In Praise of James Hollis: A Review of Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
In Praise of James Hollis: A Review of Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life
By Kay Plumb
I'm lucky enough to hear James Hollis speak about once a year, which always stimulates me to read or re-read some of his books. There are 13 of them now. Apparently the man has no issues with hard work or staying motivated: Director of Jungian Studies at Saybrook University, lecturer, teacher, practicing analytical psychologist, prolific author...
What always amazes me most about Hollis is how honestly and directly he approaches that most slippery of subjects, the human shadow. Particularly in close personal relationships... where the worst kind of shadow material tends to lurk. One of the best wedding presents you could possibly give any young couple is a copy of the chapter in his book Why Good People Do Bad Things called "Hidden Agendas, The Shadow in Intimate Relationships." That, along with a set of Robert Johnson's 3 small classics He, She, and We, and the happy couple might just have a chance to stay married as they change and grow throughout the years.
While we're onto presents, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life is the best present you could possibly give anyone who's about to turn thirty-five. As children and teens and young adults we surge upward through life, following a trajectory largely created by our life situations and our parents' outlook. But by the time we hit midlife the speed begins to slow. After thirty-five we have a chance to start noticing how we actually feel, to wonder if something isn't missing from our lives.
And it always is. That's a small sentence, but a big statement.
Something is always missing from your life by age thirty-five. Every ego creates a shadow as big as itself as it plows along, and as we age every unexamined aspect in that shadow begins to get heavy, to drag, to slow us down a bit. As Dante put it in the beginning of The Inferno, "In the middle of the road of life I entered a dark wood..."
Yeah. Which many of us experience as a depression, or a "midlife crisis." And Hollis, bless his heart, makes it clear that the only way out of a depression is through it. To enter the woods, like Dante did. To start looking into your own shadow.
To live fully, to become whoever we are, is to embrace the Self-with-a-capital-S beyond and beneath and above the self-with-a-lower-case-s we were born into, we have to reach beyond, beneath, and above the situations we were born into. We have to start examining what we're doing and why we're doing it. And while it probably made good psychic self-defense-sense for the child to respond to its parents' demands in a certain way, it probably doesn't make such good psychic sense for the adult to keep on responding-to his boss, to his spouse, to his children-in that very same way.
To keep growing throughout the second half of life, we have to start pondering why in heck we do what we do and say what we say, to stop defending and start examining.
Which is not easy. Successfully negotiating the dark woods of midlife takes a lot of courage and very sharp tools. It helps to put Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life and Why Good People Do Bad Things in your backpack. It helps to travel along with James Hollis, whose books distill a lifetime of courage, learning and experience into clear, concise and inspiring information that you will actually be able to use.
The perpetual scholar type, with lifelong interests in comparative religion and analytical psychology, Kay has a Bachelor of Science with Honors from Portland State University, but considers her real education to be 18 years of private focus on the human shadow. When not reading or writing, she's outside gardening on 3 hilly, wooded acres near Portland, Oregon.
To learn more please visit: http://www.shadowintheusa.com
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