By Arianne Rice, M.Div. ACC
Do you feel your age? I don’t either.
I’m in what people call the “sandwich generation.” (I wish that meant I could eat more sandwiches…but sadly, carbs.) What I mean, as you probably know, is that I’m betwixt and between generations, and I feel it.
I just returned from visiting my parents on Long Island, again. Every time I walk through their door, I’m surprised. They are the same, but always so different. Aging happens slow then fast —then fast, then slow. We don’t talk as much about my life because there is too much going on in theirs. I’m coordinating home health aides, fielding questions about finances, organizing their stuff (there is so much stuff). I don’t feel old enough for our roles to be reversed yet. But that’s what’s happening.
And next week, I’ll pick up my daughter from college after her junior year, which feels impossible. When I see her, I will again be surprised and wowed by the beautiful young woman she is becoming — first slow, now fast. She looks older every time. I don’t feel old enough to have a 21-year-old daughter. I mean, my body still remembers that tilt of my hip where I balanced her with one arm in that perfect maternal nook.
Driving home from a recent Long Island visit, calling on my most spiritually patient self while sandwiched in between cars on the GW Bridge, it occurred to me that the hard part right now isn’t the logistics. It’s cooperating with reality and choosing to collaborate with what is…instead of wishing things were different or thinking that my job is to find all the solutions, solve all the problems for all the generations.
My parents are the age they are. My daughter is becoming her own adult. There are things I can help with and things I can’t. There are limits to my time, energy, and control. And it’s not as if there is somewhere to get to, a destination where it will all be settled. It will just be the next change. Just like the traffic that opened up on the other side of the bridge, I’m not going to be sandwiched between cars, or between generations, forever. The truth is — life is transition. Change is the only constant.
This is one of the reasons Richard Rohr’s Falling Upward has meant so much to me over the years. The “second half of life” isn’t about age. It’s about becoming more awake to your life. More honest about the questions you’re carrying. More willing to loosen your grip a little. The second half of life is a framework. It is a growth mindset of choosing to cooperate with reality because when you accept what you can change, and what you can’t, reality tends to cooperate with you too.
I know people in their 30s who live this way and people in their 70s who are still struggling to accept the reality of their lives — and vice versa. This growth mindset, a desire for spiritual and emotional maturity, requires comfort with our own vulnerability. I cry when I leave my parents, every time. Because who knows? I cry when I drop my daughter off at college every time, too. Same reason. There are limits to my knowing, and that is scary. But being real, allowing myself and my feelings to be seen with the people I love is true connection. There is nothing childish about it.
So how about a different question — not about age — but about your quandaries these days. What questions about your life are you holding? What are you betwixt and between? Living into the questions, as Rilke beautifully reminds us, is where the answers unfold…not always as definitive choices, but as liberating truths that enable us to be comfortable with exactly who and how we are, right now.
Arianne Rice will lead a one-day retreat at the Bon Secours Retreat & Conference Center on Saturday, June 27, 2026 from 9:30am-4pm called “Falling Upward, Living Whole, Discovering True Self Through Vulnerability and Faith: Integrating Faith, Courage, and Wholeness in the Second Half of Life.”
To register, call 410-442-3120 or visit our website: https://bonsecoursrcc.org/event/falling-upward-living-whole-discovering-true-self-through-vulnerability-and-faith/