Sherpas and Guides

By Karleen Koen, Steering Committee member of The Community for Conscious Aging

When I had passed midlife but didn’t quite think of myself yet as old, I came across a quote from Carl Jung:

“No, thoroughly unprepared we take the step into the afternoon of life; worse still, we take this step with the false assumption that our truths and ideals will serve us as hitherto.

But we cannot live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening, and what in the morning was true will at evening become a lie.”

• “The Stages of Life”, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche (Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Vol. 8)

The words hit me in some truth center of my being. They clarified feelings of unease, displacement, restlessness, uncertainty—quiet and deep—that had been building in me since midlife. They gave me the beginning of a way to age differently from what I had seen modeled in my family and the culture around me. Family—despair and bitterness. Culture—Botox and pills.

And then I stumbled onto the beginning of the Community for Conscious Aging at The Jung Center. It became a home with fellow sojourners in this journey that we all face: growing old and dying. How does one do that in a way that is vital and purposeful, willing and willful—creative, and real, and in community? How does one live from midlife onward when the way ahead is unclear and goals of the past may no longer work as well as once they did?

There is no ritual or meaning out there to help me move into this. Carl Jung writes in his essay “Stages of Life” that there is no university for midlife onward, but I feel like the Community for Conscious Aging gives me what I need. I find knowledge and advice. I find people who are on the same journey as I am, or even ahead of me. I find community.

I’ve attended free programs, as well as book studies and workshops. Every month, I can hear a speaker over Zoom talk about some aspect of aging, from the practical to the esoteric. The talks are called Lunch & Learns, and they are free. I’ve learned about everything from how to age in place, to what records and documents I need done before I die, to the fact that “my kids don’t want my stuff” and the practice of Swedish death cleaning. This spring, my Lunch & Learn choices are: “Understanding Death in a New Way,” “Ethical Wills,” and “Stories We Inherit.”

This spring, I can attend workshops like “Letter to My Children on Inheritance,” “Positive Aging: The Spirituality of Later Life,” or “What Matters Most: How Can We Accept Mortality?” I can meet in circles to talk deeply about anything and everything. I can go to a Jung Center Gallery Artist Talk to learn that creativity is ageless.

And being part of The Jung Center means programs exist in its other divisions— The Mind Body Spirit Institute, Creating Your Life, The McMillan Institute for Jungian Studies—that cross over to enrich and feed my life.

I’m now 77. I am climbing the high mountain whose summit I cannot see but know is there. Two of my sherpas and guides are the Community for Conscious Aging and what it offers, followed by The Jung Center itself with all its riches.

Artwork by Lowell Boyers, Viewable at The Jung Center Jan 19 - Feb 27, 2026