The Second Half of Life [Hardcover]

There is nothing new in Angeles Arrien's book about the second half of life. Indeed, there isn't meant to be. Our lives at midpoint are about putting aside newness and embracing the ancient, the everlasting, the always true.

We live in an age that worships youth. Alongside this naive, if not indeed tragic pursuit to resist aging in all its aspects, we find ourselves as a society becoming ever more superficial, ever more devoted to what is external only, short on endurance, shallow in meaning. Small wonder so many of us approach midlife in a state of "crisis."

Yet there is no crisis. Arrien reminds us, by assembling in this collection of eight chapters named for eight gates, that this is not a time in our lives to resist or fear, but that it is, in fact, a time of wonder and beauty -- of the deeper and more meaningful kind. To pass through each of these "gates" is to be opened and enriched by the enlightenment of the second half of our lives. In each chapter, Arrien has brought together age-old quotes and wisdom from many different cultures, tested by time and place. Each chapter describes the gate through which we must pass, the task we must undertake to do so, the challenge, the gift we receive if we meet the challenge, reflections that help us to understand more fully this threshold, a list of practices to make this gateway a discipline.

The gates: silver (facing the new and the unknown); white picket (discovering one's true face); clay (intimacy, sensuality, sexuality); black and white (relationships and the crucible of love); rustic (creativity and service); bone (authenticity, character, and wisdom); natural (happiness, satisfaction, and peace); gold (letting go).

Each chapter guides us, gently yet firmly, toward facing what is around us as well as what is in us. The overall effect is soothing, I find, to the degree that it has helped me, approaching my own midpoint in life, see the aging process for the beauty and freedom it brings. It is a time to free oneself of the cumbersome masks one has worn in a more naive youth, to embrace wisdom and meaning rather than that which passes quickly and leaving no lasting mark. It is a time to gather all that we have learned in the first half of our lives and bring it all to fruition, entering a time of unbounded creativity, love based on truth rather than illusion, and finding a peace that will make crossing that final gold gate a time of celebration for a life well lived.

If we have lost respect for aging in our society, it is time we take it back. Arrien reminds us, by bringing back the wisdom of the ages, that age in ourselves is something to be welcomed rather than resisted. To resist it is to rob ourselves of what may well be the best time of our lives.

What a surprise this beautiful book was for me. Because I have and will continue to listen to Dr. Arrien's taped set on The Second Half of Life many times, I had not thought to buy the book. It came as a gift, whatta gift! The surprise is how the content compliments the tapes. No mere regurgitation of previous material, it is chock full of imagery and archetypal information that meets my mind in what it knows and gently points in the direction of making me and my life bigger----indeed, wiser. Like Dr. Arrien's The Four Fold Way this is a book to be read slowly and savored again and again. From my experience with her materials, I know this new jewel, The Second Half of Life, is a deep well from which to drink and will keep my elder years a time a growth and expansion. I recommend it without reservation---it has gone to the top of my list of books I will be gifting my friends with!

I have been listening to many of these Sounds True and similar audiocassettes recently, looking for good meditation material. Fortunately, since the exploration is pretty hit-or-miss for me, the Seattle library has a lot of them (including this one), so I am able to preview them. For my taste, The Second Half of Life is better in its intention than its execution. Overall, for my money, a more successful work (also available both at Amazon and the Seattle library) is A Woman's Spiritual Retreat: Teaching, Meditations, and Rituals to Celebrate Your Authentic Feminine Wisdom, by Joan Borysenko. Although it focuses primarily on women's wisdom and growth, as opposed to second-half-of-life wisdom and growth, it hits a lot of the same notes and also draws on myth and ritual. (Another, much shorter work in a similar vein that I also found more successful is the meditation CD, Celtic Spirit Meditations, by Mara Freeman--also available at Amazon and reviewed by me here.)

Certainly, the intention of The Second Half of Life is to help people do some positive growth in their later years, drawing on wisdom of many cultures, and as the positive reviews attest, it does accomplish this very well for some people. However, for me, Ms. Arrien picks some good myths, tales and themes for her foundation, but then doesn't do enough substantive and rigorous work with them. The basic pattern (except for the Preferential Shapes exercise, see below) is to tell a tale or introduce a character or concept, give her interpretation (which often seems either too simplistic and schematic or too arbitrary, as other reviewers have noted), and then to say, "So where am I with __________ in my life?" [Fill in the blank with the theme or symbol just discussed.] The psychologizing offered, although constructive, seems--well, mostly self-evident. To someone who grew up loving much of the original source material in its pure, story form, some of the interpretations actually diminish the stories' inherent symbolic meaning.

I did find both the description and the interpretation of the Nine Muses pretty good, and was pleased to come across a theme I'd been looking for but hadn't found elsewhere (except in Layne Redmond's wonderful music CD Invoking the Muse, also available on Amazon). The Pandora's Box story has an interesting comparison of this myth in different cultures (including what was left in the bottom of the box, according to the different cultures). The Preferential Shapes section gives you something specific to do, an exercise with your preferences for five universal shapes. I found this exercise to provide some helpful insights, albeit in a fortune-telling kind of way. The 12 Labors of Hercules got a retelling that was somehow both cursory and redundant, and the interpretations here felt especially arbitrary and forced to me. Like another reviewer, I found the Eight Gates rather suspect in how Ms. Arrien drew together elements supposedly from many sources to arrive at this particular interpretation (and I also could have done without the gnomes!), although there is some good material about initiation and transition here. Overall, there seems to be a lot of focus on schematic, numbered, arbitrary hierarchies.

I also found the material overall to be too repetitive and slow-moving, and like another reviewer with the same problem, was irked by the verbal delivery (the uneven rhythm, the tone, and a tendency to do repetitions of phrases that did not feel naturally emphatic and became quite irritating). It would be nice if Amazon would provide not only the Search Inside This Book function for books on tape (sadly missing here), so that people can get an idea of the specific content and tone, but also audioclips for books on tape, as they do for music CDs. These audiocassettes are often quite pricey, and long, and one's personal reaction to the voice of the narrator is pretty important. The Sounds True website does have audio samples for many of their authors' items, including this one.

› Go to Amazon.com to see all 31 reviews  4.2 out of 5 stars