From Role to Soul: Ageing as a Spiritual Threshold

In the later light, what is essential comes gently into clearer view.

There often comes a moment — sometimes welcomed, sometimes resisted — when the structures that have quietly organised a life begin to loosen. Work ends, roles fall away, status thins, and time opens out in unfamiliar ways. What first appears as freedom can feel strangely disorienting. Days no longer carry the same shape. The question “What do you do?” no longer has an easy answer, and with it something more subtle begins to surface: a quiet uncertainty about who one is, once the doing no longer holds everything together.

For some, this threshold is entered through retirement; for others, through ageing itself, illness, loss, or a gradual sense that earlier identities no longer quite fit. What is often named as a practical or emotional adjustment carries a deeper movement underneath it. This deeper movement is often where depth spiritual direction attends most carefully, tending soul and spirit. When outer roles recede, the inner life is no longer held at a distance. Questions that could once be postponed — about meaning, selfhood, and the shape of one’s remaining years — begin to press more insistently. This can feel unsettling, even painful, particularly in a culture that values usefulness and productivity. And yet, within many spiritual traditions, this very loosening has long been understood as an invitation: not to become more, but to become more deeply oneself.

When Roles Fall Away

In earlier seasons of life, identity is often organised around what is required of us. There are responsibilities to meet, expectations to fulfil, contributions to make. Even our spiritual lives can become subtly shaped by this same logic: growth is measured, fruitfulness assessed, faithfulness proven through effort and output. For many years this orientation may feel necessary, even life-giving. It gives coherence and direction. It answers, at least provisionally, the question of who we are.

But there comes a time — frequently later in life, though not exclusively so — when this way of organising the self begins to lose its authority. What once motivated no longer compels. What once defined no longer satisfies. The familiar markers of worth and belonging fall quiet, and the self that was sustained by them can feel strangely diminished or exposed. This is often experienced as loss, and rightly so. Something real is ending.

Yet it is also the moment when a deeper question can begin to emerge, one that is less easily answered by roles, achievements, or even virtues. This question is not What should I do next? but Who am I, when the scaffolding of my life is no longer holding me in the same way? It is a question that does not yield to planning or problem-solving. It asks instead for patience, honesty, and a willingness to remain present to what is uncertain.

For some, this inward turning feels like failure or regression, especially in cultures and spiritualities that prize clarity, decisiveness, and forward movement. Yet within the deeper currents of the spiritual life, such moments have long been recognised as thresholds rather than dead ends.

“Who is God? And who am I?” — Francis of Assisi

The Afternoon of Life

Depth psychology offers a language for this transition that resonates closely with spiritual wisdom. Carl Jung observed that the meaning and purpose of the afternoon of life are not the same as those of the morning. The task is no longer to establish oneself in the world, to secure identity through adaptation and achievement, but to turn inward toward a different centre of gravity.

Jung warned that when the aims and values of the first half of life are carried unexamined into the second, something in the soul can be damaged. What once served development may now restrict it. This does not mean the earlier work was wrong — only that it is no longer sufficient.

The ego, once required to lead, is asked instead to listen.

This shift is rarely comfortable. It requires discernment as deep listening. It may be accompanied by confusion, loss of confidence, or a sense of being less sure of oneself than before. Yet this unknowing is not accidental. It often signals that a deeper orientation is seeking to emerge.

There may be simple, ordinary moments when this becomes palpable. Sitting at the kitchen table in the morning with no timetable to consult. Not knowing quite what day of the week it is, because the days no longer differ in the way they once did. Or feeling, perhaps for the first time, the ache of being less needed — while still very much alive, awake, and inwardly present. These experiences can feel strangely exposing. They can also be quietly revelatory, if they are allowed to speak.

From Ego-Self to Self

Jung described the later movement of life as a reorientation from an ego-centred existence toward the Self — a deeper, organising centre of the psyche not constructed through role, performance, or recognition. The ego-self, necessary and vital in the first half of life, is not discarded or defeated. It is relativised. Its task changes.

A closely related intuition runs through the contemplative tradition. Thomas Merton wrote of the movement from a smaller, constructed sense of self toward a truer self found in God — a self not achieved through effort, but discovered through relinquishment. Read carefully, this language does not imply falseness or failure, but names a developmental shift: the gradual loosening of identities shaped by image, expectation, and survival, in order that a deeper truth of being might come into view.

What is striking is how closely these psychological and spiritual insights echo one another. Both suggest that later life invites a different way of knowing — one less driven by certainty and more grounded in presence. Both recognise that this transition is rarely smooth. It often involves grief, ambiguity, and sustained not-knowing. And both insist that this unknowing is not an absence of meaning, but a different way of entering it.

From Role to Soul

As outer roles fall away, the inner life often comes more clearly into focus. Here, soul does not mean uplift or positivity, but depth, texture, and inwardness. It names a way of inhabiting life that is less defended, less organised around persona, and more attuned to what is essential.

This inward turn is not a withdrawal from life, but a different way of belonging to it. For many, the loss of role and structure touches earlier wounds — experiences of invisibility, abandonment, or worthlessness that predate retirement by decades. For others, busyness simply shifts form, continuing as distraction or unconscious denial. The threshold does not transform us by itself. It asks something of us — patience, courage, and often accompaniment — if it is to be entered rather than avoided.

Letting Go of No-Longer-Useful Identities

A central task of this stage of life is the letting go of identities that once sustained us but are no longer able to carry the soul forward. This letting go is rarely chosen freely. It is often resisted, postponed, or mourned. These identities may have been bound up with competence, usefulness, authority, or being needed. To loosen them can feel like a diminishment, or even a kind of death.

Yet without this relinquishment, the deeper work of the soul may struggle to unfold. What is asked here is not self-negation, but truthfulness: an honest recognition that the forms of identity that once organised life no longer correspond to where life is now being lived. Unconscious loyalties to productivity, recognition, or control can quietly keep the ego-self in charge long after its time has passed.

This is why inner work matters so much at this threshold. Without attention to unconscious resistance and fear, the soul’s invitation may be ignored or misunderstood. Such work usually needs a holding space for the soul that can hold grief, resistance, and uncertainty without forcing resolution.

Becoming an Elder

In many cultures, this transition was once marked and supported. There were rites of passage into elderhood — not as status, but as vocation. In contemporary Western culture, such rites are largely absent. We have ways of becoming seniors, but few ways of becoming Elders.

Elderhood is not defined by age, expertise, or authority. It is an archetypal calling that emerges when a person has lived long enough to be shaped by loss, limitation, and love — and has allowed those experiences to deepen rather than harden them. The Elder’s work is not primarily to do, but to be: to hold perspective, to offer presence, to live from a deeper centre.

Discovering this Elder purpose requires an inward reorientation. It asks for a shift toward spiritual practice that supports listening, reflection, and honest engagement with the inner life. It also asks for a willingness to be changed — to allow the ego–Self relationship to continue evolving in service of the soul.

Living From Where Life Is Now Being Lived

What distinguishes this season is not what is done, but from where life is now being lived. As the compulsion to define oneself through function loosens, a deeper sense of identity can begin to take root — one less dependent on recognition, and more grounded in belonging. This belonging is not primarily social, though it may include community. It is existential and spiritual: a sense of being held within a larger story, a deeper life, a God encountered not beyond the self, but at its deepest centre.

“What can we gain by sailing to the moon if we are not able to cross the abyss that separates us from ourselves? This is the most important of all voyages of discovery, and without it, all the rest are not only useless, but disastrous.” — Thomas Merton

This movement is rarely linear. There may be periods of restlessness, grief, or longing for the clarity of earlier roles. There may be fear of becoming irrelevant or invisible. These experiences deserve respect. They are not obstacles to the journey, but part of its terrain. Often, the deepest work here is not finding answers, but staying present to what is tender, unfinished, or newly exposed.

An Invitation at the Threshold

Seen in this light, ageing and retirement need not be understood as a narrowing of life, but as a concentration of it. What is essential is brought closer. What is no longer true gradually falls away. This is not a romantic process, nor is it guaranteed. But when it is honoured, it can become a profound spiritual apprenticeship — one that leads not toward mastery, but toward wisdom, compassion, and a quieter joy.

For those standing at this threshold now, it may help to know that feeling lost is not a sign of failure. It may be a sign that the soul is asking a different question than it once did. Not What should I do with my life? but Who am I becoming, now that I no longer need to prove who I am?

This question does not demand an immediate answer. It asks instead for patience, kindness toward oneself, and a willingness to listen beneath the surface. What emerges may not look impressive by external standards. But it may be deeply true. And in that truth, self and God are often discovered together — not as ideas to be grasped, but as a living presence slowly revealed in the unfolding of a life.