Quotes About Transition

There is no practical or compelling reason to leave one's present comfort zone in life. Why should you or would you? Frankly, none of us do unless and until we have to. The invitation probably has to unexpected and unsought. Richard Rohr

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

is actually undoing the fourth commandment of Moses, which tells us to "honor your father and mother"? This commandment is necessary for the first half of life, and, one hopes, it can be possible forever. As we move into the second half of life, however, we are very often at odds with our natural family and the "dominant consciousness" of our cultures.

Once you can get "out of the house," your "castle" and comfort zone, much of the journey has a life—and death—of its own.

Death is not a changing of worlds as most imagine, as much as the walls of this world infinitely expanding.

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?

humans tend to live themselves into new ways of thinking more than think themselves into new ways of living.

How you get there is where you arrive.

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 have become a lie. —CARL JUNG, THE STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS OF THE PSYCHE

If you realize that there is a further journey, you might do the warm-up act quite differently, which would better prepare you for what follows.

So God, life, and destiny have to loosen the loyal soldier's grasp on your soul, which up to now has felt like the only "you" that you know and the only authority that there is. Our loyal solider normally begins to be discharged somewhere between the ages of thirty-five and fifty-five, if it happens at all; before that it is usually mere rebellion or iconoclasm.

Yearning for a new way will not produce it. Only ending the old way can do that.

If you don't walk into the seond half of your own life, it is you who does not want it.

We are a "first-half-of-life culture," largely concerned about surviving successfully. Probably most cultures and individuals across history have been situated in the first half of their own development up to now

One of the odd things about middle age...was the strange decisions a man discovers he's made by not really making them.

Miles smiled and gave her a kiss on top of the head, breathing her in, this kid who wasn't a kid anymore but still smelled like one. Everything about his daughter seemed just about right, including the way the second thing she said often contradicted the first. Things were going okay. Except they weren't.

Since turning in his resignation, he'd been wondering what he might do next. Suddenly his path seemed clear. He would become an alcoholic. He

We stand before a hundred doors, choose to enter one, where we're faced with a hundred more and then choose again. We choose not just what we'll do, but who we'll be. Perhaps the sound of all those doors swinging shut behind us each time we select this one

Someone has to leave first. This is a very old story. There is no other version of this story.

How much can you change and get away with it, before you turn into someone else, before it's some kind of murder?

What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal.… Man is something that must be overcome.

Thanks to our capacity to adapt to ever greater fame and fortune, yesterday's luxuries can soon become today's necessities and tomorrow's relics."6

I was persisting in reading my present environment in the light of my old one.

In death, we never much resemble who we were in life, for all the mystery is gone.