Most conversations about aging begin with preservation. How do we keep our health, our energy, our appearance, our independence and our mental sharpness for as long as possible?
Spiritual Thoughts on Old Age, by Gerrit Gielen, Pamela Kribbe and Suzy Conway, asks a less comfortable question. What if some of what we are trying to preserve is not simply our vitality, but an identity that took decades to construct?
That idea runs through several parts of the book. Its authors approach aging from an explicitly spiritual perspective, speaking about the soul, consciousness, life after death and the possibility that later life has a spiritual purpose. Readers do not have to accept all of that to recognise the psychological problem underneath it. We spend much of adulthood becoming a particular kind of person. Age can begin taking apart the conditions that allowed us to remain that person.
The Book in 3 Minutes
Pamela Kribbe describes the first decades of life as a period in which identity takes shape through family, culture, education, work, relationships and the need to belong. We learn how to function in the world by becoming someone recognizable, both to ourselves and to other people.
There is nothing inherently wrong with that. The difficulty comes later, when a role becomes so familiar that we stop seeing it as a role.
The competent person may find it hard to admit confusion. The independent person may experience needing help as humiliation. Someone who has spent years being useful to others may feel strangely empty when they are no longer needed in the same way. A professional identity can become just as fixed. Coaches, teachers and practitioners can quietly become attached to being the one who understands, guides, reassures or knows what to do.
Kribbe argues that crisis can interrupt these identities. A relationship ends. Work changes. The body becomes less cooperative. Something that once organised life suddenly stops doing so. Within the book’s spiritual framework, such moments can create an opening for the soul to become more present.
Gerrit Gielen reaches a similar point from another direction. He writes about the tendency to cling to the past, including old ideas about ourselves and about how life ought to be. His definition of “old” is therefore not strictly biological. A person can become old, in his sense, by becoming fixed.
That is one of the book’s more interesting distinctions. Aging obviously involves physical loss, and the book does not deny that. But some of the distress around aging may come from something less visible: the struggle to preserve an earlier version of ourselves long after life has started moving elsewhere.
The Problem Is Not Always the Loss
Consider retirement.
For one person, leaving work may mainly create a financial problem. For another, the deeper disturbance arrives on Monday morning when nobody is expecting them anywhere. The diary is empty. No colleagues are calling. Their professional title still exists on paper, but it no longer structures the day.
The question “What do you do?” suddenly feels different.
Something similar can happen when children leave home, when a relationship changes, when physical energy declines or when someone who has always been the strong member of a family becomes the one who needs support.
These are practical changes, but they can expose identities that had been largely invisible while life continued to reinforce them.
Kribbe describes later life as a period in which people may become less governed by what they are supposed to be and more attentive to what actually feels like their own nature. The book calls this movement a return toward the soul.
A less metaphysical reader might describe it differently. You begin noticing which parts of your life still feel alive and which ones you have continued mostly because they belonged to the person you became years ago.
When the Body Stops Cooperating With the Old Arrangement
The book gives the aging body an important role in this process. Kribbe suggests that people may become more sensitive as they grow older: less tolerant of certain environments, more easily tired, more drawn to quiet or more aware of what physically drains them. She interprets this through the book’s spiritual model, in which the body becomes increasingly responsive to the soul.
That interpretation should be kept separate from medical claims. Fatigue, pain and changes in physical function can have many causes, and spiritual explanations should not replace appropriate healthcare.
Still, the everyday observation is recognizable. Bodies change what is negotiable.
A working pattern that once seemed normal may become exhausting. A crowded schedule may no longer feel impressive; it may simply feel unpleasant. Someone who could previously override tiredness, stress or discomfort may discover that the body now objects more loudly.
The instinct is often to restore the old capacity. Sometimes that makes sense. But aging can also raise another question: if the body no longer supports the way I have been living, is the body the only thing that needs to change?
That is a more difficult question because the answer may involve work, relationships, priorities or self-image.
Aging Can Expose the Bargains We Made With Ourselves
Imagine someone who has always taken pride in being productive. She handles more than everyone else, rarely cancels and almost never asks for help. People admire her for it, and she has come to admire herself for it too.
Years later, her energy changes. She cannot maintain the same pace.
Her first response may be practical. Better sleep. A different routine. More exercise. Fewer distractions. There is nothing wrong with trying to improve her energy.
But suppose the reduced capacity continues. Eventually another problem appears. If she cannot be the person who always manages everything, who is she?
Productivity was doing more work than she realised. It was organising her self-respect.
Aging did not create that arrangement. It revealed it.
For people working in personal development, that possibility is particularly relevant. A practitioner can spend decades helping others release rigid identities while remaining deeply invested in an identity of their own: healer, teacher, expert, guide, spiritual person, resilient person, calm person. Later life may unsettle those identities too.
3 Ways to Put It Into Practice
1. Write down what changed, then write down what you made it mean. Choose one change related to age, work, appearance, energy or physical capacity. Describe the change without interpretation. Then write the conclusion you have attached to it. “I tire earlier than I used to” is different from “I am becoming less capable.” Seeing those two sentences separately can be revealing.
2. Finish the sentence: “I have always been the person who…” Do not look for the most flattering answer. Perhaps you are the responsible one, the independent one, the attractive one, the successful one, the spiritual one or the person others come to for answers. Then imagine that this quality becomes less available to you. Notice what feels threatened.
3. Ask what your ten-years-older self would probably care less about. The book includes an exercise in which readers imagine themselves ten years older and ask that future self what matters. You can use the idea without treating the future self as a mystical source of guidance. Pick one current problem and ask which part of it is likely to matter ten years from now and which part may turn out to have been mostly pride, fear or habit.
Is It Worth Reading?
Spiritual Thoughts on Old Age will make the most sense to readers who are already open to spiritual interpretations of human life. The authors speak freely about souls, reincarnation, energetic fields and consciousness beyond physical death. This is not a research-based book about the psychology or biology of aging.
Some claims, particularly those linking physical experience with energetic or spiritual processes, should therefore be read as part of the authors’ worldview rather than as established medical or scientific explanations.
The book becomes more convincing when it stays close to experiences readers can examine for themselves: attachment to past identities, fear of becoming less useful, the loosening of social roles, growing indifference to external expectations and the possibility that later life changes what feels worth pursuing.
For coaches, meditation teachers and wellness professionals, there is an extra layer to that question. Personal-growth work often encourages people to discover who they really are. Aging may eventually ask something less comfortable: how much of the identity we proudly call “authentic” was still built around being seen, needed or useful?
That is the part of Spiritual Thoughts on Old Age worth sitting with.
