Entering The Rustic Gate

09_07_2022

Exploring How We “Spend” Our Time

My thoughts today continue to focus on what I’m learning by working my way through Angeles Arrien’s book, The Second Half of Life: Opening the Eight Gates of Wisdom.  Today we’ll take a look at the tasks, challenges, and gifts associated with the Rustic Gate.  This Gate brings us to the second half of the book, and I want to take a moment to recap what I find to be the best takeaways from the first four Gates.

We began with the Silver Gate, a passage we encounter when we initially accept that we are aging.  This Gate stresses the importance of making a choice to accept our aging, and to do so with a positive outlook founded on the opportunity “to re-examine the wisdom and knowledge that we have gathered over time.”

Having a positive attitude toward our aging, particularly by experiencing our newfound freedoms, assists us in building the resources that allow us to remain connected to hope and inspiration.  A key to passing through this Wisdom Gate is to make progress in leaving behind our fixed or established views of reality.  For example, our bodies’ appearance and endurance are likely to change as we age.  If we insist on hanging onto the attachment of a younger body, we’re bound to be discouraged and depressed at this stage.

To balance a sense of loss, I find it helps to make sure I prioritize how I use my time so that I have time for new discoveries, interests, and activities that lift my spirits.      

The White Gate requires that we closely examine the areas where we have become “overidentified with our roles as well as the expertise we have developed earlier in life.”  There are multiple parts to this challenge, but in order to experience where our curiosity might take us next, we have to be willing to shed areas that may be preventing us from finding the time or the ability to explore more parts of ourselves.  One of the big challenges in passing through this Gate is letting go of roles where we felt accomplished and valued by others.

For example, parenting roles eventually taper off as children come of age and gradually move into leading their own lives.  If a major part of our identity has included parenting, it is easy to understand that letting go of that role can be difficult, even though grown children make it possible for us to have more time to ourselves. 

I had a successful, engaging, and rewarding career in education, but once I published a book that allowed me to give voice to the messages that I felt were most important for future educators, my interests began moving in new directions.

The Clay Gate contains a strong focus on our physicality.  Our bodies do change as we age, and until we’re ready to accept and respond to this reality in healthy ways, we’re going to make ourselves miserable.  In Arrien’s words, “ Accepting our changing physical reality and learning to unconditionally befriend our bodies are the major challenges at this Gate. Here we take the next step of learning how to recognize the limits our bodies are experiencing, and “to find ways to use our energy and stamina more wisely.”

 One of the important lessons I’m taking from Arrien’s work centers around our paying more attention to how “we spend our time.”  If we indeed will encounter changes in our energy and stamina, and if we wish to explore new interests, we can expect that we will have to let go of some of the activities that currently take up our time.  Joan Chittister reminds us in her book, The Gifts of Age, that we have to learn to let go as we age.  “Life, it seems, follows a relentless cycle; in our early years we accumulate but in our later years we begin to divest.  Both of these practices have a place in our lives.  Both of them are a struggle.  But both of them are liberating.”  Because we are less comfortable with letting go of something, the fact that we need to in order to make room for new in our lives may feel like a foreign currency of change.

The Black and White Gate invites us to examine our relationships.  All of our relationships have the potential to teach us something about ourselves.  We can spend time reflecting on what we have learned and continue to learn from the many different relationships we have in our lives.  We can learn where we are tempted to respond out of our shadow side, the part of ourselves we are less familiar or comfortable with.  We are invited to pay attention to exchanges with others that prompt us to anger, hurt, envy, jealously, etc.

I find shadow work a bit tricky to understand, but one path that always seems to lead me to a productive outcome is to pursue what am I bringing to the table that is leading me to less than pleasant reactions.  I start by asking myself questions that aid in unpacking my feelings:  Why do I find this comment hurtful?  What comment was I hoping for?  What are my expectations about how someone should have acted, and are they realistic?  Would it be helpful for me to find a productive way to seek more information about a particular comment or action?

This Gate is focusing on doing the work needed to allow us to form and sustain healthy, caring relationships with others in our lives.  It is normal to experience a myriad of feelings that stem from our interactions with others.  But, we have the opportunity to move beyond the initial feelings that surface and work our way to a healthier place in our relationships.  Don’t forget, no matter how much work we do in this area of relationships, our egos want to be center stage all of the time.  They can bruise easily unless we learn to pull out the weeds that can block them from giving and receiving love.

The next Gate that brings us into the second half of this work is the Rustic Gate.  This Gate builds on the work of the four previous Gates.  The major question it asks of us is, “Ae we doing the work that calls us? Are we doing work that serves others and its own way generates a meaningful legacy?” To be able to answer this question in a positive way, we have to have made progress in the earlier Gates.  We have to be open to doing what is calling us now in our lives.  Being a loving, caring grandparent can have an enormous impact on our children’s children. 

We have to have time to spend in the areas that feel most meaningful in our lives.  Again, this often means that we have to learn to say “No” to things that no longer feel central to our lives.  We have to take care of ourselves, recognize what we are able to give while sustaining self-care.  We have accumulated years of hard-won knowledge through our efforts to learn and grow, as well as the lessons we’ve learned from our experience.

I love Parker Palmer’s quote that captures the choice we each need to make as we decide how we want to use our later stages of life: 

“Age itself is no excuse to wade in the shallows.  It’s a reason to dive deep and take creative risks….How we travel the arc toward the sunset of our lives is ours to choose: will it be denial, defiance, depression, or will we do the work that allows us to reap the harvest of our lives?”