The Void: Turning Challenges into Turning Points

Even in the best of times, growing older challenges us to rise to the many occasions aging brings our way. But for our generation, with so much of our lives and world having spun out of control, it is understandable that there may be times your hard-won resilience falters and you are left wondering where you went wrong.  Let me assure you, you are far from alone. And doubly so, that feeling bad does not necessarily mean what you think it does. In fact, mystics, authors and psychologists who faced difficult periods of personal or societal setbacks teach that you, too, have the potential to turn challenges into turning points.

These old souls, hailing from many ages, faiths, and perspectives view the pain that results from both internal and external crisis, not as a bad thing to be avoided but as a necessary instigator of spiritual growth. Anthropologists and scholars in the field of ritual studies call what I refer to as “the void” liminality. Psychologists call it the shadow. St. John the Cross, in the fifteenth century, called it the dark night of the soul. The Kabala describes such a place as Ein Sof and in some schools of Tibetan Buddhism, bardo. However one refers to it, one experiences it as the discomforting period that comes between what was and what’s next, unformed and unsettling.

Psychologists inform us that crisis is not built into the fabric of the actual events, themselves. Rather, crisis occurs “when our theories about ourselves in relation to the outside world go fundamentally wrong,” explains author Glenys Parry: “It is as if your front door, one day, instead of opening when you turned the key, gave you an electric shock.” Rabbi Rami Shapiro comments that when one, like the spiritual teacher Ram Dass, struck out of the blue by a debilitating stroke, hits bottom with such force “there is no opportunity for denial, no room for ego, no option for anything but a radically humble cry for help.” In AA, this would be called “hitting bottom”, the necessary first step of recovery.

How does this work? Old Souls teach us that it is the dissonance between our expectations and our outcomes, both in regards to what we expect of the world, but more to the point, what we expect of ourselves, that causes the pain—not the outcomes alone. Foremost among our expectations is our belief that pain is something to be avoided at all costs: that it is bad for you. While our culture tends to call surrendering to pain “apathy,” the Greek root for apathy actually means the avoidance, not the experience of suffering. Humility is the primary hallmark of hitting bottom and acceptance the beginning of recovery.

There have been many who have endured the journey and survived to tell the tale. Not only did they survive, but they emerged more vital, more integrated, more connected to life’s possibilities, not despite of, but because of having undergone catastrophe. The void is, after all, the place where the status quo has the least grip on you, and where you are most able to let go of old structures, illusions and outgrown ways of being. It is in the void that you are most likely to shed the beliefs that once circumscribed the meaning in your life and take up what had never before occurred to you, the unpremeditated and radically new.

The progression through life depends on this cycle of destruction and renewal, taking its model from what humanity since the dawn of time has observed: Nature privileges spirals and cycles over sticks and linear trajectories. The seasons, the phases of the moon, the cycle of life. This is the essence of life’s meaning as embodied in the I Ching, the ancient Chinese Book of Changes. At any given point, certain aspects of our lives are falling away, new aspects birthing. This disruption and renewal is what characterizes our progress through life stages, and not only in the purview of mystics.

As Nobel prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine postulated, in healthy organisms there is a necessary period of stasis after deconstruction that he refers to as “the theory of dissipative structures.” Utilizing the scientific method, Prigogine theorized that people, things, and events are involved in a continuous exchange of energy, impacting one another on an ongoing basis. When something disturbs or upsets the system, the components have the capacity to reorganize into a higher order. When applied to cognitive function, we think of this as “breakthrough”, “insight” or “revelation.”

The moment you come to understand that your pain is not necessarily about what’s wrong with you but rather about that which yearns to grow larger, you catch a glimmer of what had previously been hidden in plain sight: that powerlessness is also freedom.  When the world spins out of control, the Old Souls advise you to do what you can to rectify your part in things. Of course you should make amends when necessary, but true rectification includes being honest about your limitations and forgiving yourself and life for being what it is and is not.

As you progress through the arc of life, your newfound humility will continue emptying you of the last vestiges of your will to false power. And here the void reveals its true nature: not as punishment, not as an ending, not even as culmination. But a pause—a place of resting where you are made ready for a transformation so profound, it leaves even the mystics breathless. Ram Dass refers to this experience as “fierce grace”: coming to see and make peace with the whole truth about yourself and life. They’re not saying you have to feel happy about this. But please know that there’s a difference between feeling bad–and feeling bad about yourself.  And that difference is everything.

This blog is based on The Making of an Old Soul: Aging as the Fulfillment of Life’s Promise, by Sage-ing International Book Club co-facilitator Carol Orsborn. Her latest of 30 books for and about the Boomer generation is the healing vision of aging by a woman who is a scholar in the fields of adult and spiritual development as well as a lifelong seeker. Based on a mystical experience that sheds light on the entire arc of life, Carol Orsborn’s book, which has won praise from James Hollis, Rick Moody, John Robinson and many more, revisions age not as diminishment but as the fulfillment of life’s promise. The illustration accompanying this blog is by artist Susan Rios. The website for the book, with discussion questions for book clubs, excerpts, ordering links and more, is CarolOrsborn.com.