Holiday season. Standing in a roomful of people, friends and strangers, listening to stories of life’s onward march, trying to pick out something that strikes you as comical or tragic or at all interesting that would allow you to interject a reaction . . . almost any reaction . . . a chuckle, a ‘Wow’ or a ‘Hmmm’ or a ‘Is that so?’ . . . to show you’re still listening, or even just still there. Are you having fun yet? Or merely doing your end-of-year accounting, feeling the satisfaction of ‘You came to my party, so I’m here at yours?’ Honestly: do you even like these people?
Feeling disconnected? Feeling as though all these folks standing around grinning, chatting, sipping from their clinking glasses are in on some secret of contentment and success that has somehow eluded you? Wondering what it is that they know that you don’t know . . . and don’t know how to find out? Now, remember the last time you felt this way. Remember when all your body parts didn’t quite fit? Remember when the sight of a certain ‘someone’ made your body tingle and your brain go numb? Remember the first time you felt all alone in a crowd? Remember back to when you were the only person in the entire world who ever felt this way: the time of favorite songs (that made your heart ache) and trying to do the ‘right’ things with the ‘right’ people at the ‘right’ time so that maybe eventually you’d belong? Remember how you felt when you were convinced that you didn’t belong? like you’d never belong? like nobody understood you? like you were alone?
Adolescence graces each of us with over-the-top social awkwardness and emotional drama. We come to realize, perhaps for the first time, what being isolated, disconnected, and alone can mean. Maybe it’s somewhat easier for those among us who are (or were) popular — I don’t know; that wasn’t me — but nobody gets out of that time of life without some scars of loneliness. These scars remain, even when we’re successful at bandaging them up or disguising them under layers of friendships, intimate relationships, careers, successes, families, houses, cars, investments, big-screen TVs and all the other trappings of adulthood. Contrary to those whom we’ve loved and lost and who are ‘gone, but not forgotten,’ the scars of adolescence hide just beneath the surface, ‘forgotten, but not gone.’
The unbearable loneliness of choice (apologies to The Unbearable Lightness of Being) comes only later when our emotional bandages and cosmetics have become worn and soiled and faded. There comes a time in each person’s life when all those emotional salves that held us up and and kept us together after the wounding of adolescence eventually turn on us, transforming from providers of uplifting and supporting scaffolding to become weighty, dragging, tiresome chains that we’d sooner be rid of . . . if only we could. Or what’s worse, we wake up one morning to find them just . . . gone, and there we lie, totally exposed and vulnerable, feeling utterly helpless.
Midlife loneliness comes on as a sickness of an entirely different order of severity from the loneliness we endured as adolescents: absent most of the drama except those flashes of heat when life finally rips and strips away the last vestiges of pretense covering our emotional nakedness. Midlife could be defined as that time when we first become conscious of living “lives of quiet desperation.” The loneliness of midlife invades our awareness in stark contrast to adolescence because, for those of us who have reached some level of spiritual maturity, we have come to understand that nothing from the outside world — no Cinderella or Prince Charming, no Nobel Prize, no C-level office — will ever be able to shield us from our own existential dread. Each of us must, in his or her turn, become Hamlet and realize in our very bones: “To be, or not to be: that is the question.” And, what’s more, we cannot look outside ourselves to define what ‘to be’ will mean. At midlife, there is no escaping choice . . . and it’s consequence.
“I am responsible.” That revelation constitutes the essence of midlife. Not my parents. Not my upbringing. Not my husband, my wife, or my ex. Not my children. Not my boss. Not ‘the establishment’ or the ‘military-industrial complex’ or the government or any other scapegoat imaginable (and there are very, very many to choose from). Not even God will respond to the summons to help us avoid our responsibility. God, Higher Power, the Universe, Whoever put you here, gave you possibilities, gave you circumstances, and gave you choice. The midlife transition is defined as that moment when you finally realize that what you feared all along is fact: you really stand in absolute solitude before your own destiny, at the turning point, without guarantees of any sort.
The existentialist philosophers of the last century lamented loudly over the unbearable loneliness of standing wholly vulnerable before the choice that will determine how the entire rest of our lives play out: “To be, or not to be.” And, like Jean-Paul Sartre, they remind us that “not to chose is a choice.” There’s no avoiding it and no escaping it, once the fact that this choice is yours alone has wedged its way into your consciousness. Unbearable? Yes, it certainly is. Yet, the moment that you seize on that choice that determines not whether but how your life shall be remade represents the moment that you have become most fully human, most fully alive!
Standing before that moment, in total clarity of awareness, you feel the full momentousness of that unbearable loneliness. And then, suddenly, once you’ve made the choice (whatever it may be: to recommit to or leave a marriage, to rebuild or abandon a career, to strike out in a new enterprise for which you feel entirely unprepared, or whatever), you’ll stand in awe of yourself, wondering what you ever feared and why you ever hesitated and what the drama was all about. You’ll learn that, even at the height of facing your most dreaded fears . . . even as you find yourself weighted down by the unbearable loneliness of choice . . . you are not alone.
H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown
Technorati Tags:
midlife, mastery, midlife mastery, choice, loneliness, desperation, existential choice
Tags: adult, adulthood, change, choice, courage, fear, isolation, lone, loneliness, lonely, mastery, midlife