The Red Pill Or The Blue Pill?

Photo by Tim Johnson on Unsplash

The Franciscan Friar and ecumenical teacher, Richard Rohr, said that the things that brought you success in the first half of your life are of no use to you in the second half and, in fact, they actually get in your way.

The older I get, the more strongly this statement resonates. 

It resonates at face value in that there are skills you learn in your early years that serve a specific purpose and, as you get older, you need to learn new ones in order to be able to keep moving forward. But I think there’s more to the statement than just that.

I think so much of the first part of our lives is spent constructing who we think we need to be in order to create what we think ought to be in our lives. In doing so, we take on personas, adopt ideas, and act in specific ways that we think will orient us towards success - not simply in the economic sense but in any sense we see as relevant (spiritual, personal, etc.).

In doing so, we get caught up in a sense of ourselves that isn’t genuinely “us”, but rather a version of “right” or “relevant” as defined by prominent influencers in our (physical and/or virtual) environment(s). 

That’s not to suggest that we won’t see success with this approach because we very well might. We may well move ‘forward’, realizing achievements in our chosen domains, despite the fact that those adopted personas aren’t truly us.

Sooner or later, though, we come to the realization - sometimes of our own volition, other times forced upon us - that there’s something amiss. This, to me, is where this idea of the second half of our life begins.

You realize then that pretenses are exactly that. That our voluntary acquiescence to someone else’s rules just doesn’t make sense anymore. That it’s nothing less than an abdication of who we truly are. 

That realization is a difficult one, because it is, at that point, simply a realization. It’s the understanding that “here” doesn’t make sense anymore and that there is a “there” we need to move towards. We still have work to do.

We need to define it first. That’s the first scary thing - to figure out what our path truly is and what it looks like. Defining what we need to move towards but doing so without the ‘established’ guardrails that society (school, community, work, religion, etc.) tells us they should be, is a big task. Because now we’re setting our own rules, we’re defining our own state. We can’t blame anyone but ourselves for it.

The next task is even tougher - making that change. Moving towards it is another challenge in and of itself, because it requires action and movement. Action makes it real and it ensures it’s  happening. There is nothing to hide behind. But it’s essential as a demonstrated statement of what we are and are not willing to accept. It is the path forward, even if there is no safety net.

There are easier paths, of course. We could decide not to do. We could choose to take the blue pill, the path that Neo (from The Matrix) didn’t take. That would be easier, because it would allow us to not have to deal with the responsibility, to carry on with our arms folded and our judgements and our pointed fingers.

But for most of us, that wouldn’t work. We’d know it. And, in my view, that’s far worse.