About theContents

[T]he task of the first half of life is to create a proper container for one's life and answer the first essential questions: “What makes me significant?” “How can I support myself?” and “Who will go with me?” The task of the second half of life is, quite simply, to find the actual contents that this container was meant to hold and deliver. As Mary Oliver puts it, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” In other words, the container is not an end in itself, but exists for the sake of your deeper and fullest life, which you largely do not know about yourself!

~ Rohr, Richard (2011-02-11). Falling Upward: A Spirituality for theTwo Halves of Life (p. 1). John Wiley and Sons. Kindle Edition.

Something connected inside me the moment I heard about Richard Rohr's ideas on the “two halves of life”. I didn't know all the details of this perspective, hadn't yet read his book Falling Upward, had never even heard of Rohr. But I knew immediately that I was struggling somewhere in the middle of these two halves. I may not have completely resolved the three big concerns or questions of the “first-half-of-life issues” – which Rohr names “identity, security, and sexuality and gender” (p.4). Nor do I think fully answering them once and for all is part of the point of this life-long journey of self-discovery and awareness anyway. But I am adding questions like “is this all there is?”; I am wanting to create a “deeper and fullest life” by exploring theContents of my container.

Hence the title of my blog.

For others who may also be trying to answer these questions, feeling alone in their struggles and/or triumphs, craving something more or different - in short, exploring the contents of life - I wanted to start a conversation... and to have an outlet to explore my own. If I was more organized in my thoughts and questions, I may try to group the publishing of posts together in a number of topical series. More likely it will be a mish-mash of seemingly out of order writings. But isn't that part of the beauty of life? The unpredictability and chaos of things evolving as they will, discovering the contents as they spill forward and fall upward...

Thanks for reading!
Beth Ann