‘Midway on our path in life….’
Dante’s Commedia.
Dante opens his famous poem by announcing that he is lost. Specifically that, ‘At one point midway on our path in life, / I came around and found myself now searching / through a dark wood, the right way blurred and lost.’ (translation Robin Kirkpatrick, Penguin). Dante wasn’t saying that he was technically lost in the way you or I might be lost if we took a wrong turn. He was saying that having reached midlife he finds himself lost at an existential and primordial level. It’s a universal truth that he’s articulating, not a personal one, which is that ‘midway on our path in life’ we are all meant to discover that we are lost. The much lampooned midlife crisis signals that the shift from the first half of life to the second is ready to begin. The unfortunate fact is that, just when we might feel we have stabilised in life, career, family, etc., everything is designed to fall apart. It is written into the script that at midlife we are destined to feel lost, the way ahead is meant to be obscured because something new wants to open up for us. Finding ourselves lost in a dark wood signifies the ending of the first half of life and the invitation to seek out a new path for the second half of life. The problem is, in our modern, materialist, individualist culture we have forgotten how to get lost in that way.
Life is naturally made up of two halves. The move from one to the other is naturally designed to occur between ages 33 to 40. First half of life consciousness is properly concerned with the local and limited self. Its main concern is with the development of a stable ego that helps us to manage ourselves and to establish ourselves in the world. First half of life consciousness naturally focuses on material concerns, with looking after the family circle, and generally doesn’t extend beyond concern for our local community or tribe. The Wilber-Combs lattice identifies this level of development of our consciousness as rational and ethnocentric. They give it the colour orange. Abraham Maslow calls this level ‘self-actualisation.’ It is healthy and necessary to establish oneself in the first half of life as described, as a stable foundation for what is coming next.
Second half of life consciousness quite naturally expands our focus beyond our small community to a much wider horizon of concern for others and for more of life. We naturally begin to feel concern and responsibility for more people beyond our circle, for nature, for the planet, and for the bigger picture in general. Maslow calls this highest phase of adult development, ‘self-transcendence,’ meaning that our concern transcends our local interests and potentially we feel concern for the whole world. The Wilber-Combs Lattice identifies this level of development of consciousness as pluralistic, capable of including interests beyond one’s own group, moving towards integrative consciousness. They give it the colour green moving to turquoise. And, if they have not already begun to, this is the time for the bigger and the deeper questions of life to emerge. The shift from self-concern to concern for others is as natural as it is necessary for the healthy functioning of individuals, the community, and the wider world.
There is however, a major problem in western culture in that we have lost the understanding that life is to be lived in two halves, rather than one continuous roll out of self-care, materialism, and a capitalist drive for more for one’s own self and small circle. We have lost the understanding of the necessity for this shift and western culture is stuck in first half of life consciousness. The template for getting lost in the right way has itself been lost. Most of us grow up not knowing that we need to undergo a major transition and transformation at midlife for our own sake, for the sake of the wider community, and for all of life. Wise elders, who traditionally guided people through the midlife transition, are themselves no longer valued by the culture. Instead, western culture is now predicated upon perpetuating first half of life consciousness. ‘Youth’ at all costs. Our culture is in arrested development. First half of life consciousness and concerns have become a glass ceiling. We have lost the path to wisdom, and with it the instinct to care for others and to have true compassion for all of life.
It’s natural to be scared of the unknown. Natural to be fearful when the road ahead is obscured. But prior to modern western culture people knew that everything is meant to change at midlife and they embraced ‘the road less travelled.’ Just like the seeker who left Plato’s cave and discovered the light; like the one who entered the dark night of the soul and discovered ‘a night more lovely than the dawn’; anyone who is brave enough to walk into the dark wood, discovers that it is the right way after all. It’s not a mistake to be lost at midlife — it’s the natural course of adult human development. Dante, notably, was not trying to find the way back to where he had come from, nor to return to the way that things were. He was looking to the future. ‘The road ahead’ points to a new way of being and knowing. Feeling lost at an existential level makes people think there is nothing else ahead, that only an abyss of despair awaits them. That’s why, when things fall apart, people do everything possible to keep the show on the road without understanding that life itself is trying to dismantle their first half of life security as a necessary prelude to living in a new way.
There is no doubt that being lost is one of the things we fear most in life. And, to be lost at an existential and primordial level is so destabilising that mostly we cannot admit to it and will cling to anything, no matter how dysfunctional, rather than admit that we have lost our way. We resist, deny, and numb the feeling of being lost with ever more first half of life satisfactions and distractions. Our culture is set up for success at all cost, so to feel lost in this way feels like a life-sized failure. We won’t admit it, even to ourselves – yet until we do admit it, the necessary inner transformation cannot begin, with the result that both the individual and the culture are left impoverished. The dysfunction of our world is evidence of our failure to mature into the second half of life consciousness.
Dante’s poem speaks a universal truth that applies to every single one of us. We must re-learn how to walk into the metaphorical dark wood, to surrender to learning a different way of knowing and being, and to being re-shaped into a new type of human for the second half of life. The future of humanity and the natural world depends on it. That unpleasant, gnawing feeling of being lost is the first inarticulate yearning of our soul for more from life without us yet knowing what that ‘more’ might be. It expresses the natural desire of our soul for more depth and more meaning in life even though we don’t yet know how to find it. We need to get re-acquainted with the feeling of being lost as a natural crossing point in life so that collectively we can once again mature into wise elders and help to heal our very broken world.
It’s true that very few of us are wise enough to seek out the ‘getting lost’ on our own. We deny and defend against it, so that sometimes life just does it for us. Sometimes we have no say at all in the matter. Breakdowns, crises, catastrophes, losses, failures of every sort are life’s way of pushing us to change lanes. My dark wood time came as postnatal depression after my first child was born. I was 33 and ‘things fell apart.’ Ultimately, I gave up my legal career to follow a more creative, more fulfilling path, without knowing where it would lead. Paradoxically, to let go, and to let life guide us through that dark wood, will bring us to the shores a new certainty. Dante was guided through hell, purgatory, and finally into the celestial realm of wisdom and second half of life consciousness because the Commedia enacts the archetypal pattern of life. It speaks to every one of us. The pattern is to find ourselves lost, the road ahead obscured, but if we walk into the dark wood we walk the truer and wiser path in life.
To deny the shift at midlife is to become deformed in our psyche and soul. No matter how intellectually sophisticated we are, no matter how wealthy some people become, no matter how materialistic the culture has become, the inner path of life will not bend to flawed human understanding., The path is the path whether we like it or not. The paradox is that, if we don’t get lost in the way Dante describes, if we stay in the same lane all our life, we are already lost without even knowing it. It is a fundamental law of life that we are meant to change at midlife. The fact we want things to stay the same means we have lost the understanding of how life works. We have come to fear change instead of recognising it as a core feature of life.
The need then is to recover the idea that must get lost in order to transition to the wisdom half of life. This requires dismantling the ideologies of our culture, and the structures and institutions that perpetuate and promote first half of life consciousness. We cannot live the second half of life with first half of life consciousness. In order to shift into a wiser and more compassionate consciousness we must let first half of life consciousness fall away. No one denies it is painful. Just like childbirth, it’s very difficult. But to stay in first half of life consciousness in midlife and beyond is fundamentally to have failed to engage in what life is all about. To look after the ‘small self’ to the end is to have missed everything of lasting value in later life and beyond. It is also a failure to take up our responsibility to care for the wider community so that life can flourish for all. To live and die for the small self is essentially to have missed your go in life.
Image is by Gustave Doré, Dante in the Dark Wood.