In the end, we are only tiny frightened animals, doing our best to survive amid other tiny frightened animals.

To experience some healing within yourself, and to contribute healing to the world, you are summoned to wade through the muck from time to time.

In the second half of life, the questions become: 'Who, apart from the roles you play, are you? What does the soul ask of you? Do you have the wherewithal to shift course, to deconstruct your painfully achieved identity, risking failure, marginalization and loss of collective approval?' No small task.

We are not here to fit in...we are here to be eccentric, different, perhaps strange, perhaps merely to add our small piece, our little clunky, chunky selves, to the great mosaic of being...we are here to become more and more ourselves.

Fear of our own depths is the enemy.

Is not our chief neurosis - by which I mean our estrangement from nature - our desire to hold fast to what is forever transforming, to freeze the familiar, to submit motion to stasis, to solicit immortality through rigidity.

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