“We cannot live the afternoon of life according to the program of life’s morning, for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”

In my experience of it, age has a tendency to make one’s sense of oneself harder to maintain, less robust in some ways.

Often a person’s identity, that wild inner complexity of soul and colour of spirit, becomes shrunken into their work identity. They become prisoners of their role. They limit and reduce their lives. They become seduced by the practice of self-absence. They move further and further away from their own lives. They are forced backwards into hidden are

Such a precept confronts him with life’s finiteness as well as the finality of what he makes out of both his life and himself.

As we age, we think that things are more serious and that we must leave frivolous things behind.

when my experience can no longer be expected to deliver me into socially affirmed norms, I’m struck with a sense that I’m old. I’m of the past because my experience no longer helps me anticipate how to be in the world.