As children we listened to the sound of the sea still echoing in the shell we picked up by the shore. That ancestral roar links us to the great sea which surges within us as well.

The world is more magical, less predictable, more autonomous, less controllable, more varied, less simple, more infinite, less knowable, more wonderfully troubling than we could have imagined being able to tolerate when we were young.

The goal of individuation is wholeness, as much as we can accomplish, not the triumph of the ego.

What I refuse to face within myself will meet me in the exterior world through you, not as you are, but as I have so construed you.

In moments of spiritual crisis we naturally fall back upon what worked for us, or seemed to work, heretofore. Sometimes this shows up through the reassertion of our old values in belligerent, testy ways. Regression of any kind is just such a return to old presumptions, often after they have been shown to be insufficient for the complexity of larger questions. The virtue of the old presumptions is that they once worked, or seemed to work, and therein lies if not certainty, then nostalgia for a previous, presumptive security. In our private lives, we frequently fall back upon our old roles.

Learning to live with ambiguity is learning to live with how life really is, full of complexities and strange surprises.

There is some debate in professional circles about whether the so-called “midlife crisis” exists.