Quotes About Fulfillment

Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—right now. This is a monumental change from the first half of life, so much so that it is almost the litmus test of whether you are in the second half of life at all.

The soul needs meaning as much as the body needs food.

All we can give back and all God wants from any of us is to humbly and proudly return the product that we have been given—which is ourselves!

The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver.

Your concern is not so much to have what you love anymore, but to love what you have—right now.

The problem is solved. Now go and utterly enjoy all remaining days. Not only is it "Always Advent," but every day can now be Christmas because the one we thought we were just waiting for has come once and for all.

Humans are creators of meaning, and finding deep meaning in our experiences is not just another name for spirituality but is also the very shape of human happiness.

God tries to first create a joyous yes inside of you, far more than any kind of no . . . Just saying no is resentful dieting, whereas finding your deeper yes, and eating from that table, is always a spiritual banquet.

Death is largely a threat to those who have not yet lived their life. Odysseus has lived the journeys of both halves of life, and is ready to freely and finally let go.

When you get your "Who am I?" question right, all the "What should I do?" questions tend to take care of themselves.

The reason we do anything one more time is because the last time did not really satisfy us deeply. As English poet W.H. Auden put it in "Apropos of Many Things": "We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.

The first half of life is discovering the script, and the second half is actually writing it and owning it. So

Thomas Merton, the American monk, pointed out that we may spend our whole life climbing the ladder of success, only to find when we get to the top that our ladder is leaning against the wrong wall. Most

A heaven you created by yourself will never be heaven for long.

Only later in life can we perhaps join with Thomas Merton, who penned one of my favorite lines, "If I had a message to my contemporaries it is surely this: Be anything you like, be madmen, drunks, and bastards of every shape and form, but at all costs avoid one thing: success If you are too obsessed with success, you will forget to live. If you have learned only how to be a success, your life has probably been wasted."7

In the second half of life, we are not demanding our American constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness or that people must have our same experiences; rather, simple meaning now suffices, and that becomes in itself a much deeper happiness. As the body cannot live without food, so the soul cannot live without meaning.

So now we move toward the goal, the very purpose of human life, "another intensity…a deeper communion," as Eliot calls it, that which the container is meant to hold, support, and foster.

Most of us tend to think of the second half of life

It takes a huge push, much self-doubt, and some degree of separation for people to find their own soul and their own destiny apart from what Mom and Dad always wanted them to be and do.

Everything finally belongs, and you are a part of it. This knowing and this enjoying are a good description of salvation.

We do not want to embark on a further journey if it feels like going down, especially after we have put so much sound and fury into going up. This is surely the first and primary reason why many people never get to the fullness of their own lives. The supposed achievements of the first half of life have to fall apart and show themselves to be wanting in some way, or we will not move further. Why would we?

From eighteen to fifty-five was the unfolding. Then, when it happened at fifty-five, they knew what they were born for. When that moment comes, it is great and it is all synchronicity. We know then that grace is at work and we are not manufacturing our own lives.

What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?

It is strange that when people have so much, they are so anxious about not having enough—to do, to see, to own, to fix, to control, to change.