If we hold on to what once defined us, we will miss our on the authentic identity we are being called to

From “Embracing Your Second Calling: Find Passion and Purpose for the Rest of Your Life” by Dale Hanson Bourke

“We arrive in this world with birthright gifts – then we spend the first half of our lives abandoning them or letting others disabuse us of them,” Parker Palmer says in Let Your Life Speak. “We are disabused of original giftedness in the first half of our lives. Then – if we are awake, aware, and able to admit our loss – we spend the second half trying to recover and reclaim the gift we once possessed.”

I love the idea that we have to turn our backs on some of those identities from the first half of life in order to move toward something more authentic in the second. It’s not so much that we are losing our identities, but rather that we are no longer embracing false identities. If we hold on to what once defined us, we will miss our on the authentic identity we are being called to.