Midlife Mastery Journal

Few of us make it through to maturity without leaving a mess behind themselves: a tangle of broken dreams, broken promises, and broken relationships. Each false step along the way and each wrong turn leaves its imprint somewhere in your psyche. Most of these faux pas are small and relatively unimportant in the great scheme of things, but, especially at midlife, they can add up. When you have collected enough of these sources of embarrassment, it’s only a matter of time before just one or two more can cause you to collapse into despair. It’s never too soon to tackle cleaning up the messes you’ve made.

First, though, a word about mistakes: little ones are not tragedies, nor are they insignificant; big ones are not unforgivable. Messing up is simply a part of life. To err is not only human, it is also necessary. You can’t do everything perfectly the first time (or the second). Occasionally, you may experience ‘beginner’s luck’ and accomplish something that’s beyond your level of expertise, but that experience seldom lasts. Eventually, you’re going to push your luck beyond the breaking point and, behold! you’ve made a mess! If you’ve been raised in a dysfunctional household, you may either feel as though you can’t do anything right and have learned not to try, or you may have numbed out your feelings to the extent that you just blunder on through, letting the chips fall where they may. Neither approach will work for you in the long run.

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Remember that biblical phrase, “Don’t kick against the goads?” Did you ever wonder what it meant? ‘Goads’ are actually low-tech cattle prods used to herd animals in a desired direction. Should the animal kick back against the goads, it would only hurt itself. The urgings of the Spirit that goad us forward toward the fulfillment of our destiny are not irresistible: the capacity that we all enjoy to refuse to cooperate with whatever may be in our own best interests is what gives our cooperation its value. An amoeba can’t refuse its destiny; that’s an option that only we humans are gifted with. We have the capacity to kick against the goads and to say ‘No’ to whatever purpose our lives might otherwise have had.

The seismic shift that each of us experiences in the course of the midlife transition has varied and far-reaching consequences. Like the goads of the ancients, that transition urges us forward into paths that we may be very reluctant to embark upon. After all, don’t we spend the first half of our lives striving for independence and autonomy? The changes that come over us at midlife seem to be focused on our physical nature. For the second time in our lives, — for men and women both — our hormones seem to be taking over. Yet the physical aspects of midlife, although fundamental, do not define the ground where most of our personal transformation is taking place. When the goads of midlife are applied, what we experience can only be described as a ‘soul-quake’ of enormous proportions. It’s a 9 on our emotional Richter scale.

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Don’t you just love encountering new ideas? I do! Yesterday was one of those wonderfully serendipitous occasions when one of those insights came to my attention: for the first time, I heard about ‘learned despair.’ I went right home, and did some research on it. I tracked down the story that I heard (I like to go right to the source, whenever possible) and located it in the book Competing for the Future by management analysts Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad. Here’s the passage:

4 monkeys in a room. In the center of the room is a tall pole with a bunch of bananas suspended from the top. One of the four monkeys scampers up the pole and grabs the bananas. Just as he does, he is hit with a torrent of cold water from an overhead shower. He runs like hell back down the pole without the bananas. Eventually, the other three try it with the same outcome. Finally, they just sit and don’t even try again. To hell with the damn bananas. But then, they remove one of the four monkeys and replace him with a new one. The new monkey enters the room, spots the bananas and decides to go for it. Just as he is about to scamper up the pole, the other three reach out and drag him back down. After a while, he gets the message. There is something wrong, bad or evil that happens if you go after those bananas. So, they kept replacing an existing monkey with a new one and each time, none of the new monkeys ever made it to the top. They each got the same message. Don’t climb that pole. None of them knew exactly why they shouldn’t climb the pole, they just knew not to. They all respected the well established precedent. EVEN AFTER THE SHOWER WAS REMOVED!

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Today I want to write about passion. It’s not specifically about ‘sex after fifty’, but if you find that any of the ideas you read here fit, then please don’t hesitate to use them. Instead, let’s start with the word, passion. It comes from the Latin word, patior (pati, passus), and it means ‘to suffer’ or ‘to undergo’. In a derived sense, it also has a connotation of allowing or permitting something to happen, or ‘accepting‘ something that’s happening. From this little word, we get such English words as ‘patient’ and ‘passive’ as well as ‘passion’.

In the Judeo-Christian world, this week celebrated the Exodus of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt, the passage through the Sea of Reeds and the hope of a promised land. Today also marks the culmination of the celebrations at Easter. They began last Sunday (‘Palm Sunday’) with the reading of one of the narrations of the death of Jesus, “Passio Domini nostri Jesu Christi secundum Johanem . . . ” (“The Passion of our Lord Jesus Christ according to <Matthew/Mark/Luke/John>”). The celebration culminates with the proclamation this morning at the empty tomb that, “He is risen; he is not here.” What all this has to do with us, and what it has to do with midlife is what I want to reflect on today.

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Last week, Spring arrived with a vengeance in Washington. It was sunny and the temperature rose to the mid-to-upper 70′s (F). The trees responded to the warmth by popping their buds almost instantaneously. One day, you could look down on Massachusetts Avenue from our ninth floor window upon the dreary browns and grays of mid-winter, and the next, the avenue was lined with lacy canopies of pink and green. People, too, were transformed from scurrying puffballs of quilting and caps to couples strolling (yes, actually strolling) along together in their shirtsleeves.

Then, the weather turned cold again, just in time for the weekend, with low temperatures below freezing and the highs barely breaking 40. The sweaters and lined jackets from past months haven’t been mothballed quite yet, and they come in handy once again against the chill. That little lever on the thermostat got pushed back from ‘cool’ to ‘heat’ once again. It’s no big deal. It’s only a temporary cold snap: some vagrant left-over Arctic air that wandered down our way. It’ll be gone soon enough. The forsythia’s in full bloom. The clematis is a foot tall already. The garden is full of the green leaves that promise a summer of colorful blooms. Change has come.

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