Living Your Unlived Life
Coping With Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose in the Second Half of Life
By Robert A. Johnson and Jerry M. Ruhl, PhD (Tarcher/Penguin, $22.95)
Johnson, a lecturer and analyst who studied with Carl Jung, and Ruhl, who has studied spiritual practices around the world, present solutions for readers who feel they have reached the second half of their lives without accomplishing all they wish they had in the first half. Regret is painful, but it need not taint one’s unlived life — the promising years ahead.
1. Your entire being should be embraced. Personal strengths and faults, quirks and curiosities are meant to be parts of your human makeup.
2. The human psyche morphs between the ages of 35 and 50. “So much unlived life has built up as we approach the threshold of aging that we are overtaken by unsatisfied demands and backward glances.”
3. “Most of us work so hard to obtain an identity that it becomes hard to let it go.”
4. “Sexuality is a vast and fertile field of unlived life. … Perhaps we struggle so with this energy field because it cuts across all aspects of our being — physical, emotional and spiritual.”
5. The best parents have their own lives in order before stewarding little ones.
