The emotional awareness of mortality that seeps into our consciousness at midlife has profound impact on our psyche and soul and on our way of being in the world.
First of all, it leads to a changed sense of time. When we were young, time was quite elastic, infinite. We could stretch time to make place for all that we wanted to accomplish. We could dream of a hundred things to do, and we had the confidence we had enough time to accomplish all that. Not so now. Time is now experienced as finite, restricted. Focus shifts to the limited time-left-to-live, on how to live it more meaningfully. We experience an urgency in terms of accomplishing something worthwhile. This is all the more true if we feel that our life so far has been not very meaningful or productive. As psychologist Roger Gold puts it: “Whatever we must do must be done now.” How we spend the limited time available to us becomes significant. One consequence is the pressure to reassess life and its priorities.
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Fr Jose Parappully SDB
