The ages from 21-42 are for the development of soul maturity, psychological maturity.

Ages 21-28

• The “I’” incarnates more fully.
• Strong emotional life, excitement, impulsivity, sociability, adventure, sensuality.
• Memory reaches its peak.
• A time to prepare for a career and to gather experiences.
• Betty Staley also writes about marriage when both partners are in their early 20s and how this often works but can be a difficult road as both partners do not have a bank of life experiences to draw on.
• Men during this time period are often focused on work, marriage and family and trying to set and achieve goals “he thinks he deserves by the time he is 35.”

Ages 28-35

• The “I” begins to enter the soul-life more deeply and penetrates thinking.  We begin to experience life through our thoughts and our thinking.
• We feel the need to organize our lives.
• We regard things more objectively than before, but at times our objective thinking can also separate us from life – if we judge everything around us, we can become cold, distant, critical, self-righteous.
• In this phase we tend to think that thinking can solve all of our problems.

Ages 35-42 – Going into consciousness

• A time of strength, ambition; but also of emptiness and loneliness.
• Life taken in through our senses, through our bodies, does not excite us the same way it used to.
• Our natural spirituality fades and we can feel overwhelmed by life
• Life takes on a routine quality, and yet we can experience more and more problems than before.
• Much of what used to bring contentment no longer does.
• We become critical of causes, philosophies, religion that used to appeal to us.

Whew!  I think when we are in the 35-42 year phase, we have to be particularly careful to NOT pass on our adult baggage and criticism to our small children.  I have seen over and over parents of this age frame to have difficulty working within the Waldorf framework with the spiritual elements because they themselves are going through a period of disillusionment with spirituality.  Please make sure to not shove your 8-year old into the 35-42 year old phase  by putting your “adult stuff” on them!

We will talk in detail about each of these seven-year cycles, but next we will look at the last part of this overview of the seven-year cycles that covers ages 42- 63 (and beyond), a time of developing spiritual maturity.

Till next time,

Carrie