Dr. James Hollis

Well, let me say, first of all, many years ago, when I was still teaching at a university, I taught a course on life stages.

And for one of the papers, I asked the students to imagine two stages ahead of them.

So if they were typically 18 to 22, let's say, to imagine themselves in their 40s and try to write about their life in their 40s.

And the assignment completely failed, although it was made useful for the classroom discussion because all of them imagined in their 40s

They would have this perfect marriage, their adolescent children would adore them, and they would be in these satisfying careers despite everything we'd read, everything we'd talked about as a time of turbulence and disappointment and so forth.

And it was a complete failure.

So it's hard for us to imagine that we too will go through these similar kinds of things, but usually we do.

And some of this is triggered by roles in one's life.

A lot of it's determined by our own aging of the body and so forth.

So, for example, the last stage in Erickson's discussion in so-called old age is the conflict between despair and integrity.

And I remember reading that when I was young and wondering, what did he really mean by that?

Now I know that in a very personal way.

Despair is one sees friends die.

One sees avenues in your life closed that you can't possibly do that.

You're confronted with the unlived life or the mistakes you made.

You're dealing with loss of functions of the body.

You're facing your mortality and so forth and so on.

And how could you not despair in the face of that?

Well, at the same time, there's, again, the summons to accountability.

What now is life asking of you?