The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young. —JAMES HOLLIS, FINDING MEANING IN THE SECOND HALF OF LIFE

The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.

If people are to develop any deep spirituality today, and especially if men are to develop spiritually, they need to be liberated from self-serving worldviews.

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

As Bill Plotkin, a wise guide, puts it, many of us learn to do our "survival dance," but we never get to our actual "sacred dance.

Until and unless there is a person, situation, event, idea, conflict, or relationship that you cannot "manage," you will never find the True Manager. So, God makes sure that several things will come your way that you cannot manage on your own.

God can help you get what you want, which is still a self-centered desire, instead of God's much better role—which is to help you know what you really desire (Luke 11:13; Matthew 7:11).

This new coherence, a unified field inclusive of the paradoxes, is precisely what gradually characterizes a second-half-of-life person. It feels like a return to simplicity after having learned from all the complexity. Finally, at last, one has lived long enough to see that "everything belongs,"4 even the sad, absurd, and futile parts.

You do not climb up to your True Self. You fall into it, so don't avoid all falling

Trusting in God is not a passive dependency, a handing over of responsibility: "Okay, God, you can do it." Faith in God is primarily an active virtue. Faith does not necessarily mean an expectation that God will intervene. Faith is an end in itself. Faith is an active empowering of the other to be everything he or she can be for you.

Our institutions and our expectations, including our churches, are almost entirely configured to encourage, support, reward, and validate the tasks of the first half of life.

With this access point, God becomes more a verb than a noun, more a process than a conclusion, more an experience than a dogma, more a personal relationship than an idea. There is Someone dancing with you and you no longer need to prove to anyone that you are right, nor are you afraid of making mistakes. Another word for that is faith.