Reflections on Aging

Table of Contents

Reflections on Aging, Meaning, and Individuation

Aging from the Inside

What does it mean to grow older?

Not simply biologically, but emotionally, psychologically, spiritually, and relationally. What does it mean to look back on one’s life while also sensing that some important inner process is still unfolding? What happens when a person begins to realize that aging is not only about decline, but also about meaning, integration, loss, contribution, and becoming?

These questions stayed with me throughout my reflections on aging. At a certain point, I realized I was not exploring the subject from a distance. I was exploring a process I am already living inside of.

One reaction that became difficult to ignore was my own fear of decline. Physical decline. Sexual decline. Loss of independence. Becoming dependent on others or on medical systems. Another was the fear that time is running out while I still feel there is so much I want to do, understand, experience, and move toward. The specifics of that vision may still feel vague at times, but the deeper sense of purpose behind it feels increasingly clear.

Rather than distancing myself from these reactions, I found myself wanting to explore them honestly. Perhaps understanding my own relationship to aging may someday help me sit more openly and compassionately with others struggling with loss, meaning, fear, regret, loneliness, or the awareness of mortality.

Integrity, Regret, and the Search for Wholeness

One of the thinkers who resonated deeply with me was Erik Erikson, particularly his final developmental stage: integrity versus despair. At this stage of life, a person begins looking back and asking whether life feels meaningful and coherent, or dominated by regret and disappointment.

Do I look back? Certainly I do.

Do I have regrets? God knows I do.

Do I also have things I am proud of? Absolutely.

Am I fully at peace with all of it? Not entirely. I think I am still working on that process. It feels less like arriving at some final state of acceptance and more like a one day at a time kind of journey.

At the same time, I do feel that over the years I have gradually come to understand something about my purpose and the deeper direction of my life. A few years ago, I wrote the following words on the homepage of my website:

“From telecom hardware businessman to visual artist and storyteller, my journey has been a profound transformation. Along this path, my deepest passions have converged at the intersection of trauma, art, and history. It is here that I have found my purpose, driven by a heartfelt desire to contribute to meaningful conversations and facilitate healing.”

Reflecting on Erikson made me realize that integrity may not mean the absence of pain, contradiction, mistakes, grief, or unresolved feelings. Perhaps integrity means the willingness to hold all of it together as part of one human story rather than continuing to fight against parts of oneself or one’s past.

Inner Space as the Final Frontier

Alongside the fear of running out of time, another realization slowly emerged. The understanding that much of the real work of life may actually be internal.

I am reminded of the theologian John Roger, who said that humanity believes the final frontier is outer space, while in reality the greatest frontier is inner space. That idea resonates deeply with me at this stage of life.

More and more, I find myself less interested in external achievement alone and more drawn toward inner exploration, reflection, integration, meaning, and connection.

Individuation and the Second Half of Life

Another thinker whose work deeply influenced me is Carl Jung, particularly his ideas about individuation and the second half of life. Jung believed that the first half of life is often organized around identity, career, family, achievement, and social role, while the second half invites an entirely different process: becoming more fully oneself.

More and more, I find myself understanding individuation as one of the central themes not only of aging, but of my entire adult life.

When I stepped away from the business world in my early forties, I felt lost. For many years my identity had been organized around work, productivity, responsibility, and external accomplishment. Once I stepped out of that structure, I found myself looking inward and backward in a much deeper way than before.

Slowly, I began recognizing the depth of trauma I was carrying, not only from my own childhood and military experiences, but also inherited trauma from being raised by Holocaust survivor parents who endured some of the darkest aspects of human history imaginable.

At that time, I was married to a woman who studied psychology and later became a licensed therapist. We began attending couples therapy together, which eventually evolved into individual therapy. I remember my therapist as a deeply kind and insightful man. It was during that period that I became intensely preoccupied with the Fourth Step, a searching and fearless moral inventory of oneself.

I came to believe that talking honestly in therapy was one of the deepest ways to engage that process. I remain grateful to that therapist for helping me explore parts of myself that felt far more complex than what could be contained within simplified formulas or easy explanations. The process required emotional depth, nuance, and a willingness to remain with uncertainty and contradiction.

A few years later, I left therapy after noticing my therapist struggling to stay awake during sessions. Oddly enough, even that experience became meaningful in retrospect. It pushed me to continue searching inwardly and creatively for my own path toward healing and understanding.

👉 Looking back, I increasingly recognize that much of my life has involved the slow work of individuation — through trauma, art, relationships, recovery, and aging. For those curious about Jung’s thinking on this process, I found the following discussion worthwhile: Becoming Your True Self – The Psychology of Carl Jung

Art, Dance, and the Body as a Path to Healing

Around that same period, my creative life began emerging more fully. I discovered fused glass and began creating two dimensional glass sculptures. Much of that early work revolved around the image of trains. In many ways, I was envisioning myself through my father’s eyes, but with one essential difference. His train journey led into the concentration camps. Mine was moving out of darkness toward light, beauty, freedom, and self realization.

Looking back now, I can see how deeply that artistic process reflected Jung’s idea of individuation. Art became a way of encountering the unconscious, the shadow, grief, anger, fear, and inherited trauma without needing to explain everything intellectually. It allowed me to hold contradiction and complexity emotionally, visually, and symbolically.

Eventually, my creative expression shifted again. I moved away from Holocaust train imagery and found myself increasingly drawn toward autobiographical writing, reflective essays, memory, and storytelling. The form changed, but the inner search remained the same.

Another major part of this journey involved dance, particularly the Five Rhythms practice developed by Gabrielle Roth. The practice moves through five emotional and energetic rhythms: flowing, staccato, chaos, lyrical, and stillness.

In the early years of dancing, I often found myself most at home in chaos. Through movement, I could finally express anger physically and safely. I remember facilitators and dance partners who were deeply attuned and skilled at holding space for me during those intense emotional experiences, allowing me to release emotions that had likely been buried for decades.

Over time, something shifted. Although I still dance intensely and sweat deeply, I now find myself increasingly drawn toward stillness. I often dance with my eyes closed, moving slowly and quietly, deeply attuned to the smallest movements within my body. At times, it feels as though I become an empty vessel connecting something from above to the ground beneath my feet. It is very different from where I started, yet it feels more like home.

Along this journey, I was also introduced to Adult Children of Alcoholics and Dysfunctional Families and the Chapter 9 couples in recovery program, which Danna and I continue exploring together. Much of that work involves learning how to build not only individual healing, but emotional intimacy, mutual growth, and a shared spiritual path.

Most importantly, this journey has deepened through my relationship with Danna. I have come to believe that healing does not happen alone. It happens through relational experience. Through love, honesty, presence, patience, and the willingness to continue growing together.

Jung often wrote about the shadow, the parts of ourselves we reject, suppress, deny, or fear. I believe much of my life journey has involved gradually turning toward those hidden places rather than away from them. Sometimes through therapy. Sometimes through art. Through dance. Through writing. Through recovery. Through relationships.

Not becoming perfect, but becoming more whole. More integrated. More honest. More connected to oneself, to others, and perhaps to something larger than oneself.

Meaning, Suffering, and Service

Another thinker whose work deeply resonates with me is Viktor Frankl and his book Man’s Search for Meaning. I have read this book several times throughout different stages of my life, and it took me many years to truly begin understanding what Frankl meant when he wrote that if a person has meaning or purpose, they can endure almost anything.

When I was younger, I understood those words mostly intellectually. Emotionally, I was still filled with anger. Much of my inner world revolved around the humiliation and suffering my Holocaust survivor parents endured, and somewhere deep inside me existed a desire for revenge against the cruelty and evil that shaped so much of their lives and, indirectly, mine as well.

Only later in life, through recovery work, therapy, creativity, dance, relationships, and years of reflection, did I slowly begin understanding something deeper in Frankl’s message. Meaning is not something handed to us from the outside. It is not dependent on achievement, status, recognition, or certainty. Meaning is discovered internally through the way we choose to relate to suffering, healing, love, creativity, and service.

In many ways, entering a clinical psychology program at this stage of my life feels like a continuation of a healing journey I have already been on for many years. At the same time, it also feels like something more. There is a growing desire within me to give back in some meaningful way through storytelling, listening, art, presence, and perhaps eventually therapeutic work itself.

One realization that has become increasingly clear to me is that external achievement seems less important now than contribution, connection, authenticity, and inner peace. Earlier stages of life often focused on building, proving, striving, surviving, and establishing identity. Aging, however, seems to invite different questions. How does one live meaningfully? How does one transform suffering into wisdom? How does one remain emotionally and spiritually alive while facing limitation, loss, uncertainty, and mortality?

👉 The relationship between suffering, resilience, and the search for meaning has occupied much of my thinking over the years, particularly through the lens of trauma and healing. I explored these themes more personally in Conversation with Viktor Frankl, reflecting on how meaning can emerge even alongside loss and hardship.

Aging, Agency, and the Fear of Dependency

As I reflected more deeply on aging, another realization slowly emerged. Aging is not only about physical health. It is also about agency, dignity, and the fear of dependency.

Modern medicine often focuses on extending life through procedures, medications, and interventions. Yet the individual still carries an important question: What kind of life is being extended, and at what cost?

I have become increasingly aware that fear around aging is often not only fear of death. It is also the fear of dependency, invisibility, loss of control, and losing one’s sense of self before death arrives.

I think about this often in relation to my mother, who is 92 years old and still lives alone in Israel in her own apartment, fiercely protecting her independence and her space. Hardly anyone comes in, and hardly anyone goes out. Once a week, I call her, and some time ago she shared something with me that stayed deeply with me.

She told me that she keeps a stash of pills hidden away. She said that if the day ever comes when she feels she is losing her capacity to think clearly, function independently, or make decisions for herself, she hopes she will still have enough agency left to take those pills and put an end to the story on her own terms.

I remember how painful it was to hear those words. At first, what I felt most strongly was sadness. The thought of my mother thinking about death in such concrete terms was deeply unsettling.

Yet as time passed, another feeling slowly emerged alongside the pain. I began to feel a certain admiration for her determination to maintain agency and authorship over her own life. Not because I romanticize death, and not because I see the issue in simple terms, but because I recognized in her a profound human need: the desire to preserve dignity, choice, and some sense of control in the face of decline and dependency.

That conversation stayed with me because it touched one of the most difficult and least spoken truths about aging. Beneath many conversations about health lies a deeper fear: not only the fear of dying, but the fear of losing oneself before death arrives.

This is also where spirituality enters the reflection for me.

Spirituality and the Care of a Higher Power

This reflection on aging would feel incomplete without addressing spirituality and the evolving relationship I have with what I call a Higher Power.

One of the central ideas I encountered through recovery work was the notion of turning things over to the care of a Higher Power as I understand it. Over the years, I struggled with that idea. I could never fully reconcile myself with the image of an omnipotent God who controls everything, knows everything, and allows immense suffering to occur without explanation.

Growing up as the child of Holocaust survivors made that especially difficult. I clearly remember my father saying that God could not possibly exist after what he experienced during the Holocaust. That statement stayed with me for much of my life.

At the same time, I always remained fascinated by spirituality and by the possibility that there is something greater than ourselves connecting all living things.

Over time, I slowly arrived at a place that feels more emotionally honest for me. I no longer think in terms of a controlling God deciding every outcome. Instead, I find myself leaning more toward the idea of the care of God, or the care of a Higher Power as I understand it.

The emphasis, for me, is on the word care.

Not control. Not certainty. Not protection from suffering. Rather, a deeper sense of connection, guidance, compassion, acceptance, and surrender within the uncertainty of being human.

This does not mean relinquishing responsibility for my life. The work remains mine to do. Taking care of my health. Attending to relationships. Showing up in my professional life. Remaining engaged with family, friends, creativity, and growth. In many ways, perhaps 99 percent of the work is mine.

Yet there are moments when I allow myself to lean on something beyond my own efforts. Sometimes one percent. Sometimes five. Sometimes much more. There are periods in life when I feel that the care of a Higher Power is the only thing available for me to rely upon.

I do not experience this as certainty that everything will work out, nor as immunity from pain or loss. I experience it more as an opening. A willingness to receive care, to feel held, accompanied, or guided while moving through uncertainty.

As I grow older, I find myself increasingly grateful that this connection exists in my life, and perhaps even more grateful that I allow myself to remain open to it.

This understanding did not arrive suddenly. It evolved gradually through recovery, relationships, creativity, suffering, aging, and reflection. I am still working on it every day.

A large part of this spiritual perspective was influenced by the Twelve Steps. There is a story mentioned in the Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous involving Carl Jung. One of the early members of the Oxford Group, the predecessor to the AA movement, went to Jung seeking treatment for alcoholism. According to the story, Jung suggested that some maladies are physical, some are mental, and some are spiritual, and that spiritual suffering requires a spiritual solution. That idea deeply resonated with me.

As I reflect on aging, I increasingly feel that many struggles people experience later in life are not only physical or psychological, but also spiritual. Questions of meaning, loneliness, mortality, forgiveness, regret, connection, and inner peace begin moving closer to the surface.

👉 The relationship between intuition, surrender, and trusting what cannot always be explained continues to evolve for me with age. I explored some of these ideas more deeply in Living by Intuition: Walking the Edge of the Known.

Protecting Inner Peace

I notice that as I grow older, I become increasingly protective of inner peace. Not perfectly and not consistently, but consciously. Increasingly, I find myself less willing to remain in environments, conversations, or relationships that constantly pull me into unnecessary chaos, emotional exhaustion, or defensiveness.

A quote often associated with Alan Watts resonates deeply with me:

“The more at peace you become, the less you tolerate chaos. You stop explaining yourself to people committed to misunderstanding you. You stop showing up at places that disturb your calm. You start choosing silence over proving your point and distance over forced connection.”

I do not experience this as arrogance or detachment from humanity. If anything, I experience it as an aspiration toward alignment. Toward protecting an inner space that allows me to remain emotionally, spiritually, and creatively alive.

Writing this reflection made me think about something I have struggled with repeatedly since October 7, 2023: how to have difficult conversations around politics, governments, leaders, wars, and deeply opposing views.

I often find these conversations uncomfortable, aggravating, and ultimately unhelpful. I have spent considerable energy wondering how to conduct them better, how to persuade, explain, defend, or find common ground.

Yet reflecting on aging and rereading the words above, I realize something simpler may also be true.

I do not have to enter every conversation.

I do not have to discuss politics with people when I sense the interaction will become an argument, a contradiction, or an attempt to convince one another. I can say, gently and honestly: I would rather not talk about this.

Not because I do not care.

Perhaps because I care about other things more.

I find myself increasingly drawn toward different questions:

How are you?

How is your family?

Are you carrying more stress than you let others see?

How do you take care of yourself?

Do you exercise?

What gives your life meaning?

Who is your community?

What sustains you?

Are you lonely?

These are the questions that genuinely interest me.

These are the questions I care about.

Perhaps this is one of the reasons I entered a Master’s program in Clinical Psychology. Not to become an expert in human problems, but because I remain deeply curious about human beings, suffering, healing, resilience, and what allows people to keep moving forward.

As I grow older, I increasingly wonder whether protecting inner peace is not withdrawal from the world, but choosing more carefully where to place one’s attention, energy, and care.

Listening Forward

I once believed growth belonged mostly to youth.

I am no longer certain that is true.

Aging, at least from where I stand today, feels less like decline and more like an ongoing movement toward honesty. Toward accepting contradiction. Toward carrying grief and gratitude at the same time.

As I continue studying psychology while also living through the realities of aging itself, I increasingly realize I am not separate from what I am trying to understand.

In many ways, I am still learning how to ask better questions.

And perhaps, more importantly, learning how to listen.

Forward.

Reflections on Aging