Home on the Range
What do people really mean when they casually refer to someone as an old soul' or a 'young soul'? I hear people saying: “Oh, don’t expect Sam to get it; she’s such a young soul.” Or: “Chris is amazing. He really gets it. He must be such an old soul.” Do these people know the depth of what they are referring to, or have they somehow been caught up in the fashionable post yoga lingo?
For the record, there is a distinction between an old soul and a young soul but it may not be quite what most people assume. Still, the difference is important enough to assist you in making relationship choices and decisions, especially as you select your tribe and build your community. It’s an essential tool for all your relationship dealings, really.
If I asked the average person, they would tell me that an old soul has had more lifetimes than a young soul. And that ‘s just not the case, so I would remind them that a soul is timeless and limitless and we therefore have to realize that no one is really an old or young soul, at least not as defined in the linear, logical sense of time. If a soul’s age were measured at all, it would be in multi-dimensional ways of experiences, not in our human-created, three-dimensional measurable perception of height, depth, width, clocks and calendars.
A soul exists as an energy. The second law of thermodynamics confirms that energy can neither be created or destroyed: it just is. So by that definition, a soul cannot be young or old. Then what are these people picking up on when they label someone an old soul? What are they referring to when they call someone else a new or young soul? I believe they are seeing range.
Both young and old souls may have had the same number of lifetimes, but it is their actual experiences in those lives that make the difference between them. An old soul has invited and said yes to a wider range of experiences as a way of experiencing their very best. They have elected a vast array of human highs and lows to be explored, in an effort to experience fully all that they are.
On the other end of the spectrum is the young or new soul. They have consciously or unconsciously limited their range of experience and what they bring into and get out of, those experiences. They have chosen a narrower range of experiences in an effort to fulfill their intentions.
Think of an old soul as really just a more experienced soul, having chosen to feel all sides of the human condition, the good, the bad and the ugly. And consider a young soul as one who’s really just a less experienced soul, one that has kept their encounters and choices very limited, very contained, and very hesitant.
How then does this translate to the outside physical world? How can we tell if someone is an old (more experienced) soul, or a young (less experienced) soul? Well, to us, it looks as though the old soul with the wider range of past experiences has more to draw upon from their vast inventory of living. All that experience has had its affect on them. They have either trusted, grown and expanded into a fuller sense of freedom, courage and connection from it, or have shrunk from the interpretation of it all. Old souls can therefore appear in extremes: either fearless or petrified in the world. They can either take risks or lose it all because they can't get started. They 'get it' and run with it, or 'see it' but are afraid of their potential, afraid of the risk, because there’s a shadow of memory within them of times they stretched and failed and they don’t want to repeat those experiences.
And the young souls, the less experienced ones? We can recognize them because they are slower to initiate and accept and truly take risks based on faith and trust. They usually keep their living conditions contained, sheltered, protected. They’re often all about safety. They might be rich or poor, married or single, beautiful or plain, bold or shy, but we can recognize them regardless as essentially hesitant in making changes out of their comfort zone. A bit fragile no matter how tough they sometimes like to appear, they plod along, inch by inch, lifetime after lifetime, acquiring levels of trust and skill in navigating their way on the earth. Have patience with them.
Our life will be filled with a mixture of old and young souls. It’s exciting to recognize them and to learn to accept them where they are, for both souls are here for the same reason, both lining up for the same journey. They are just approaching it from different angles, and at different paces.
Jonni's writings have appeared in The Common Ground, The Good Life in Vancouver, First Lines, The Intuitive Connections Network, The Good Life Connoisseur, Planning For Profit, Burnaby Now and other local and national publications.
