🥀 Missing Ingredient, Part Three
Catch up on part one and part two first.
“One cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be of little importance in the evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening become a lie.”
—Carl Jung, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche
Despite the unrelenting uncertainty of self-employment, small joys abound. One of them, particularly when living in a busy city, is grocery shopping at odd hours: Tuesday morning at 8 a.m., for example.
On this particular day, I arrived late, knowing the store would be a congested cluster; Ryder needed sweet potato to help with an upset stomach, so I couldn’t wait. It was six p.m. rush hour when everyone getting off work had the same idea, thus no carts or baskets left.
I’ve got this, I thought, already carrying a heavy backpack and takeaway cup of tea.
In stubborn self-sufficiency, I started stacking items while squeezing past fellow shoppers in the produce section: three pre-made salads in plastic containers, bananas and a box of peaches on top, then four oblong double-bagged Japanese sweet potatoes. With the stack now teetering, I couldn’t resist a few more staples, grabbing cheese and a large bin of Fage yogurt.
By the time I got to the cereal aisle, I was struggling. I gave up on the tea, tossing the cup away mid-shop. I began accidentally dropping various items and picking them back up, only to drop the next few; a solo performance worthy of the three stooges.
My “I’ve got this” stopped working the moment I added more to my arms than the one item I entered the store for, but I was too stubborn to do any of the following: ask a clerk for help, wait by the escalator until a cart became available, return upstairs to find a basket near the checkout kiosks, or simply purchase less.
Instead, in the name of efficiency, I stumbled around the store like a hot mess.1 At least until a stranger noticed and took pity.
So far in this series, we’ve been talking about the missing ingredient for Rolling in Doh, acknowledging ambiguous grief, and the metaphor of pruning a rose bush to make room for new blooms. Where we left off last time:
WHAT DIED?! I wanted to shout at the book [Necessary Endings]. I only know a part of me did, and a part of my business too. That’s not a bad thing—I have been pruning, and likewise, my life and business have been pruning me. But it has been hard to grieve what I can’t see.
Mercifully, the next book-as-clue arrived the following day with answers. Something finally put the last few years into stark relief. It took another author sharing his explanation and saying, “If you feel this too, you are not alone.”
That book was From Strength to Strength, by Arthur Brooks (no relation to David Brooks, who wrote a similar one called The Second Mountain). Both reference Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward, and all three cite Carl Jung for first introducing the idea of “the two halves of life.”2
Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation blog describes this transition well (emphasis mine):
The first half of life is spent building our sense of identity, importance, and security—what I would call the false self and Freud might call the ego self. Jung emphasizes the importance and value of a healthy ego structure. But inevitably you discover, often through failure or a significant loss, that your conscious self is not all of you, but only the acceptable you. You will find your real purpose and identity at a much deeper level than the positive image you present to the world.
In the second half of life, the ego still has a place, but now in the service of the True Self or soul, your inner and inherent identity. Your ego is the container that holds you all together, so now its strength is an advantage. Someone who can see their ego in this way is probably what we mean by a “grounded” person.
I didn’t find these words until after reading the first chapter of Arthur Brooks’ book—the one that shocked an aha into me, no doubt titled for that exact purpose: “Your Professional Decline Is Coming (Much) Sooner Than You Think.”