Midlife Mastery Journal

Gone for good are the days of pappa and his baggy slacks and suspenders, waist hitched up half-way to his nipples, sporting a fedora and sucking on a stogy. Vanished too are the ankle-length plain black dresses accessorized with the equivalent of high-heeled combat boots. The image of the two of them, rocking side by side on the veranda stays absolutely stuck in your mind. That Grandma and Grandpa image is so last century! Now, as long as we’ve taken care of ourselves, we’re doing other kinds of rockin’ . . . if we’ve both still got the energy when we get home from work. When they say that 60 is the new 50, they ain’t kidding! The retirement train has left the station, and, if you’re not already on it, you’ve probably missed it for good. That paradigm has done shifted.

Just because we need two birthday cakes to accommodate all the candles (and, we hope, all of our friends at the party) doesn’t mean that we’ve installed ourselves in death’s waiting room, awaiting the next departure of the ferry across the river Styx. I hope that, by this time, we’ve learned to cope with the vagaries of menopause and andropause with at least the same measure of grace and style with which we once managed to deal with puberty. It may surprise younger people to know that, in most cases, Mom and Dad (and yes, Grandma and Grandpa) still ‘do it.’ It’s just a little . . . well . . . different.

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That is the cry of the “innocent victim” . . . most often followed by, “After all I’ve done for you!” Does this sound at all familiar? You generally can hear this coming out of your mouth after someone has dropped a ‘but bomb‘ on you. Seldom can you see a ‘but bomb’ coming; but when it hits, it sounds like this: You yell it at your spouse when s/he says: “I still love you BUT I’m not in love with you anymore.” You yell it at your boss when s/he says: “You’ve been a great asset to the company BUT your position has been eliminated.” Or, you yell it at God when your doctor syas: “It’s probably nothing BUT I’d like to see you in my office right away for more tests.”

“Why are you doing this to me” emerges as the heart-rending cry of a woman or man who’s just had the stilts knocked out from under him or her and it’s the lament of the person suddenly overwhelmed by a sense of injustice. We have heard this lament (or similar cries) for as long as we humans have been encountering adversity. Here’s a passage from the prophet Isaiah (6:11-12):

Then I said, “Lord, how long?” And He answered,
“Until cities are devastated and without inhabitant,
Houses are without people
And the land is utterly desolate,
The LORD has removed men far away,
And the forsaken places are many in the midst of the land.”

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If you haven’t yet noticed my attraction to silly things, let me now bring it to your attention. I discovered a long time ago that, very often, silly things contain far more wisdom than sensible things. It’s one of the great ironies of our universe. Take, for example, that incredibly silly series of books by Douglas Adams that goes by the title The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There’s enough silliness (and, consequently, wisdom) in those pages to last a person the better part of a lifetime. Take, for example, the excerpt from the Guide that appears in the third book of the trilogy (Life, The Universe, and Everything) under the heading “RECREATIONAL IMPOSSIBILITIES.” According to Adams, the Guide says this about flying: “There is an art, . . . or, rather, a knack to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”*

Of course, Adams (quoting the Guide) goes on to explain more about how throwing yourself at the ground is easy, but knowing exactly how one needs to go about missing the ground can be a little tricky. But I won’t pursue that, because it has nothing whatever to do with the reason I’ve brought it up at all. Besides, what on earth does this have to do with midlife or a spiritual crisis? What’s so extremely valuable about this somewhat unusual approach to flying is that it’s so silly that it’s incredibly insightful. Once again, our whole approach to something like flying is defined and pretty much wholly decided by the bucket of assumptions that we bring to it. That’s why I need to tell you that the decision that you (and many other people) may have made to reinvent yourself at midlife is exactly like the decision to learn to fly: until you empty your bucket of assumptions, you’ll keep falling flat on your face. Sound familiar? You throw yourself at the ground, but you keep not missing! You’ll need to follow me closely now: this silliness is going somewhere . . .

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Maybe you’ve heard the saying, “The devil’s in the details”? It probably means something like whatever details you overlook in whatever you’re doing will come back to bite you. That saying is actually a corruption of an earlier motto, attributed to Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880): “Le bon Dieu est dans le detail” (“God is in the details”). Evidently, I prefer the earlier form of the idiom. Although everyone’s life experience is replete with examples of the ways in which this saying proves true, the great temptation remains to focus our attention on the big items we see playing out on life’s stage all around us. These critical issues are the ones that grab our focus and demand our attention in our careers, our relationships, and our personal condition. These are the both ‘important’ and ‘urgent’ tasks that inhabit Stephen R. Covey’s “Quadrant One.” What you won’t find in “Quadrant One” are things like success, intimacy, peace, harmony, and, ultimately, happiness.

Do we really need to ask why a preoccupation with the big issues eventually leads to failure and unhappiness in careers, in relationships, and in regard to your personal health and well-being? When it comes to your health, what happens when you wait until things get really bad (a crisis) before looking for treatment? Don’t you then find yourself racing to beat the pathology to the finish line? The closer you allow issues to come to the tipping point (that point at which failure is unavoidable), the more important and urgent the need to engage in corrective action becomes, and the lesser your chances of meeting that challenge successfully. At the same time, the more your resources are dedicated to handling any crisis, the greater the chances will be for other issues to approach their tipping points.

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Into every life, pain must come. It may come from any number of sources: from loss, from betrayal, even from growth. Regardless of where it originates, the general outlines of the experience are universal. Foremost, we feel what we recognize as emotional pain. Heartache settles on us like a heaviness that we can’t shrug off, that no amount of cheerful banter or amusing distractions can unseat. Our expressions remain blank, our eyes reflect a kind of lifeless dullness, in conversation, our voices lack sparkle. Although there are many similarities, pain is not the same as clinical depression. Unlike depression, emotional pain has a recognizable source. We can pinpoint why and where we are hurting.

Whether or not we recognize it, each of us constitutes an organic whole. We can’t somehow separate out our emotional pain from our physical being, our mental acuity, and our spiritual focus. When painful emotions overtake us, we can expect to experience physical discomfort (that ‘heartache’ again), mental dullness or confusion, and spiritual aridity. The entirety of our personhood goes into retreat from a condition we might call ‘feelings deprivation.’ Pain is big. It’s so big that it fills our inner space to the breaking point. It leaves no room for anything else. Ordinarily, we have room for many emotions at the same time: joy, excitement, anticipation, intimacy can all together share the same emotional space and still leave room for more, like anxiety or fear. Not so with pain. When it settles in, there’s no room left for any other feelings. We are joy-deprived. What can we do then?

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