Imbolc Waxing Bridgit Moon
“Justice is what love looks like in public.” – Cornel West
So, valentine’s day is a justice holiday, too. I like it. I met Cornel West in 1974, when we were both much younger. We attended a week-long conference on liberation theology at Maryknoll College in Detroit.
Since the retreat, I’ve begun looking back, seeing my life as a whole rather than in its most immediate reality. There’s a task here, called integrity (see below), defined by Erik Erikson, a task in which we review our life and decide if it has threads, through lines, think about its cogency as a work of art.
| Maturity(65 to death) | Ego Integrity vs. Despair | Reflection on Life | Older adults need to look back on life and feel a sense of fulfillment. Success at this stage leads to feelings of wisdom, while failure results in regret, bitterness, and despair. |
This is a delicate task, I think, since most of us, myself included, don’t see our lives slowing down or as less productive or even, in important ways, discontinuous with the life preceding. That aspect, the final, end note aspect of Erikson seems premature, but the task itself is one that can begin now, that is, in our mid-60s.
There is a need, it seems, for a 7.5 or an 8.0 followed by integrity as a 8.5. Jung, who broke with Freud early, earlier in his career than Erikson did, sees the second half of life as an inward journey, a preparation for dying, but, also, a recipe for living. It is this aspect that seems left out of Erikson’s model, that contemplative, meditative facet of life as we pull away from the world of engagement toward a world of the inner journey. So, I see this ego integrity task as a subset of a more important turn, the turn from achievement and goals, to the interior, to the inner cathedral, the cultivation of the deep Self.
Life review certainly fits as a section of the inward journey, but it fails to acknowledge the still active, still an agent, role of our lives up to our death. We need to retain agency, to take responsibility for the journey now, just as we have in the past. Still, there is no question that getting older means taking stock, reviewing our past, but it cannot dampen the vitality and purposive nature of life even in our 80s and 90s and 100s.