June 02, 2026

The great irony is that most of us spend the first half of our lives avoiding suffering and the second half learning how to suffer well.

Rohr wrote this in the context of his work with men and women in midlife who found themselves unexpectedly undone — by loss, failure, or the quiet collapse of plans they had built their identity around. He had spent decades as a Franciscan friar watching people try to control and accumulate their way to security, only to find that security hollow. The insight points directly at simplicity: the compulsive adding of more — more achievements, more certainty, more protection — is itself the problem, not the solution.