A conversation with Michael Conforti
Covid-19 has buckled the world. My country, South Africa, is the latest to bow down and lockdown. And as we all stumble around in the penumbra of this virus, things – longstanding things – are breaking. My concentration fragments. Never has the ground felt so loose beneath my feet.
I have struggled to write this blog not only for these reasons, but because it addresses ageing and death – of our youth, of unlimited potential, and our illusions. And it too may require accepting formlessness for a time. Yet, the ultimate paradox is that accepting the notion of death, and the changes it ushers in, can be the single most liberating act of life there is.
I speak about this to Dr Michael Conforti, Jungian analyst and the Founder and Director of The Assisi Institute. He takes an archetypal perspective on the aging process in an online course hosted by the Jung Platform.
In the same way that a dread disease diagnosis often realigns a person’s life path with their soul, so too does aging to those who will listen. Dr Conforti explains that tucked beneath the finiteness of life hides a gift, an opportunity to ask the Self what it really wants to do.
‘The process can be very disorientating, as people navigate the transitions accompanying the aging process,’ he says. ‘People often think they’re depressed, because the same things don’t inspire you anymore. The same old track doesn’t work anymore, and you don’t know what the next track will be. You are more focused on the inner life, than the outer.’
I mention that the liminal space, both fertile and formless, is tough to navigate. ‘When you’re in a liminal space you’re not anchored,’ he explains. ‘And that brings up death anxiety. One of the ways we avoid this, is to say “I’m still young! I can still do it!” We deny mortality.’
To illustrate this, Dr Conforti speaks about Hemingway’s last novel, The Old Man and the Sea. He tells me that he knew that Hemingway would kill himself after he read it. He points out that many readers wish to be like the old man when they grow old, but in fact, the story is an allegory of how not to age. ‘In The Old Man and the Sea, the old man could not acknowledge that life had slowed down. He wouldn’t give up what he had, the old patterns of how things once were.’
People identify with their younger selves, I suggest.
‘Yes. People identify with that piece of themselves and hold on to it. It’s tough to give this stuff up. You can never get it back. And the reality that life is coming to an end makes it even harder. We avoid it for as long as we can, with all kinds of things – wine, food, art – because if you accept that you’re going to die, your life changes. You choose to do more of what is meaningful. You stop hanging on so desperately to things that do not serve. By giving up the old patterns, you make room for something new to come in to your life.’
I mention that certain older people have a luminousness that radiates from them.
‘What gives people that luminous quality is the ability to make a transition,’ he says. ‘Which not everybody chooses to do. Hemingway could not give up his machismo, an almost primitive form of masculinity for which he was famous. Hemingway – like the old man in the story who knows that it is his pride that kills the beautiful fish for nothing – could not make way for something more lovely that was calling him in his old age. Perhaps it was a new orientation to the masculine that his ego could not accept? That is why in the book the old man keeps saying, “I wish the boy were with me”, as something in him longed for the spirit of renewal that the young boy represented.’
It is these transitions and their potential that Dr Conforti explores in his course, as he guides us to understand the mandates of the Self in the aging process. By looking at a series of dreams, he helps us uncover the gifts that come with honoring the soul’s call in the later part of our lives. We learn to recognize and hear those messages from the Self, calling us not to the end of life, but to a different one, more aligned with our soul. More than a course, this is an invitation, an opportunity to jettison outdated youthful complexes and enter a time that may be liminal, but ultimately transcendent.
*Originally published on Jung Platform