STAGES OF LIFE

Throughout our lives, we face different chapters and turning points; marriage, job, promotion, unemployment, separation, growth, departure of children, death of parents, ageing and loss of one’s own powers and responsibilities. At each stage we are forced to revise our conception of who we are, since so much of what we may have thought was central to our personality in fact changes and moves away. This can, for some, feel like a tragedy that they never come to terms with. They refuse to face up to change and loss, and refuse to go through the mourning process that such reconciliation requires. In other words, they imagine that their finest self is the self of their supposed hey-day when they were at their most fit and strong and successful. They cling on, fruitlessly to this lost self and thus can never find themselves as they are here and now.     – Alex Howard