I am grateful that your book club has chosen to read and discuss The Making of an Old Soul: Aging as the Fulfillment of Life’s Promise. I’m providing the quotes and discussion points below to prompt the discussion for one or multiple sessions. The book’s official pub date is Oct. 1 but the paperback edition is available now on Amazon HERE. I’d love to hear how your discussion went and/or anything more you’d like to know from/about me and my book:
–Carol Orsborn, Corsborn@aol.com.
The book is also the official November selection for the Sage-ing Book Club. To learn more about SBC, please click HERE.
Book Club Study Guide: The Making of an Old Soul
PRELUDE: “We who are growing old may well appear to have been diminished by time. But you would be wrong. There are some amongst us not dulled but burnished by long lives, twists of fate, impossible choices and grace into something most unexpected. We have not just become old. We have become old souls.”
Do you know anyone who by this description qualifies as an old soul? Do you?
PART ONE: THE PORTAL OPENS: “(During sequestering due to Covid)…Devoid of diversion and support, those of us fortunate enough to take shelter with basic needs met had an abundance of time on our hands to dwell upon our litany of regrets, unanswered prayers and questions of ultimate concern”
Breaking denial is a prerequisite for psycho-spiritual growth. Carol asserts that many of her peers experienced a similar disrupting of the status quo and an unexpected deepening of their spiritual life. Did this happen to you? What unexpected growth did sequester hold for you?
PART TWO: THE ARC OF LIFE Do you have a sense of which of the life stages you’ve transited and what you’re still working your way through? Are there any stages in particular where you may have gotten stuck for awhile or are still stalled?
STAGE 1: MERGED WITH THE DIVINE: “While traditional life stage models logically begin with birth, the big reveal I received that day on my walk through the cemetery intuited something a priori, not just important, but critical to understanding how human beings grow through time psychologically and spiritually.”
Do you agree with Carol’s premise that to be truly complete and accurate, a true model of the arc of life needs to take us beyond the boundaries of empirical knowledge to consider where do we come from before we are conceived and where do we go after we die?
STAGE 2: SEPARATION: “Regardless of how the primal wound plays out in any particular individual’s life, there is a conclusion all humans arrive to, so pernicious and odorous that for most of our lives it cannot be embraced gracefully. In a nutshell, the core misunderstanding is this: Something’s gone wrong and I am responsible.
With this in mind, revisit your birth story and early life experiences and see if/how this message may have been subtly or overtly been communicated to you.
STAGE 3: THE PERSONALITY PROJECT: “The task of building a personality will dominate and determine the trajectory of your life, until you evolve sufficiently to have some say over the matter. Until then, your response to your original wound and the chain of dominoes it set in motion, will in great part determine how other people see you, and how you see yourself.”
In what way has there been a consistency between your early responses to problem-solving and how you approach things now? In what ways have you outgrown your original programming and with what has it been replaced?
STAGE 4: UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES: “As your developmental journey continues, you may be found at times holding onto particular masks, even if destructive, because the alternative—losing protective cover—is too painful to contemplate.”
What are some of the masks you adopted? Which have you dropped—which have you retained, and why?
STAGE 5: EXERCISING POWER: “In Stage 5, you are likely to make bad choices primarily to prove that you are your own person. The transition to this stage in its own way represents a progression, but one that creates as many or even more problems than it solves.”
Can you think of times in your life where you may have confused freedom with knee-jerk reactivity? Were there new unintended consequences?
STAGE 6: DISMANTLING YOUR MASKS: “You’ll know you’re in the sixth stage of development when you begin asking ‘Why is this happening? Why do I try to do everything right, but it’s never enough? Why do I keep making the same bad choices? Why is it that no matter how hard I try, the experience of life I feel I deserve continues to elude me’…and the answer is not somebody else’s name.
Think of a challenge you are facing in your life right now. What kinds of questions are you asking yourself about it? and what does this say about your progression through life stages?
STAGE 7: THE VOID: “Thomas Merton in The Silent Life describes one who has allowed life’s challenges to shatter the last of his masks: ‘He can peacefully accept that when his false ideas of himself are gone he has practically nothing else left. But then he is ready for the encounters with reality…’
In what ways have you experienced the breaking apart of the status quo as the instigator of psychological and spiritual growth? What is left when your false ideas about yourself are gone?
STAGE 8: CONSCIOUS AGING: Do you know somebody like Carol’s neighbor Shelly who was able to draw upon inner resources she did not know she had in her to take hold of her own life, regardless of the challenges aging presented to her? Carol writes that “older age is a life stage with meaning, task and purpose of its own.” What is this task?
STAGE 9: THE BIG REVEAL: “In Stage 9, we can finally question the veracity of the stories our original wounds have been telling us: that we have been so wronged, so misunderstood, so unworthy. We can find the courage and the strength to break from the well-worn ruts of the past to see the whole truth about ourselves, others and the world—accepting not just the shadows, but the light”
Carol mis-remembered her mother’s final words to her thus perpetuating her sense of victimhood. In what ways have you been stuck in a narrative that reinforces your original wounding and how could your life be different if you were to tell the whole truth?
STAGE 9: THE BIG REVEAL (Continued): “I saw that I had, indeed, worked long and hard to acknowledge and rectify every one of my unintended consequences, but that unconsciousness is not something you choose: not something you did “wrong.”
How would you feel differently about yourself and your life if you accepted that “you can’t make amends for what is not yours to fix. Not for what is in your DNA; the archetypal forces; anybody else’s choices; nor the 96% of your brain scientists postulate that is held unconsciously. Nor can you change how others feel about who you truly are when you become less willing to compromise, hide or defend your true self.”
STAGE 10: THE LAND OF OLD SOULS: “Whereas I’d once pushed through my slowing pace as if my aging body were an obstacle, I determined to use the deficiencies of my energy and balky knees as the very vehicle that could strip away the last vestiges of my clinging to how things used to be. Day after day, through the changing seasons, I was carried to a place beyond expectations where while the body was proving to be undependable, gratitude was not.”
What are some of the unexpected gifts of age that you have experienced personally?
STAGE 11: FULFILLING LIFE’S PROMISE: “In the words of poet Jennifer Welwood:
‘My friends, let’s grow up.
Let’s stop pretending we don’t know the deal here…
Let’s grieve our losses fully, like ripe human beings,
But please, let’s not be so shocked by them.’”
What still shocks you about aging? What could life be like for you if you more willing and able to live your life out of love not fear?
