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Age and the journey

Perhaps home base is dictated by our genes, or in the development of our brains before we are born. Perhaps it is a result of our early nurture – or perhaps it emerges from the choices we make when we first encounter the world around us, trying out first one strategy and then another until we find one that seems to work for us in the situations that we face. Whichever way home base is determined, we have probably taken up residence there by the age of five, ready to face the unpredictable world of the early years of school.

The strategy that each person develops and refines over the next ten years – from five to fifteen – is the strategy that will then launch them into the adult world as they go through ‘coming of age’ and into young adulthood. The strategy that they have practiced through the school years is all that they have to rely upon as they suddenly have to apply it ‘for real’ in countless more situations in the adult world.

For many people, their type is most evident – most obvious – if they think about how they were in their twenties.

And it is in their twenties and thirties that people are most likely to feel ‘stuck in a rut’ – locked into a single way of operating and a single mode of living, compared to the great variety of different lives being lived by the people around them. They are living with one particular set of strengths and weaknesses and gifts and temptations, shared with just a small minority of the rest of the world – about one in nine – while all the rest seem to have such a great variety of different and exciting lives.

If we feel it intensely, we may choose to take action: to change, to explore some other aspect of who we are, to grasp some other life which seems to be within our reach – a place excitingly different from the familiar home base, but almost certainly a wing or a stress or security type. On the way, we face new temptations and we make new mistakes, but we also discover new strengths and new gifts, as life and experience are broadened forever.

For most of us, life itself is more than varied enough to ensure that we do not remain stuck in a rut for long. Life provides us with new challenges, which call on us to try out different strategies, and we rise to the challenge, discovering – if we try a wing strategy – that we are good for the task. And then life applies pressure, pushing us over to our stress type, or offers times of great security, drawing us to our security type. Life puts the pressure on hard and drives us over to our security type again. We make these moves around the board, encountering new temptations, facing new challenges, learning as we go, and finding new gifts and potentials that we never knew were there.

Age is a factor. The longer you have played the game, the more you have learned, and seen, and become. More temptations and gifts will have been collected along the way, more paths will have been walked, more challenges overcome. More of your wide potential will have been developed: as well as home base, you are more likely to have well-developed stress and security types, and the wings of all three. The journeys and stories of more sectors – perhaps of all nine – will feel strongly familiar. Others may find it harder to place you, with your accumulated gifts and your breadth of character – but even long into the journey, there is still one sector which is the most peaceful and natural and familiar place. For all the development and balance of character brought by age and experience, it is still possible to identify the gentle lure of home.

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