the Heart Waits).

	Existential questions: “Relatively soon, I will die. Maybe in 20 years, maybe tomorrow, it doesn't matter. Once I am dead and everyone who knew me dies too, it will be as though I never existed. What difference has my life made to anyone. None that I can think of. None at all.”

Sometimes external events are the catalyst for our soul searching:

• Your children leave. Your life was tied up in your role as parent. Who are you now?
• You hit the ceiling on the corporate ladder. Or you’re “downsized” and suddenly out on the street competing with 30-somethings. Or, like the Jack Nicholson character Warren Schmidt, you retire from a career that has held your identity for years.  Who are you now?

Other times the call — the invitation to embark on a journey of self-rediscovery — is prompted by a vague, lingering discontent, “a still small voice”:

     Finally you realize what’s troubling you. It’s that little voice again, the one that keeps piping up during the silences and raising the same litany of disturbing questions.

    “Is this all there is?’ it asks. ‘This home? This mate? This job? This life?’

    “‘Time is running out,’ it whispers. ‘A portion of my life is already over. Shouldn’t things be better? Or at least different?’

    “But better than what? Different from what?”¹

The call to rediscover ourselves is essentially a call to inner work — or mindfulness. When we recover the unlived parts of ourselves and touch those original passions of our childhood or youth — passions that we repressed, to gain acceptance, or deferred, to make our way in the world — we unleash new energy and new creativity and often embark on a whole new direction in life.