Don’t move… Just die over and over. Don’t anticipate.
Nothing can save you now because you have only this moment.
Not even enlightenment will help you now because there are no other moments.
With no future, be true to yourself and express yourself fully.. Don’t move.
~Shunryu Suzuki
deep in the middle…
inquiry for today~ may you too, be ok with discomfort….
Carl Jung wrote: “From the midpoint of life onward, only the one who is willing to die with life remains truly alive.”
At first, that sentence feels strange. Death in the middle of life? But Jung was not talking about the body. He was talking about the part of you that you have kept alive for decades by refusing to let it change, and that is now asking to be released.
You are not the person you were at forty.
The hunger that once drove you, the need to prove yourself, the restless ambition to become somebody, has either faded or turned into something you no longer recognize. And in that gap, between who you were and who you are becoming, there is a discomfort that most people never talk about. Not depression exactly. Not regret exactly. Something quieter. A slow, persistent ache that whispers: This is not enough. But you don’t know what “enough” would even look like.
The question is not “What should I do with the rest of my life?” That is still the language of the first half, the language of doing, achieving, optimizing. The deeper question is: Who wants to live through me now? What wants to express itself through my hands, my voice, my remaining years? Not for an audience. Not for approval. But because it is the truth of my own soul, and it has been waiting long enough.
This is the difference between growing old and becoming whole.
~Carl Jung
