Beyond Midlife

Introduction

Your Life Path Who You Are and What You Want to Bring to Life

This and That

You are a rational and reasonable person with a wide variety of interests. You are always collecting new impressions, and you care most about things that are current. You want to know what's going on and be able to participate in any conversation. In this context you usually try to maintain a neutral standpoint and view things as objectively as possible. You are a talented communicator and are good at dealing with controversial situations and contradictory people. Shrewdness, smart and tactful decision making and a healthy dose of cunning enable you to find your way in any situation, usually coming out on top.

Next to a nervous restlessness, you are particularly driven by your curiosity and your desire for intellectual stimulation. You are easily bored, which doesn't leave you much time to deepen your knowledge. Even though you are good at appearing interesting to your fellow human beings, you are sometimes seen as superficial and flighty. You need variety in your life, particularly when it comes to interpersonal togetherness, and you are not a big fan of commitment, especially in terms of your standpoints and opinions.

However, the impression that you go through life carefree and relaxed is deceptive. Intellect, common sense and logic mark the lighter side of your being. But you know very well that these means are not enough to explain and understand existence. You also have an irrational side that always frightens you when you are at your wit's end. But the more you try to compartmentalize your emotions, the stronger they end up being when they do catch up with you. Therefore, use your talents in mediation to strike a balance between the two souls living within you.

The Trendsetter

Your expression of your individuality has always benefitted from having allies and like-minded people by your side who are avant-garde enough to share your views. Even now, you are often a step ahead of your time, which can lead to you feeling misunderstood or seen in the wrong light. You may always be a little foreign even to yourself, for your personal development comes in unpredictable leaps and bounds. What defines your individuality is also a product of the time in which you are living. You never seem to belong to yourself entirely, but are much more marked by the circles in which you move.

You have the potential to leave your mark on a group of people. Perhaps you are the leader of a team and you realize your personal potential in a collective context. You are a natural networker and you like to connect with people who will pull together with you in order to realize higher goals. Your personal vision is to actively shape what is often referred to as Zeitgeist. You want to be part of a movement that changes the world. Your potential in this regard has quite revolutionary characteristics, and indeed, you are sometimes preceded by a reputation for being a rebel intent upon upending the status quo.

You have to regularly reinvent yourself in order to stay true to your ideals. The fact that you may have marched to the beat of your own drum particularly in the first half of your life may well have been foundational to your identity. You are not quite normal, and that's a good thing. Even if some people call you crazy, your idiosyncratic nature cannot be categorized, and whoever wants to paint an accurate portrait of you should prepare to be surprised. In spite of your age, you are less predictable than you appear, even to yourself. Therefore, don't be startled if you suddenly turn out to be someone other than who you always thought you were.

Care and Intellect

You have been preoccupied with the question of whether it's better to listen to your head or your gut since your youth. You have an intellectual nature, but your spontaneous instinctive reactions are at least as reliable as your faculties of logic and rationality. You regularly had to wrack your brain to find plausible and logical explanations for things that felt authentic and true to you, especially in your younger years. Often enough, you ended up making wrong decisions because you were internally torn between the voice of reason and your instincts.

As you gained life experience, you became better at overcoming your inner divisions and living in harmony with your rational mind as well as acting in accordance with your emotions. Your empathetic and caring disposition conceals a mischievous sense of humor and a cleverness that can border on cunning. You are a smart person interested in a variety of different subjects, and yet in the emotional sense you remain very vulnerable and almost shy. Your intellect gives you an eternally youthful air and enables you to surround yourself with interesting and interested people who are, in a sense, just as much your family as your actual kin is.

You certainly won't need to fear getting bored at any point in your life, including old age, and you will have a significantly better handle on your tendency to have too many balls in the air at any one time once midlife sets in. As you grow older, your caring nature will manifest more and more in your interest in stimulating and compassionate conversations, offering your fellow human beings comfort as well as entertaining them and lifting their spirits. This combination of lightness and empathy will continue to enrich your existence and provide you with an interesting life full of variety.

Between 40 and 50: In the Middle of Life - Challenges and Opportunities

About year counting: From the moment you are born, you are in your first year of life. When you are one year old, your 2nd year of life begins. From the moment you turn 40, you are in the 41st year of your life.

The Impact of Your Knowledge

Until now, you've probably had little reason to doubt that you had something important to say when it came to following your own interests and making your opinions known. You were used to being heard and being able to influence your fellow human beings through the power of your words and ideas. But now you are facing challenges that you are increasingly unable to surmount with your old strategies. Maybe your knowledge is being called into question or your stances and opinions have made you the target of criticism, so that you need new arguments and experiences in order to hold your own successfully. The resulting insecurity can lead you to be temporarily confused and doubt your own thinking.

The events you are currently experiencing are primarily matters of fate. Therefore, clinging to your insights and convictions from the past is not a particularly promising way forward. Rather, this time is about recognizing what issues are worth getting to the bottom of in order to better understand certain connections. You are being called to use your distinctively inquiring mind, focusing much less on your personal interests than on a higher order of questions. Aiming to distinguish yourself exclusively on an individual level harbors the danger of failing entirely. The insights you gain in this phase of life should have collective value and serve a higher cause.

If you don't fully recognize yourself in this description, it may be related to the fact that so far you've rarely had the nerve to say what you really think. Perhaps you were made to believe early on that your contributions were wrong, incorrect or stupid, so that you increasingly fell silent. Your nature may also have been more brooding or closed off, leading to a build-up of thoughts and feelings now threatening to explode. If this is the case, the key challenge of this time in your life is about finding ways and means to express yourself in exchange with your fellow human beings. Even if it involves saying the wrong thing from time to time, it would be far worse to end up suffocated by all the unspoken words just on the tip of your tongue.

The catalyst for the internal processes of transformation you are currently experiencing may be of a medical or psychosomatic nature. Maybe your life- and work circumstances are also undergoing changes that force you to make the required adjustments. It's the little things in daily life that harbor a potential for creating far-reaching change. It may be time to let go of habits that you can no longer reconcile with your wellbeing. By clarifying for yourself what kind of lifestyle and activities do in fact correspond to your needs, you can find your own inner rhythm and do what's good for your health.

You can now initiate a lot of changes where you like working at full steam. Some tasks may require your full dedication and demand all your resources. By paying attention to the details, you can have an effect on things normally outside your range of influence. Only at those moments where your strength reaches its limits will you be asked to show humility. By releasing your tendency to demand perfection at all times, you will also have an easier time health-wise, and still manage to have an impact.

New Beginnings in Career and Society

Professional and societal questions define this sometimes rather turbulent part of your life path. Perhaps you are preparing to change workplaces or planning a new start professionally, perhaps it's time for you to retire or you are considering going into business for yourself. Regardless of what type of change you make, you are now wishing for an increase in freedom and self-determination. Even if changes now set in that you didn't initiate, you can use them to target new goals with your ambition.

You are in the midst of a transition from obligation to desire in terms of what you consider your calling. This may mean that you react to normative performance expectations that don't meet your standards in an unexpectedly rebellious way. On the one hand this can bring on conflicts with higher ups and authority figures, but on the other hand it offers you the possibility to freestyle independently and to come into your own creatively.

The liberties you take in this life stage will also re-define your role in society. Perhaps you will detach from an old paradigm, flouting everything related to your career and re-orient yourself along internal and personal values. Perhaps you will also develop a surprising new sense of ambition or become active in a field where you get to know a whole new set of people. Thinking about your reputation too much may be detrimental. Set your own standards and measure your success according to your own criteria.

Whatever decisions you make now, keep an eye on their effects on your domestic and familial well-being. Whatever price you will have to or have already paid for the successes you seek will now come to the surface in much greater clarity than before. You may also have to rethink your work and home lives in order to better balance them out. Doing more than is good for you is not an option for your future. Drawing the right conclusions from these events will give this stage of your life a special appeal.

A Divine Joie de Vivre

What dreams and desires from your past have stayed with you? Were they about being creatively productive and becoming a great artist, or did you want to have wild adventures where you could be the star of the show? Did you dream of breaking athletic records or were you more interested in pure fun and joie de vivre? Were you perhaps a hopeless romantic who was almost always in love? Regardless of how concrete your wishes and expectations of life were, in your early forties you have reached a point where you will be shown what you overlooked or failed to take into account back then.

You may now have to admit to yourself that your gift of placing yourself in the limelight has not always been a blessing. Perhaps you used it to deceive yourself and others, and now you must recognize with disappointment that you are not who you always thought you were. Perhaps you also feel misjudged by others and are less and less inclined to fill the roles assigned to you. In extreme cases you may lose your sense of identity completely, so that from time to time you might not even know who you are at all.

But your deep-seated insecurity about your true being also has positive aspects. The disappointments you are currently experiencing may help you define your personal profile and express your individuality more clearly. This makes it easier for your fellow human beings to recognize what makes you unique. And when it comes to finding a hobby, you now have a better sense of orientation about where to start searching. By facing the challenges this phase of life presents you with, you can ensure that your creative gifts will bear abundant fruit in the future.

The things you share with other people are one source of the insecurity you struggle with in this period. You may be doubting whether you can really rely on your partners in marriage, business, and other areas. You may feel abandoned or, in extreme cases, cheated out of an inheritance or a company share, and therefore deliberate whether or not to break with certain people. Perhaps contracts and commitments dissolve tacitly, and you are left to fend for yourself once more. Differentiating whose intentions are good and whose aren't may not be easy at this time. On the other hand, you are now able to detach from ideas you once clung to that were beginning to block your mental and emotional growth.

Perhaps you now feel the urge to sacrifice yourself for people who feel like your kindred spirits. You yearn for encounters of intimate bonding more than ever before, which can also lead to unexpected new levels of climax in your erotic life. You can now get truly high on overcoming boundaries and feelings of separation through transcendent experiences. Transformation through therapy may also look especially promising at the moment. Dying one or two little deaths can present you with insights into dimensions of your being that were closed off to you for a long time, but may turn out to be crucial for your future. You have a good instinct for things that are concealed, and some of the secrets of life may now reveal themselves to you as if of their own volition.

Far From Home

Your early forties will clearly show how well you have managed to disentangle yourself from your familial roots and go your own way. Perhaps you will have unexpected successes, or more people in your social circles will begin to recognize everything you have achieved in the first half of your life. If you haven't met with success yet, this most likely stems from too harsh a break with your origins. If you rejected your roots and rebelled against your family in order to avoid at all costs becoming just like your parents or other close relatives, now is the time to return to your ancestry voluntarily, thereby finding your way to inner peace.

The question of how to settle down in life without sacrificing your freedom is a central challenge of this life stage. Whatever you have achieved so far, you are now faced with the need to stabilize, particularly in the emotional sense. If you haven't already started your own family, now is your chance to do so from a place of newfound inner freedom. Should you however feel that this subject is already part of the past, you can take this opportunity to put your foot on the gas in your professional life in a totally new way.

Whatever decisions you make in this emotionally intense life stage, what matters most is that you are free to make your own choices and maintain your independence. Perhaps you will have to break with social conventions and choose a new and self-determined way of living. In this phase of your existence, anything is permitted that helps you overcome your soul’s lack of security and your sense of being estranged from existence, so that you can really arrive in this world, wherever this actually may be.

Everyday Responsibilities

Overcoming your inner isolation and loneliness and building faith in your own existence presents you with life tests that ask a great deal of courage and conscientiousness from you, especially during your mid-life crisis. It's the frustrations of daily life in particular that provoke old tendencies to retreat as well as feelings of guilt and fears of failure. The burdens you are currently being asked to bear will show you where you may have bitten off more work and responsibility than you can chew.

Autonomously ensuring that you don't surpass your own limits and successfully defending yourself against the demands of others in this regard is a central challenge you face in your middle age. If you have the impression that your contributions are not getting the appreciation they deserve, now is the time to emphatically call for respect and recognition for your work and, where this is not possible, to stop serving the wrong causes, instead reorienting yourself and getting involved in other areas.

The middle chapter of your life will show you the meaning of your everyday actions and the sacrifices and efforts involved in them. Even if some endeavors turned out to be futile, others will seem to complete themselves effortlessly. You are very gifted at influencing events from behind the scenes and ensuring safety and stability without necessarily appearing in public. This is precisely the way in which you can create bigger successes and get a good deal closer to your true calling.

Committed Relationships

Submitting your interpersonal relationships to a rigorous review presents a necessary, though not always simple challenge during this phase of your life. It may well be that some of your friendships and acquaintances come to an end during this period and that you feel the time has come to part ways for good. Even if this sometimes pains you, it's still important for you to clearly differentiate between those relationships you want to maintain in the future and those you don't care to. The disappointments you experience now are particularly relevant for pointing out where a break is inevitable.

However, separations are not inevitable. Those relationships that have a solid foundation can deepen and solidify during this time. The processes of maturation that you have undergone in the past years may strengthen your wish to take on more responsibilities in your partnership. Maybe you avoided certain commitments in the past and only now feel internally prepared to engage on a deeper level. There is no more getting past the responsibilities required by loyal and reliable relationships. It will pay off to think in the long-term when making the decisions you are now faced with.

Should you have neglected to fulfill your obligations to any of your fellow human beings over the course of the last years, you are now confronted with the resulting consequences. It's very possible that you will encounter external limitations and be challenged to put all your cards on the table. Wherever there is an imbalance in giving and receiving, it's your responsibility to initiate a fair adjustment. Even if this is somewhat of an effort, you will profit from doing so. It's very important for you to use this period of your life to create the right conditions for your partnerships and other relationships so that they endure for the long term.

The Flaws of Others

Your weaknesses in dealing with other people come to the fore very clearly in this phase of your life. It won't take much of an effort to provoke power struggles or get entangled in relationship issues. The causes are often unpleasant emotions such as envy, anger, jealousy or compulsive desires for closeness, sex, and intimacy. You will experience some of this yourself, some of it will come to you from others. The resulting intensity can make your existing relationships implode as well as give them greater depth, and it's a magnetic force for newcomers.

Facing the dark sides of your own being now becomes an existential necessity. In almost all situations, you may need to deal with the question of whether the accusations and conflicts that are laid at your doorstep are just other people's problems, or whether they actually mirror facets of your own being. The information you're now receiving may be related to patterns of behavior you haven't been able to see in yourself or have rejected until now. Now is the time to get to the bottom of such things, and to resist the temptation to keep your head above water by blaming others.

Maybe you're now discovering that what binds you to other people doesn't necessarily have to be love, even if that's what you thought until now. You can take this realization as an opportunity to give love another chance, be it with an old partner or a new one. Maybe you can sustain your relationships by submitting to a deep process of transformation. You will now see what parts of a relationship are built to last and whom you can rely upon one hundred percent. But wherever you discover a lack of loyalty from your fellow human beings, now is the time to forge new alliances.

New Goals and Triumphs

Doing what you feel called to do is your greatest joy in life, even if it is usually connected to extensive responsibilities. In your 48th year, you will have many promising opportunities in the professional as well as the social realm to further expand your radius of activity and find new goals to set your sights on. Perhaps you will receive a promotion, or you strive for success and recognition in a different way.

What could become problematic in this stage of your life is your tendency to claim the lion's share of a success, leaving everyone else involved only with scraps. As a result, you run the risk of resting on other peoples' laurels and minimizing their hard work. This makes it more difficult for you to credibly take up the role-model function in which you wish to serve. Therefore, strive to be generous in granting others their share in your successes.

Favourable opportunities to set a course of expansion and move up in the world will present themselves quite naturally during this stage. All that's needed from your side is courage and the resolve to grab chances by the horns as they come. Don't wait for success to fall into your lap, but rather take an active role in shaping your professional fate. In the coming decade, you may be able to achieve far more than you ever thought possible. Have faith in yourself and direct your ambitions towards the right goals.

Besides personal successes, the coming chapter of your life will be about doing good things for your fellow human beings and making a contribution to the improvement of the collective living conditions around you. You feel a higher calling in this area, and as long as you share your successes with others, it can lead you to inner fulfillment. Make sure you set your sights on challenges that will help you grow and mature, while simultaneously serving the good of many others.

An Undertone of Confidence

You may not immediately be aware of it, but upon closer examination you will notice a new type of strength and confidence gradually becoming part of your personality. You are giving your individuality more of the center stage than you are used to, demanding increasingly more attention and recognition for your personal concerns. Even if you maintain your original character, your being will start to exhibit a self-assured undertone that supports you in feeling confident in your significance and taking yourself seriously enough at key moments in order to assert your interests and achieve personal validation.

From now on, you will rarely feel ignored or overlooked. In fact, you will experience more and more situations that make it seem like the world might just revolve around you. You may have to learn to express your newly ignited self-confidence in measured doses, and to catch excessively egomaniacal tendencies in time. Your creative and artistic talents in particular are asking to be expressed with greater force than before. This requires finding the right stage upon which to express yourself, which is an interesting challenge for you and enables you to bring more and more fun and joie de vivre into your life. From now on you will have more and more fun exploring your potential and improvising with what you find.

Between 50 and 60: Your Best Years - Channeling Your Potential and Achieving Mastery

Called to Heal

Admittedly, it took some time for you to acknowledge your true inner calling. One of the reasons is that your vocation is not immediately acceptable in mainstream society. Even if it isn't noticeable at first glance, you have at your command a healing potential that defies common convention. The outsider status associated with this power has led you to subtly undercut any promises of success and sabotage them internally over long stretches of your life. Even when you tried your hardest to meet society's demands and make the contributions being asked of you while remaining within the socially prescribed rules and regulations, it never brought you the recognition you coveted.

At fifty, you are at a point where you can recognize what type of success actually suits you. You no longer need to question society's values and rebel against almost every form of state power and authority. You long for worldly respect and recognition without the caveat of having to submit to convention in order to get it. But as long as you insist on your special status and demand such extensive personal freedom, your chances of success will shrink. The continuous struggle to find an adequate role within conventional society is the Achilles heel of your existence. Recognizing this will help you overcome the internal mechanisms of resistance that have led you to hurt yourself over and over again, and instead follow your true calling.

Even if society does not yet offer you adequate possibilities for realizing this calling, you yourself are mature and free enough by now to make your contribution to the world's healing on your own terms. Maybe your vocation is not yet recognized as a "real job" by mainstream society, but your work can still be healing and beneficial to many. In the future, you could have a much bigger impact on society than you might think you are capable of. It's time to reflect on the healing aspects of your ambition and sound out the possibilities for realizing these aspirations.

Internally Purged and Strengthened

After a period marked by a diverse range of connections and experiences, you are now faced with the decision of where you should engage on a deeper level and where you would do better to detach internally. This may get you into situations in which you feel like you have been put to the test. Although it may be difficult for you to do so in individual situations, laying your cards on the table will now be very good for you.

In this life stage you have a strong connection to anything secret or associated with taboos. This can also make itself known in terms of your sexuality. You are both more passionate and more vulnerable than usual, and you sense exactly what will satisfy you. Allowing yourself to be touched and transformed on the internal level appeals to you far beyond the sexual realm.

The ups and downs of human existence with all its becomings and perishings are now particularly close to you. You may also be asked to stand by people in times of crisis, or faced with the task of organizing the estates of others. It's by no means external events alone that are putting you in touch with your own mortality more than usual. You have developed an inner familiarity with processes of death and rebirth, and can leave this life stage strengthened after overcoming them.

Free and Untethered

After so much was asked of you over the last two years, you are now starting to sense a nearly unstoppable need to be free. You want to feel independent, and are experiencing the desire for a change of social scenery. This may take the shape of a move or other domestic changes that give you more room to breathe.

This life chapter is marked by contradictory emotions. Sometimes you desire closeness, sometimes you need distance, and you usually feel pulled back and forth between these two extremes. You are more restless than usual, and sometimes you give people the impression that you are internally on the run. Your longing for change is your primary motivator, even if you behave erratically along the way.

Some of what you are now experiencing may feel foreign and unfamiliar to you. Your inner workings have shifted a little, and you are less entrenched in your habits. This gives you the opportunity to gain some emotional distance from things and to feel free and self-determined.

Enter with Optimism

Pursuing your goals with confidence and optimism will pay off especially well right now. Modesty is not called for at this time, rather you would do well to use any opportunity you can to strengthen your willpower and make a lasting impression on your fellow human beings. You now have good prospects for getting other people excited about your plans and continuing to expand your scope of action. Whatever new beginnings you initiate now, both the support of other people and luck will be on your side.

Still, when embarking on your new journey it will be advantageous for you not to overestimate your abilities or to overdo it in terms of your will to assert yourself. You could easily end up doing too much of a good thing and unintentionally testing the tolerance of your fellow human beings. However convinced you may be that you are doing what is right, others may not see things the same way. While it is a good time to gain confidence in your endeavors and grab opportunities by the horns, how successful these ventures turn out to be and whether you will be blessed by luck and success is not in your hands alone.

Your desire to feel important and validated is becoming tangible in both your demeanor and your appearance. You now want to make an impression that is as positive as possible, and are more than happy to pay attention to your physical appearance in order to present yourself in the best possible light. Negligence in this area may now result in gaining weight.

What You Have to Say

Getting to the bottom of things has always attracted and fascinated you. And yet, there are some secrets that have remained opaque and that you are only now beginning to see through. The helpless feeling that important pieces of information are being kept from you increasingly gives way to the gift of seeing the true intentions of your fellow human beings and discovering hidden connections. Your fear of saying the wrong thing is also lessening noticeably, and you are getting better and better at freely applying the power of your words with precision while unabashedly speaking uncomfortable truths if needed.

By seizing the opportunity to independently delve into new subjects, you can clear mental blockages and penetrate to a place of profound insight. The days when your views and opinions fell on deaf ears are over for good. You no longer need to fear being judged or humiliated for what you have to say. Particularly your growing trust in yourself gives you the courage to address subjects that have been kept hidden or placed under a taboo, and to expose secrets and dishonesty.

Aside from the possibility of expanding and deepening your knowledge, this phase of your life also opens up new perspectives on handling relationships with neighbors and siblings. By overcoming your old suspicions, you can chip away at discord from the past as well as open or covert hostilities, and find your way to a sincere form of communication. Whatever issues have prevented you from communicating openly and with ease up until now, you've reached a point where you refuse to cede any more power to them, instead dissolving the blockages associated with them for good. Your ideas and perspectives may even lead to a breakthrough that gains you increased attention and enables you to communicate on a new level with a mass-effect.

Your desire for an honest sense of togetherness in your partnerships and interpersonal relationships is a central catalyst for the processes of transformation you are currently cycling through. You are now faced with the necessity to test which among your relationships have a future and which ones you have increasingly outgrown over the course of the last years. Perhaps the power dynamics between you and some of the most important people in your life have also shifted, and you are now faced with the need to readjust.

In your attempts to distinguish between those who wish you well and those who don't, you may also get into conflicts in your personal life. You can nip unpleasant escalations in the bud by taking care not to indulge in unreasonable mistrust or false convictions. You now have opportunities to make a lot of changes in relationships with people to whom you feel passionately connected and can rely on at all times. The most important thing here is to play your powerful cards at the right moment without triumphing over anyone else. From now on, you are stronger together than you ever were before.

Harvest

As far as your ambition is concerned, you have reached a peak on both the social and the professional level. You are now at the summit of your success and can reap the recognition for all the efforts and achievements of your life so far. It may come in the form of a promotion with extended responsibilities, so that you will serve as an example to others. Or you experience other forms of appreciation for the competencies you managed to acquire over the course of your life. What you harvest now is the result of all you have worked for with such discipline and endurance.

However, this phase of life will also see you confronted with the accumulation of all the times you fell short of your goals over the years. Your fears of failure and the conflicts you haven't yet worked through are now becoming visible. You may well feel frustrated in this regard because some successes will remain unattained and in some cases you may even fail completely. Maybe you encounter other setbacks and even play with the idea of giving up. If you haven't reached your goals, now may be a good time to reorient yourself. The deciding factor will be to use the resources and competencies you have worked so hard to develop up to now.

Perhaps this phase of life also sees you confronted with the necessity to redefine your goals. At the same time, it’s important for you to finish those things you have achieved and make peace with what has remained undone or incomplete. Maybe you would have preferred savoring what you worked for over a few more years and are contemplating where you might still be needed in the future. Bridling your ambition and respecting the boundaries set by others may be a big challenge for you now.

Resignation would be the wrong attitude towards your desired successes not happening in this stage of life. Instead, use the opportunity to question your ambition and to continue caring for your private, domestic and familial concerns. In fact, you may have sacrificed more for your ambition than you realized until now. Now you are forced to take the price of success into account. On the one hand this may cost you a good deal, on the other it can also enrich you greatly. Recognize the true scope of your possibilities and engage with them accordingly.

Successes Well-Deserved

What you have achieved in your life so far and the successes you can call your own now need to be submitted to thorough analysis and a conscientious review. This is especially true if you are experiencing setbacks or if you have the impression that you are not getting the appreciation you deserve, at least according to your own standards. What you can accomplish within the framework of your personal ambition will become very clear to you now. Should this be associated with disappointments or frustrations, you can take these as an opportunity to rethink your personal norms and adjust them to the reality you live in.

Perhaps you are now being confronted with more social responsibilities than you have taken on in the past, which may give you greater influence, but also increase your burden and limit your personal scope of action. Even promotions or other honors may now come with a downside, as you are being saddled with responsibilities that you did not choose yourself. You may be given assignments and tasks that demand great effort and personal sacrifice of you. Doing right by your social and professional responsibilities may not be easy for you at the moment, but will pay off in the long run.

Even if you have long since concluded your career, with your ambition in this realm being a part of the past, you are now faced with the question of what you individually have to give back to the world and what you want to contribute to the greater whole. Letting other people be part of your experience and competence can now give you a deep sense of satisfaction. In fact, your true calling may only now come into full effect. You now have the opportunity to lay the foundation for giving your existence the scope and significance that corresponds to your true abilities, even in societal terms. Other peoples' standards will do more harm than good in this process. From now on, what counts is what only you feel called to do. Designing the right framework for following through with this will be decisive for the success you can achieve in future, the impact of which will not be something you need to worry about.

Inner Space

You are currently cycling through a life chapter in which some things will fall into place unexpectedly without you having to engage with them directly. Some things have a long past and are now coming to an end, perhaps without your wanting them to. This leads to more space for new things, even if it's not quite tangible for you yet. In certain situations it will be up to you to actively close a chapter and set yourself free from life circumstances that you have already inwardly outgrown. It's beneficial for you to focus on what has become stagnant rather than jumping into things whose time hasn't yet come.

Perhaps this also leads to a certain sense of idling that initially makes you restless, but also offers you the possibility of reorganizing your life and then restarting with new energy. A creative pause during which you can view things from a distance will provide you with the freedom to set new priorities independent of outside influences. Some of what once seemed unchangeable and immovable can now be fundamentally transformed and bestow you with unexpected freedoms.

Even if some of what is now rising to the surface may appear somewhat alarming, it can also contain information about untapped potentials that can enrich your life from here on out. The future holds more opportunities for you to shape it than you ever thought possible. You may have subconscious premonitions about certain things and it's no mistake to trust your intuition here. In some areas you are preparing to take a leap directly into the unknown, and having closure with the past will help you land more smoothly. In certain situations, you may get the impression that you are somewhat ahead of your time. Some of your ideas and actions anticipate things that turn out to be highly forward-thinking and end up setting a trend. The unknown is what now appeals to you and enables you to take on endeavors you otherwise wouldn't have had the confidence to. What you will now encounter can barely be predicted, which is why it's so inspiring and exciting.

Deceptive Successes

The extent to which you've managed to fulfill your hopes and dreams in the professional and the social realm can be measured by how satisfied or unsatisfied you feel with your achievements thus far. A rational approach will not help you cope with these feelings. Perhaps you have accomplished a great deal by conventional standards and have relevant successes to show for it, but you might still be experiencing an increasing sense of dissatisfaction. It may sound strange, but some of this feeling is likely of a divine nature. Finding a fulfilling answer here could be the biggest challenge of this life phase.

Maybe you feel called to a higher purpose and want to save the whole world, or your perspective and sense of meaning have gotten lost along your career path. A more socially involved profession may now appeal to you, or perhaps you have secretly been dreaming of a creative life as an artist. It may prove to be very enriching for you to see where these fantasies lead. But before you start putting your desires into action, you should make sure that your visions are informed by a healthy dose of realism. Some of what comes up in the context of your professional and social prospects now may appear in a deceptive light.

Developing a positive attitude towards the concept of disappointments will prepare you well for the challenges of this life stage. Whether it's the realization that even so-called dream jobs involve hard work or the feeling that you have subscribed to the wrong ideals or been robbed of your true successes, you will now have to accept things that were not part of your plan. But even if you do take a few wrong turns, eventually they will lead to an opportunity to devote yourself wholeheartedly to a task that makes you feel happy and internally fulfilled.

You may be asked to make sacrifices that don't appear meaningful to you at first. In extreme cases, you might need to depend on the support of others in order to get by. As paradoxical as it sounds, these types of experiences may help strengthen your faith in life. You now need to feel that you are embedded in a social fabric and connected to the world. You may even encounter this feeling in the form of becoming well-known or even famous beyond your immediate circle. But don't let appearances seduce you into playing only to the gallery. Dreaming of success and recognition can be a great motivator for you now. Remaining on the path that's right for you and staying the course throughout requires you to remain vigilant.

A Higher Calling

You are cycling through a transition period that spans several years, during which your previous ideas of professional and social success will subtly start to change and dissolve. At first you may only experience a slight dissatisfaction with what you have achieved in life so far. But in extreme cases your ambitions may turn out to be little more than illusions, and you will be forced to face the sobering realization that you expected too much and pursued the wrong goals. The resulting disappointments will show you clearly that you need to seek out happiness elsewhere in the future. By recognizing these signals in time and drawing the right conclusions from them, you can spare yourself further failures and adjust your idea of success to your changing circumstances.

Humanitarian and social goals will now become especially important to you. You feel called to help and to do good, and perhaps you secretly dream of saving the whole world. An inner mission can now give your ambitions a real boost, but you are less interested in your personal success than in serving the common good. There will be phases where your desire to sacrifice yourself to a greater cause knows no bounds, which can lead you to overexert yourself and perhaps even end up feeling used.

This life stage may also see you succumb to the charm and glamour of more or less deceptive promises of success, leading you to hatch unrealistic plans for your career. This is especially likely to happen when you wish to appear bigger and more important in the public eye than you actually are. In that case you might see yourself as an idealized helper or savior while in fact only pursuing self-centered successes. Making a habit of thoroughly examining your professional motives and not fooling yourself or anyone else in this context is an essential component of your long-term success.

Even if it's not always obvious at first glance, the events of this phase will show you which life goals truly hold promises of success and fulfillment. These may not always correspond to your hopes and dreams up to now, but they offer far better prospects for future happiness and satisfaction. If you trust that things will work themselves out in a way that not only benefits you but also the greater good, your true calling can gradually be revealed to you. The promotions you receive from now on will come all the way from the top - in this case not from the executive floor, but from a much higher authority.

Inner Stability and Strength

It has been a long road for you to feeling like you could deal with the obligations and responsibilities of daily life. You received little guidance that could have helped you in your childhood and youth. Furthermore, you were very successful at finding a way around the rules, and deferring to authority remains a challenge for you to this day. Because you couldn't find stability and security on the outside, you had to make your own set of rules to guide you through life. Over the course of the years, you have developed an inner strength that now allows you to set your own standards and in this way even have a mass effect.

You know what it means to carry responsibilities behind the scenes. In your late fifties you are faced with the interesting challenge of what tasks you feel internally called to at the beginning of your third age. Where are you needed in the role of grey eminence to continue to successfully contribute your competence and experience? What have you already accomplished, allowing you to move on and turn towards new tasks and obligations? What would be a fitting place of refuge for you to tend to your need for calm and seclusion? Now more than ever, you need a place where you can enter into a dialogue with yourself and connect with your true nature. Take this opportunity to get in touch with something larger or higher, and to make peace with that feeling of loneliness that has never quite left you.

Showing compassion and renunciation is a spiritual discipline that can serve as a valuable resource and a well of inner strength as you age. Depending on the circumstances, this phase of your life will not only see you fulfilling the obligation of supporting others, but also making sacrifices in your own life. Perhaps you will find yourself having to rely on the support of your fellow human beings. Some of the things you have been able to suppress for a long time are now showing themselves clearly. This offers you the possibility of making things right with yourself.

A Mature Entrance

This phase of your life stands for a new beginning, even if you can't immediately tell what form that will take. You now need a cause that motivates you enough to risk a new start. Looking back at what you have achieved and realized over the course of your life, you are now forced to ask yourself what could be a new reason for stepping out. What do you expect from your life in the future? What appeals to you and what challenges you? What would you still like to achieve, what wishes have come true and which ones remain unfulfilled?

Don't take these questions lightly now, but rather choose a task that can occupy you for some time to come and that requires you to act conscientiously throughout. This phase is ideal for finally tying up the loose ends of your life and starting over again, unencumbered by the past. Of course, you can use all your experience and the competence you have acquired so far as a foundation for this new beginning. The main thing is not to weigh down your future with things that are actually already part of the past.

The signs of the physical process of aging can hardly be denied anymore in this phase of your life. Take these visible processes of maturation and aging as an occasion to adjust your overall appearance, including your style of clothing, accordingly. In this context, the question of how you can gain the respect you desire from your fellow human beings also comes into play. This can mean a change in your demeanor or even a shift in your role, and it will help you to underline these changes with a fitting look and style.

The processes taking place in this phase of your life also have an effect on your environment and your relationships. You can't expect all of the people who are important to you to be enthusiastic about your new lifestyle. Some may even try to push you back into your old patterns. Try practicing patience in this regard, and wait until you are sure of your new presence. Once you have found your new way of life, your connections with others will also gradually begin to change and clarify. Not all of them will survive, but some relationships will consolidate and deepen as a result of your new role. Let life surprise you!

Meaningful Successes

In the two years leading up to your 60th birthday you will go through a transitional phase in which you will see clearly what parts of you remain young at heart in contrast to what has become obsolete and where you feel too experienced, too mature and too old to continue as before. Next to the success and recognition you have achieved in the professional arena in particular, you are now forced to admit that some of your goals may have been too lofty after all and will likely never be accomplished. By successfully overcoming the associated disappointments about your hopes and dreams, you will create the right conditions for a good transition into your third age.

Making a positive impact and making it as publicly as possible has always been an important source of motivation from which you could draw strength and confidence. By now you have gained enough experience in life to be able to gauge what prospects for success remain realistic in your third age and what goals make sense in this context. Being satisfied with what you have achieved so far and resting on your laurels won't get you any further now. Instead you need new challenges that inspire you and enable you to continue making the most of your gifts and talents.

In this life stage you may also arrive at the conclusion that not everything you have achieved so far has carried the meaning you thought it would. Some professional avenues may be depleted or evade your reach for other reasons, which means that new goals and adjustments are required from your side. By drawing the right conclusions here and detaching from the norms and expectations of others, you will increasingly come to celebrate successes that give you a sense of inner joy and fulfillment from here on out. The validation you afford yourself is key to giving you the strength to master the transition into your third age.

Between 60 and 70: From Obligation to Freedom - Time to Freestyle

Plunging Into Pleasure

It's your passions in particular that make your hobbies special, and fully devoting yourself to your leisure activities brings you great joy. All or nothing, that's your motto, and you'd rather abstain completely than do something halfheartedly. You have a tendency to become downright obsessed with things, which enables you to perform at a very high level. You won't let up until everything matches your expectations as perfectly as possible.

What you enjoy in your free time may strike some people as strange at first, but you are particularly enticed by breaking taboos and getting to the bottom of things. Sometimes you even seek out danger in order to really stimulate your creativity. The moments when you feel under internal pressure are precisely the ones in which you manage to move mountains and surpass yourself. Sometimes you also find pleasure in things that other people fear, and you don't really feel fulfilled by your leisure activities until they have given you a certain thrill. The intensity with which you devote yourself to your hobbies isn't for the faint of heart, and the fact that it can sometimes get a little dangerous gives your activities a particular flair.

You are probably accustomed to your hobbies making you appear a little less than ordinary. It brings you joy not to be like everybody else and pursue your own self-determined, highly idiosyncratic creative tendencies. You enjoy things that are highly individual and usually don't lead to particularly normal leisure activities. Thus, it can be quite difficult for you to connect with others and share your hobbies with like-minded people. Still, you are a sociable person - you just wish that everybody else would tolerate all your eccentricities.

In your third age, your desire to fall out of line will be able to unfold freely and unselfconsciously. The less conventions are forced on you, the more creative you become. Even though some of your creative activities may appear strange or bizarre, you have your own style, and it's not uncommon for you to be a bit ahead of your time. Thus, your choice of hobbies may also set unexpected trends. As long as you maintain your readiness to take risks and your love of experimentation, you won't need to look far for activities that bring you fun and joy. As far as your hobbies are concerned, you are the exception to the rule - and that's exactly how it should be.

Guarding Your Treasures

You seem to have been swept up in a certain retro wave regarding the conveniences of daily existence. You long for the experiences of the past and will continue trying to derive joy from them in the future. You are less excited by new things than by the repetition of what is already familiar and what you have come to love. In the future, you may catch yourself wanting to vacation in places you already know and indulging in feelings of nostalgia, yearning for the good old days.

Your sense of taste and style will also start to diverge from short-lived trends and you will begin thinking only of your personal likings. You are invested in the things you have always enjoyed, and you'll dress however you want regardless of what happens to be in vogue. By taking the liberty of deciding what looks good and fits you according to your personal preferences, you can develop a highly individual sense of style over the next few years that will increasingly become your own.

You are also coming to value the tried and true more and more in your friendships and romantic relationships. You are less interested in making new connections, instead you derive much more pleasure from nurturing your existing relationships and further deepening the closest ones. If you should fall in love in the coming years, this person is likely someone you already know or who shows distinct similarities with some of your previous partners.

The coming years will be something like an inner treasure hunt, which will have positive effects on your self-esteem in the long run. There are certainly some talents still slumbering within you that remain to be uncovered and whose unfolding will pay off in many ways. By discovering what you're capable of, you will gain more self-confidence and reap the recognition and appreciation you deserve for what you have to offer your fellow human beings.

A Growing Desire for Validation

You may have been wanting to experience the spotlight for some time, but you are only now feeling the impulse to take the initiative and start anew. Your desire for validation is by now pronounced enough for you present yourself to the world successfully and draw the attention of your fellow human beings. Whatever has kept you from taking yourself seriously enough to successfully assert your interests up until now, the time has come to position yourself accordingly and fight for your initiatives and projects. You feel vital and strong enough on the mental and emotional level to face new challenges and take on your goals with uncompromising determination.

Even if you sometimes place yourself front and center a little overzealously in the heat of the moment, there is currently no getting past your ambitious demeanor. You are ready to fight for your cause and are increasingly experiencing competition as motivation to stand firmly behind your plans. Now that you are increasingly able to act in tune with your soul's needs and ideals, you are nearly unstoppable and can achieve a great deal of what you set your sights on.

Journey to Yourself

After a phase marked by inner sensations and the need for emotional safety, the coming years will see you behaving in a markedly more extroverted and confident manner. You are being flooded with impulses to really live life, feeling vital and creative. A lot of what has touched you internally and enriched you emotionally will want to be expressed in a deeply personal way from here on out. This will give your life a more individual note, and you will see your true self reflected in your thoughts, feelings and actions more than ever before.

In the future you will develop an even more holistic sense for who you are in your essence and what defines you as a person. This may sometimes involve you overestimating yourself and taking yourself a little too seriously. However, it will do you good to become increasingly aware of your value and to present yourself to the outside world with confidence. By becoming more and more familiar with your individual strengths and potentialities, you will sharpen your personal profile and create a name for yourself and your causes.

Mobile Roots

You are quite flexible both in terms of your physical and your emotional household, and the sense of creative restlessness this provokes in you will give you an unexpected sense of mobility in this life stage. You may now be flirting with the idea of putting down new roots in a far off place. But the opposite may also come to pass, and you could feel free enough to return to your ancestral home and settle there. Whatever you decide now will show what fate your inborn instinct to fly the coop brings with it. As far as your heritage is concerned, you are an apple that fell rather far from the tree, and now is your chance to take root in a way that corresponds to your deepest desires. Don't hesitate to find a place for yourself where you feel safe and sound. It could even be a home on wheels in which you can travel from place to place, discovering the world.

You now have the freedom and autonomy you need to develop an independent way of life and live out the sense of being inwardly uprooted in a constructive way. In this life stage you have the chance to completely redefine what family means to you and to whom you feel closest and most connected. Stand by your nomadic lifestyle and free yourself from any obligation to care and provide for others that might limit your autonomy. You can now connect with a wide variety of people, particularly in terms of your home and your living situation. Make sure you nurture your unconventional sides, particularly within your own four walls.

Your refusal to let your origins define you gives your existence its special flavor. The resulting autonomy will take full effect at the beginning of your seventh decade. With a healthy dose of courage and an appetite for risk taking you can now begin a new life and truly start all over. Perhaps you have long felt as though you were running away from something and are now taking the opportunity to fully come home to yourself, thereby finding calm and inner peace.

The change and upheaval you will now encounter is deeply rooted in your past, and the influence you have over them is limited. At times, you may feel completely at the mercy of circumstance. However and wherever fate shows itself to you, take this opportunity to discover new spaces of freedom and become more independent on the inner level. Finding out what life has planned for you now requires a certain willingness to experiment. Some developments will come from deep within your subconscious, and it's far from clear where things will ultimately lead. Trust in the acts of divine providence now revealing themselves to you. You are part of a larger whole, and with a little luck you can actually grasp the big picture all at once.

A New Beginning in Service of Your Own Interests

The idea of a new beginning gives you new lifeblood and inspires you to seek out risks and leave behind deeply entrenched behavioral patterns. You want to show the world that you can be different, and you value acting in an autonomous and self-determined way. It may come as a surprise, but your desire to slip into a new role and start a new life has been making itself known for some time now. You may simply have ignored the signs or did not want to see the truth: that you long for new challenges.

How much things can change all at once is now being made clear to you. Life circumstances that you have long been familiar with may now feel foreign. Perhaps you feel the desire to keep a distance from key people who are close to you in order to give more space to your own expectations and demands. Your desire to shape your life freely may be greater than you knew. This can bring grave changes with it. You are now decidedly benefitting from doing things your way and maintaining control of your own actions.

In this regard, you are confronted with some of the following questions: where have you missed out on asserting your own interests in the past and why? Were you too unselfish for your own good? Did you not know what you wanted? Were you too considerate of others? What consequences will it have for you to think more about yourself? Where is it time to start over? What will support you in doing so? What's stopping you? Taking up new roles and learning to play them well is a long process. It would be astounding if you succeeded right away. Don't be discouraged by setbacks and always dare to go for another round.

Of course, it would be an illusion to believe you could start all over and pretend like your old life never happened. Furthermore, there are also parts of the past that have stood the test of time and that you can continue to rely on in the future. This phase of life shows you what was neglected in the past. Make up for the things you missed out on without falling from one extreme into the next. It's more than enough for you to maintain your own interests and show a healthy degree of selfishness. Doing so in a different role than you have up until now can prove to be very life-affirming.

Putting Down Roots

As far as your origins and your family go, you have now reached a point where it's time for you to clarify your boundaries and find closure in areas that have been emotionally burdensome. You are currently being confronted with the consequences of all you inherited from your parents and ancestors. Now you can recognize the effects of familial patterns and traditions, and you are faced with the necessity of dealing with the associated responsibilities. This doesn't necessarily mean that you are condemned to carry forward unpleasant or dysfunctional family traditions for all eternity.

You can use this phase of life to build a stable and secure home base for yourself, both internally and externally. Maybe you are thinking about acquiring an apartment or another type of property, perhaps you consider moving or you simply paint your walls a new color and rearrange some furniture. The main thing is that you feel protected and safe in your home while making sure your budget can handle it well. You may want to downsize spatially, perhaps because your children have moved out or you need less space for another reason. Whatever decisions you are faced with, making them with the long term in mind will pay off in the future.

You may now feel a strong desire to retreat and become more domestic than you are used to. Emotionally and spiritually, you will have to work through a lot, triggered by the memories that arise during this time. Some of what you are currently experiencing has its source in events reaching as far back as your childhood. Now you have the opportunity to find an inner sense of closure regarding these experiences, which can lead to a feeling of spiritual peace. Reorganizing yourself internally and doing some thorough emotional housekeeping are central challenges in this span of your biography. By ensuring that your needs are fulfilled and that you as well as your loved ones are well cared for, you can lay a solid foundation for the next phase of your life.

Between 70 and 80: Fit for Old Age - Life Tasks Completed

Happiness and Validation

Time and again, your striving for public success and recognition has motivated you to work hard for great endeavors. As you transition into your eighth decade, your ambitions will involve inner values to which you are increasingly looking for joy and fulfillment. By now you have gained enough experience in life to set your own standards by which to measure your success. Because you have been quite fortunate in the professional and social worlds in particular due to the support you received from others, you are experiencing an increasing desire to give some of that back and support your fellow human beings in turn. By doing good and becoming socially engaged, you can once more discover new life perspectives that will also benefit others.

Your desire to better yourself personally and contribute to a more just society will continue to motivate you to achieve things that go far beyond your own individual concerns. Doing good will fill you with a growing sense of inner satisfaction and once more open up new perspectives on life. You have already accomplished a great deal in your life, and you know what really matters and what counts. Passing these experiences on to posterity will strengthen your confidence and give your vision of the future an optimistic hue.

Even if you no longer have all the opportunities for social influence you once did, you can still effect change that helps others as well as yourself. Your ambition may also be less pronounced than it once was, but you still have a lot to gain that's worth working hard for. By remaining in the realm of what's possible for you now and not fostering any exaggerated expectations, you can continue to celebrate personal successes, reaping recognition and appreciation as you age. Being fulfilled by a mission has always given you strength and confidence and presented you with many high points in life. This won't change as your age advances, even if the scale of things becomes slightly more humble.

An Age-Appropriate Rhythm of Life

The extent to which your advancing age is associated with certain limitations is currently making itself noticed in your increased desire to retreat and be alone with yourself. While you once often feared being alone, you now have a downright compulsion to shirk your everyday duties from time to time in order to create some leisure time for yourself. You don't want to have to constantly function and make yourself useful, but would prefer to find the essential in silence and contemplation.

Even if it hasn't always been easy for you to look past certain suspicions regarding the more transcendent levels of being, you have now gathered enough experience and maturity to build on the knowledge that life is about more than just its visible outer realities. The desire to satisfy your longing for a spiritually nourished life enables you to continuously practice trust and devotion well into your old age, and to allow the important things to fall into place by themselves at the right moment. It may seem like a miracle to you, but fate can shift without your involvement - and sometimes in a much better direction than you would have thought possible.

Your newly heightened tendency to retreat may also be the result of factors surrounding your health. From a psychosomatic perspective, you will profit greatly from adjusting your rhythm of life to the realities of your age and respecting your own capacity to work. You continue to feel an obligation to the greater good, but occupying yourself with smaller goals than you did previously will make it possible for you to remain active behind the scenes well into your old age and continue to have an impact that reaches far beyond your personal world.

From Us to Me

Over the years you have come a long way in your soul’s journey, so that you can assert your individuality independently and can largely do without the special status you were once accustomed to. By now, you have accessed enough of your own creative potential to overcome your attachment to the eccentric and the unusual, and can instead be yourself with serenity.

Instead of holding fast to the idea of being someone special and habitually needing constant validation of this perception from your friends and peers, you have developed an independent profile over the years, thereby garnering increasing recognition. You have experienced enough fateful encounters that supported you in getting a handle on your internal contradictions and living calmly in the here and now. Freestyling with ease and doing what brings you fun and joy have liberated you from remaining stuck in old patterns of needing to step out of line.

Your spiritual mission in life continues to be recognizing your own individuality and becoming creatively active in an independent way. By connecting with your creative potential, you have reached your soul's purpose and can successfully come into your own, thereby finding happiness and inner satisfaction.

Clear Relationships

Getting older requires you to be prepared to let go of things and people, bidding them farewell on an internal level. The right moment to do so will now be presented to you clearly. Some of your relationships have reached a natural ending, be it because they have fulfilled their purpose or because they can't continue on due to external factors. Twists of fate over which you have no personal control may also result in separations and goodbyes. Whatever the circumstances may be that require you to find closure in certain relationships, successfully overcoming the pain of these ruptures represents a central challenge in this phase of your life.

Still, going on without the accompaniment of a partner is not inevitable. Some interpersonal relationships may now experience a deepening, perhaps through your taking greater responsibility for the well-being of your counterpart. Gratitude and respect play central roles in this sense of togetherness. Offering stability and security to those closest to you may give you the reassurance of being needed and doing work that is useful. Maybe you now require the help of others, thus experiencing their special appreciation for you. This stage will show you clearly who the loyal allies are that you can rely on at any time.

In this phase of your life you will feel with increasing clarity that you no longer can or want to meet all the expectations and requests that other people make of you. As a result, you will have to say no more often and sometimes even to disappoint your fellow human beings. Still, it's essential that you accept your own limitations and express them clearly to the outside world. Therefore, be honest with yourself about when things become too much or when certain responsibilities threaten to overwhelm you. By setting clear priorities, you can now focus your interpersonal activities on those people closest and most important to you.

80 and Beyond: Detachment and Transcendence - The Circle Closes

Careful Undertones

It doesn't happen overnight, but eventually you will develop a pragmatic attitude towards life, and a utilitarian way of thinking that you haven't known up until now. It's not as though your fundamental character will change, but still, careful and somewhat calculating undertones will start to show up in your personality and lead you to act from a more practical place. You feel a growing desire to use your resources in the most economical and functional way possible, and not to squander your time idly. You may catch yourself taking things more and more seriously, and deriving great joy from everything working as smoothly as possible.

In the coming years you will feel a certain inescapable pressure to adapt. Even if functioning as well as possible goes against your very nature, you won't get around at least sometimes measuring your life according to its usefulness and shaping it in the most effective way possible. You may also feel a sense of trepidation and fear you are not used to that leads you to take cover and avoid risks to the greatest extent possible. Having a better grasp on yourself can have a positive effect on your life. You will be internally more organized, enabling you to work more effectively and realize more of your goals than before.

Rejuvenating Home and Heart

A change of scenery can prove to be highly stimulating in this stage of your life. You are faced with the question of how you can uproot yourself and settle down somewhere else in the most constructive way possible. Whether you're thinking of moving, buying a home, or emigrating completely, mobility is the key to successfully walking this biographical path. The meaning of home and homeland can now appear to you in an entirely new light, provoking a major change.

Familial changes may now be wreaking emotional havoc in you and creating the desire to either fly the coop or build your own nest. Cutting the cord to your family of origin and your roots as well as finding some internal space from your own familial or domestic situation enables you to make the right adjustments for the future. What's important here is autonomous action on your part regardless of whether or not old family structures are dissolving or new ones are being constructed.

In this context, you will ask yourself questions such as: What can you change in order to find inner peace? How free do you feel when dealing with what was given to you at birth? What domestic and familial changes would do you good? Where do you want to put down roots in the future? Where is it time to cut the cord? And what should you take better care of in the future than you have in the past?

The desire for the fulfillment of your very own emotional and spiritual needs sets a refreshing new dynamic in motion in this life stage. This also affects your professional and social ambitions. Maybe you will start to value your well-being more than your ambition to produce something outstanding. Flipping the switch and setting other priorities is now unexpectedly easy. Taking a risk here and there in order to make it happen will now pay off very well.

Success and Honor

In this stage of your biography, everything you have worked for and achieved will be brought into focus once more. Maybe you receive public recognition once again in the form of an honor or accolade, or you take on an assignment or a post that requires all your experience and expertise. You now feel a strong desire to give something back to the world in return for all the successes you have earned over the course of your life. Unlike before, your personal ambition is largely satisfied, and you are now primarily occupied with doing right by your social responsibilities and serving the greater good.

Next to this positive time of harvesting, you should also be prepared for frustrations, the source of which lies in omissions or neglect that will be presented to you with new clarity once more. Take this opportunity to find closure with regards to these missed chances instead of continuing to mourn them. Even if you have the impression that you failed in certain areas, do yourself a big favor and make peace with that. While most of your career milestones are over, you can continue to make contributions and take on tasks that still express what you truly feel called to do.

Recognizing the true meaning of all you have achieved over the years can have a joyful as well as a sobering effect. You are now being shown where you might have overestimated yourself, and where you weren't as irreplaceable as you thought. At the same time, external layers are falling away to reveal the core of your true inner calling and its significance. Perhaps this reveals your achievements and your successes to you in a different light and you find it easier to assess them realistically. You may have underestimated some things, so that the full range of what you have accomplished and realized in your life is only now becoming visible. Don't just measure your achievements by other peoples' standards, but rather take the time to appreciate yourself. You've earned it!

The Creative Spirit and the Art of Life

Coming into your own on a creative level has long been one of your biggest dreams, motivating you time and again to surpass your own limitations and work wonders. You were very invested in being seen as perfect and complete, and treated the world as a stage on which to shine and show off your talents. But your knack for constantly reinventing yourself also provoked confusion and perplexity in others, usually - though not always - unintentionally. In spite of many disappointments, you continued to make big sacrifices for your desire to improve your hand at the art of life, and went without many other things that were also important to you.

In your old age you primarily look to your friendships for happiness and fulfillment. Even if you experience phases of weakness and helplessness with regards to your future plans, it is very important to you to be there for people whom you perceive as kindred spirits, and doing everything within your power to help them. You have always been able to work veritable wonders when it comes to using your creative gifts to contribute to a collective effort. This ability remains one of your biggest assets as you advance in age and can help you overcome disappointments especially in connection with your chosen family.

The magic and the glamour of risky, daring actions has always motivated you to outdo yourself. Placing your personal ambitions in the service of the greater good enables you to have transcendent experiences and find inner fulfillment and liberation. Rather than always taking yourself so seriously, your main priority now is animating others to express their own creative abilities. Whether this benefits your children or your children's children, or serves a much higher purpose, is nonessential. What's important is that your joie de vivre is infectious and that everyone has fun.

Liberated From Your Origins

You have always taken liberties to maintain your independence in familial and domestic matters. It has always been important to you to detach from your origins and go your own way. At home, you usually felt different and foreign, and had a sense of not belonging very early on. As paradoxical as it may sound, you were born to cut the cord and act autonomously, and your family of origin long expected you to break with tradition and dare to do something new.

It took many years for you to overcome your internal conflict and strife with regards to your origins and to find your way to an innate sense of safety. Settling down physically as well as cultivating an emotional sense of home has long seemed nearly impossible to you, and your impulse to fly the coop and the associated inner restlessness have never been fully extinguished. But over time, you will find that you are less ruled by contradictory emotions and fragmented needs while feeling increasingly free to care for yourself and your well-being.

You have already released many of your emotional attachments on the level of the soul and can now meet the challenges of your advanced age with serenity and tolerance. Looking back on your life, you now realize what risks were worth taking and when you might have been recklessly ignoring your need for safety. At the same time, it's becoming clear what you have detached from for good as well as where you can now enjoy your jester's license and live out your days in a relaxed freestyle. Regardless of how near or far you are from your original home today, it's a comforting feeling not to have done everything exactly the way your ancestors wanted, but having instead followed the call of the unknown and thus experiencing and learning a great deal that wasn't preordained by your heritage.

Well-Deserved Prestige

Your success and your social standing continue to promise fulfillment and happiness in your later years. You have always been talented at cultivating connections that benefit your social status, and you can continue to profit from this throughout your more mature years. Your desire to do good things and make the world a better place remains unbroken, even if your enthusiasm for doing so is slightly more controlled and comes to bear more selectively than before. Your gift for presenting yourself successfully to the public has gained you a good deal of recognition, which you can still enjoy well into your old age.

Steering your ambitions carefully and implementing them for the greater good has brought you many successes over the years, and the feeling of having done the world a service is especially gratifying as you grow older. You enjoy doing what's in your power to help others succeed and letting them partake in what you have brought into being and achieved. Even if your former success and status are now history, you remain an authentic embodiment of a life worth living.

Internal Stability

Being able to look back on your life in the certainty that you made the right sacrifices and had an impact from behind the scenes contributes a great deal to your inner sense of peace and serenity. Thanks to the discipline and endurance with which you have put yourself in the service of great tasks, your fears of being internally trapped, isolated and alone have proven to be unfounded. While you were often active and effective from behind the scenes in the way of a grey eminence, you were never left to rely on yourself and were recognized and valued all around.

As you get older you might fall back into old patterns and perhaps battle feelings of loneliness and isolation. But thanks to the maturity and competence you have acquired over the years, you usually get these feelings under control relatively quickly and can continue to gain something positive from times where you are alone with yourself. You have worked all your life to shape your existence according to your own standards, and even in your old age, nobody has the right to tell you how to live.

Perhaps you once lacked stability and structure, and for a long time the feeling that your efforts might be in vain was your constant companion, but all that was long ago and simply doesn't matter any more. Your gift of being able to make big sacrifices for the greater good and thereby having a long-term impact will remain an important resource for you well into your later years. Even if some things remain unfinished, you did your best, and you can be sure that your actions will leave their mark.

Farewells and New Beginnings

This phase of your life will uncover the physical effects of aging. It's quite possible that there will be burdens and challenges that you feel less and less up to facing. Even the things that you once enjoyed tackling with great vigor can now become inconveniences. Accepting the associated limitations requires you to practice setting boundaries and doing without. Focus your activities on what really matters, even if this results in having to part ways with some of the habits you have grown to love.

Perhaps you are also experiencing this period as a phase of strengthening and consolidation. Maybe you feel challenged to risk a new beginning with a new assignment or a personal concern. In this context it's important for you to conclude with the old and leave it behind, so that you can ring in this new stage of life in as free and lighthearted a fashion as possible. By now you have gathered enough experience to gain the respect you need from others when dealing with your expectations and wishes. You now no longer need to cope with everything alone, but can instead confidently request help and support from others in working for your goals and interests.

This life phase will lead you to focus on the essential, resulting in having to restrict your interpersonal contacts. You may have to part ways with some people for good and continue along your own path. Therefore, you would do well to hold yourself accountable for clarifying your expectations as well as your boundaries. A healthy dose of selfishness can now be a valuable resource. Your courage to create a new beginning will also be rewarded by new people stepping into your life whom you can rely on in the future.

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