Falling Upward summary

We live in a “first-half-of-life culture.” It’s nothing new. It’s been this way throughout history. Our main purpose has always been to survive, so we concentrate on building our identities: establishing a home, a relationship, friendships, and a community.

Identifying what makes us significant, figuring out how we’ll support ourselves, finding people to accompany us through life – these are first-half-of-life concerns. We must do these things to create the “container” for our life.

Back to Odysseus.

After returning home and being united with his loved ones, Odysseus undertakes his second journey. He’d learned about this journey during his odyssey home, from a blind seer named Tiresias, who he’d spoken to in (of all places) Hades, the kingdom of the dead. We can think of this trip to Hades as Odysseus’s rock bottom; there is, quite literally, no farther “down” to go – and yet it is then that he hears new things, even if he hardly acknowledges them at the time.

In post–World War II Japan, returning soldiers were often not prepared for a return to civil society. They had been a “loyal soldier” and now needed a broader identity if they were to reenter their communities in a useful capacity. To enable this, a communal ritual was established in which the soldier was thanked and praised for his service. An elder would declare that the war was over and that the person was needed by the community as something more than a soldier. This kind of process – “discharging the loyal soldier” – is needed by many of us to give closure when we are transitioning from one chapter in our lives to another.

Our own loyal soldiers have seen us through the first half of life. They’ve helped us to look both ways before crossing the street, given us impulse control to avoid addictions, and taught us to say no so we can build our boundaries, dignity, and identities. But our loyal soldiers simply can’t help us get to the second half of life. They haven’t been there and simply don’t understand it. They may have been able to help us with that early decision-making in black-and-white thinking, but if we’re to move on, there comes a time when we have to part ways. The Japanese certainly had the right idea. And if we go back to our hero, Odysseus, we can see that he too was a loyal soldier, rowing his boat right up to his second journey.

In this last section of our Blink to Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward we’re going to look at what the second half of life holds for us and some of the ways in which it differs from the first half.

The first thing Rohr tells us is that the seriousness of the second half of life is characterized by what he calls “a bright sadness and a sober happiness.” Although there is still darkness, we’re able to cope with it with less anxiety. We think differently, too. We have less of a need to hold on to hurts from the past and less of a desire to judge others. We lose our feelings of superiority. And we learn not only to stop fighting stupidity but to actively ignore it. We work for change, using our influence to persuade quietly.