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.

I’m going to approach the question of cleaning up life’s wreckage using the schema offered by Gary Chapman and Jennifer Thomas in their book, The Five Languages of Apology: How to Experience Healing in All Your Relationships (to give credit where credit is due). The first step toward cleaning up your mess is to acknowledge that you’ve created one. As I mentioned before, making a mess is not the end of the world. It doesn’t make you a bad person, even when the mess you’ve made is rather . . . shall we say . . . substantial. For many people, this is the most difficult step of all. Fearing shame, people very often go to incredible lengths to hide the truth and to prove to themselves and to others that they’re perfect, and somehow immune to the faults and failings that everyone struggles with. Gentle reader, this, in itself, is a tremendous mistake!

The first lesson that anyone in the midlife transition needs to learn is that a little guilt won’t hurt you. Guilt is that feeling that comes over us when we realize that we’ve screwed up. This is not a bad thing! Experiencing guilt can be a powerful motivator to do better (when we are able to accept it, rather than let self-centered pride keep us from experiencing it). We get a rude wake-up call when we see the results of our actions creating the opposite effects from those we wanted or expected. Then, there’s that nagging voice inside your head that keeps saying, “Whoa, Dude, you really screwed up this time!” What do you do then? If you’re wise, and if you’re spiritually connected to both the strengths and weaknesses of your humanity, you’ll listen. Where does that incredibly strong desire to ignore and to silence that voice come from?

It comes from shame. (Healthy) guilt says, “I did a bad thing.” (Unhealthy) shame says, “I am a bad thing.” Silencing guilt leaves a person incapable of learning from mistakes (it’s the underlying mechanism behind the sociopathic personality). Feeling shame, on the other hand, leaves a person incapable of accepting responsibility for his/her actions. That’s why, as a first step toward cleaning up your messes, it’s so important to silence your shame (it lies to you) and embrace your guilt (it motivates you). We might even say: “There’s no shame in admitting your guilt!”

Here’s where the real growth happens: admitting that you’ve made a mistake. Sometimes the results are so obvious that you (and everyone else in the world who experiences it with you) realize immediately that something’s gone wrong. “Oops!” you say, “that didn’t work out the way I planned.” Sometimes, the results aren’t so obvious, and it’s not clear that you’re the one behind what has happened. The temptation then is to keep the “Oops!” to yourself, even when other people have obviously been affected. Behold: shame doing its dirty work.

Here’s a vitally important principle that most people are not aware of: there’s no such thing as a solitary action. No matter how few people you may interact with on a day-to-day basis, your thoughts, words, and actions are never done in a vacuum. When you mess up, your actions have an effect on you: who you are today and who you will become in the future. To the extent that your life touches other people — your family, your friends, your co-workers, and even people you interact with in the most casual circumstances — to that extent your mess will touch and affect them, too.

Accept it or not, like it or not, your every thought, word, and action takes places within the context of the entire human family. It’s not enough just to own your responsibility in your own mind, or even just to admit it to God in the silence of your prayer. At some point, taking responsibility for whatever wrong you’ve done — intentionally or not — has to include the broader community of which you’re a part. This is (in my understanding) the first ‘language of apology’ that we need to embrace, saying to yourself, to God, and to another human being, “I’ve done wrong, and this is what I’ve done.”

One final caveat before we part: although if we want to clean up our mess, we have to come clean and accept our responsibility, we don’t have to create a bigger mess when we do that. It would be an even bigger wrong to compromise our own futures and the futures of those whom we care about and who depend on us by needlessly advertising the hurts we’ve caused. In many cases, we need ‘to let sleeping dogs lie.’ It will be enough to share our guilty secrets with a trusted spiritual adviser, therapist, mentor, or even a long-term close and trusted friend. If you’re unsure whether or not to tell someone who is unaware of what you’ve done to them, use this rule of thumb: when in doubt, don’t. Talk it over with your adviser first. Pray about it. Above all, be prudent: don’t compromise your life and others’ needlessly.

Next week: Cleaning up the Wreckage Part II, “I’m sorry!“

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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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.

At some point in our personal evolution, we either change our minds about our relationship to life in this world, or we risk causing great harm to ourselves and to those we profess to love. We kick against the goads at our own peril, yet we do that whenever we refuse to accept life on life’s terms (and the radical changes that entails) and refuse to trust the process and the One who drives it forward. That’s one reason why I feel called to confront political and religious conservatism. People want to believe that the truth (‘Truth’?) is ‘out there’ and changeless. Yet ‘truth’ necessarily involves both a knower and whatever is known. To suggest that the ‘truth’ is eternal is only to suggest that knower him- or herself also cannot change.

The truth of what we know and experience derives from our dialog with what is. As we change, our ‘truth’ must change, too. To try to resist that change and to cling to old ways of seeing and understanding our world can only be described as ‘kicking against the goads.’ We spend the first half of our lives learning to hang on, and the second half of life learning to let go. Hanging on to old ways of seeing, thinking, and believing in the face of life’s invitation to change can only lead to frustration and pain. That’s the insight behind what Episcopal Bishop John Shelby Spong wrote about in his book, Why Christianity Must Change or Die: A Bishop Speaks to Believers in Exile. Using outmoded human paradigms to explore the wildness of God’s relationship to humankind can only lead us to an impotent caricature of faith. Tradition can give nothing to a people who cannot comprehend it.

It’s been a tense week here. My 88 year old mother-in-law has been very sick, and we thought for a time that we were going to lose her. After some relatively minor surgery (there’s nothing minor about surgery at 88), her doctor prepared us for the worst, based on her experience. Just as she was being released from the hospital yesterday, the tests results came back negative. Living life on life’s terms meant knowing that we would have to cope with the results, regardless of whether or not the news was going to be good. We had to let go of our own expectations and our own hopes, and live simply in acceptance and trust: not necessarily an easy thing to do, regardless of the outcome.

That’s the lesson that comes with maturity: ultimately, we’re not in control. Living life on life’s terms means living in an attitude of acceptance with the realization that “all things work together for the good.” Whether we’re looking back at the so-called tragedies of our lives, or looking forward toward the obstacles that still seem too daunting to overcome, it’s ultimately our spiritual connection with our Higher Power that will allow us to see everything in its true perspective. I’ll repeat once again that perfect prayer from Dag Hammarskjöld: “For all that has been, thanks; for all that will be, yes!”

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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!

Was this a scientifically-controlled research project, or a fabricated urban myth-in-the-making? Who knows? That’s as far back as I could trace the story. Even if it’s a fable or parable, I think that we can all relate to the underlying experience: many animals are prone to give up hope in the face of social opposition. That’s the message that researchers wanted to convey when they coined the term ‘learned despair‘: when attitudes around us turn negative, we tend to give up trying to reach our goal without even trying!

The word ‘despair‘ itself tells the story. It comes from the Latin de-sperare, meaning to turn away from, or to give up (de-) hoping (sperare). It’s a cognate of ‘desperation‘. When I’m working with people who might be emotionally allergic to hearing about the so-called theological virtues of ‘faith’, ‘hope’, and ‘love’, I replace those terms with synonyms: ‘acceptance’, ‘trust’, and ‘engagement’. Despair — turning away from or lacking hope — derives from a lack of (or, rather, from a misplaced) trust. We tend to trust what we learn from others’ beliefs (whether or not they’re grounded in facts) rather than trusting in our own experience. We turn our methodical doubt inward on ourselves at least as often we apply it to what we learn from others.

Our lack of trust in ourselves, in our own capabilities, and even in our own experience can prove to be a very serious flaw, particularly at midlife. I can relate it to another theological construct: what is known as the ‘unforgivable sin,’ or the ‘sin against the Holy Spirit.’ What kind of sin could possibly be ‘unforgivable’ in the light of an all-loving God? It’s not so much an action, as it is a belief or a mentality: one that says, “I don’t believe that God would forgive me for ______.” The ‘unforgivable’ sin is such because someone lacks the trust in a loving God that would make forgiveness possible.

Like the ‘unforgivable’ sin, ‘learned despair’ derives its power from a refusal to trust in ourselves and in a Power greater than ourselves Who loves us unconditionally and who enlightens and empowers us. In learned despair, we yield to the temptation to surrender our self-esteem to those who don’t believe in us, rather than to accept (have faith in) a God who does.

How often do those around you influence you not to try do accomplish something that would (or could) move you forward? In what ways are you allowing others’ beliefs about you to erode your trust in yourself (as well as your trust in a Higher Power who cares about you)? In what ways are you permitting others’ opinions of you to keep you stuck in a midlife rut? What do you need to do to recapture your enthusiasm for who you are and where you’re going? What do you need to stop listening to? What old, negative beliefs about yourself do you need to get rid of? What can you do today to overcome just one fear that you have about yourself?

To move forward, all you need is to recapture some of your primal hope. To recapture hope, you need re-learn to trust yourself (and your Higher Power). To learn to trust yourself, first, you need to unlearn despair. You can begin unlearning as soon as you tune out the discouraging voices around you, and start, once again, listening to (and believing in) the wisdom of your own heart.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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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.

See how gracefully we accept the seasonal transformations of our world, even when we experience unexpected (and unwelcome) setbacks? Surely, we may complain about having to get bundled up again after having had a taste of unseasonable warmth. Regardless, we accept these things as just part of the cycles of nature. We know that these changes come and go, each with its own particular joys and sorrows, comforts and discomforts. “To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven.”

Perspective is everything. The wave of cold that embraces us today would have seemed like a break from the bitterness of winter only a few weeks ago instead of a setback in our steady march toward summer. So it is when we look at the midlife transition from a spiritual perspective. Once again, perspective is everything. We have trained ourselves to face even the worst that the planet has to offer us with a certain amount of equanimity: we face ‘hurricane season’ knowing that, although there’s a chance we may have to deal with danger and damage, chances are very good that we won’t. We hope for the best and pray that others, too, will be spared.

Somehow, though, when it comes to coping with the seasons of our own lives, we may not find ourselves exercising the same degree of calm acceptance. Like women and men fighting fiercely to hang on to the last vestiges of summer as the first snowflakes fall, some of us cling unrelentingly to the hopes and dreams of adulthood (that all too often are simply recapitulations of childhood imaginings) even as the transition into midlife is sweeping them away. What those who descend into midlife crisis lack is the same perspective that allows us gracefully to accept the passing of the seasons, knowing, as we do, that along with the discomforts of the coming season, each will have its own very special grace and charm.

The joys and the sorrows of youth (did we forget about those?) have given way to the joys and sorrows of adulthood. Likewise, these, too, are destined to give way and make way for the still deeper experiences of maturity. Only with the perspective of the whole of life, and the spiritual strengths (virtues) of faith, hope, and love, will we be able to appreciate properly the gifts that maturity has to offer us. Once again, we can learn much from the perspective of Robert Browning’s poem, Rabbi Ben Ezra:

Grow old along with me!
The best is yet to be,
The last of life, for which the first was made:
Our times are in His hand
Who saith “A whole I planned,
Youth shows but half; trust God: see all, nor be afraid!”

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

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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 . . .

You may still think that, when circumstances change drastically (like they do at midlife), reinventing yourself would seem to be a very wise thing to do. I say ‘seem to be’ because that’s all based on your set of assumptions. You assume that it’s possible to ‘reinvent’ yourself, and you further assume that you know how to do it. Interestingly enough, it isn’t, and you don’t. You are the product of the sum total of your genetic makeup plus your defining experiences as determined by a lifetime of choices you made either in response to changes in your environment or in an effort to change your environment. Your life is a continuum. You may change your mind; you may change your direction; but, you’re not going to ‘reinvent’ the person that you’ve become anymore than you can ‘reinvent’ your genetic code.

Now that you’re beginning to see the problem (and being sensible isn’t working all that well), it’s time to bring on the silliness! Instead of focusing more of your time and energy on an impossibility that won’t work, why not throw out your assumptions entirely, and re-define the problem into one that will work? Specifically, in the same way as Douglas Adams redefined the problem with light from one of how to leave the ground to one of how to avoid hitting it. So, perhaps the spiritual answer to the midlife crisis is less about reinventing yourself in response to the world, and more about reinventing the world that you’re an integral part of. Let me just say that reinventing your world is a whole lot easier than missing the ground, once you’ve thrown yourself at it.

Where to start? Traditional Chinese medicine teaches that one should begin treating a problem in as remote a spot from the problem as possible. We can do the same, and, since the ‘problem’ is you, we’ll start as far removed from you as we can: with your job or career. Rather than start with the question, “How can I become a raging success in my chosen field?” you can start by telling yourself: “This is not a dress rehearsal. This is the only life I’ve got. What do I want to do with it . . . rather, what do I need to do with it?” At midlife, it’s time to take true ownership of your life. You’re not being controlled by your parents, your upbringing, your religion, your politics, or anything else outside of yourself. At midlife, it’s time to stop making excuses for why you aren’t the person you’d really like to be, and start doing something about it.

This is called ‘goal setting’ and I assume that, over the years, you’ve already heard a lot about it. If you’ve not only heard of goal-setting, but listened to what people have been telling you, then you have a very clear, distinct, and detailed vision of the life that you want to live, and you’ve banished the words “I should” “I’ve got to” “I have to” “I need to” from your vocabulary, and you’ve replaced them all with “I want to.” You’ve also succeeded in replacing the phony buck-passing phrase “I can’t” with the true self-aligned one: “I won’t.”  Finally, you already know whether or not your current job or career is healthy and serves to promote your life vision, or it’s unhealthy and keeping you stuck and away from becoming the person you truly desire to be and, right now, you’re implementing a plan to change it.

German existentialist philosopher Martin Heidegger defined human life as “being-in-the-world with others.” At midlife, perhaps more than at any other time, we have the opportunity to experience what he meant. ‘Others’ are not optional equipment to make use of for our own purposes. Once again, with all our relationships, spirituality challenges us to empty out our assumptions about who these people are, why they’re in our lives, and what purpose they may serve for us.

The people with whom you share an intimacy are a constitutive part of what life means for you. Whether or not you have an explicit relationship with another, you can’t just throw any of them away (no matter how tempting it may be). Each one you encounter is essential to your own human existence — not only because you rely on them for what they can provide for you or do for you — because each person you meet has something essential to tell you about who you are. This is even more true when your encounters gain intimacy. Dating, they say, is your opportunity to learn about yourself. A relationship is a 24/7 date. By reinventing how you look at the people in your life (from seeing them as obstacles or benefits to you, to seeing them as the only mirrors you have that show you who you really are), you suddenly no longer want them to change. You need them to stay as they are, because only then do you recognize that what you dislike most about anything you see in them is only your own reflection.

Finally, and most importantly — the most intimate relationship you have — your relationship with yourself. Here’s where the spiritual ‘rubber meets the road.’ For most people, adolescence and adulthood are both characterized by the assuming and shouldering of responsibilities as they go about the work of self-actualization. The focus is generally on creating a safe and secure life for ‘me and mine.’ It’s a period of acquisition and immersion into the struggle to hold on to what they’ve got, even as ‘what they’ve got’ grows and the struggle intensifies.

Regardless of the cause, at midlife, the curtain gets pulled back only to reveal the emptiness and purposelessness of a life lived for acquisition and self-aggrandizement. Whoever dies with the most toys wins . . . the booby prize. In whatever form it takes — physical, mental, emotional, spiritual or economic — life’s vagaries always intrude on the neat little plans you and I may have been making only to show us the vanity of the exclusive pursuit of health, wealth, safety and security. If youth and adulthood are all about acquisition, then midlife and maturity are all about letting go, and that’s a much more difficult lesson to learn. The meaning of your life can never be defined by your career, your relationships, or your accomplishments. Instead, on a spiritual level, the meaning of life comes from the courage you can muster to face your challenges relying not on anything external, but solely on the strength that comes from your connection to a Power greater than yourself to get you through.

The universe provides each of us with a series of life lessons. Regardless of what they may look like on the surface, they all teach only one thing: whatever it is that you choose to rely on that is not God, will be taken away. At midlife, the training wheels come off and the props are knocked away. You are left standing there with only your acceptance of life on life’s terms and your trust in God to support and guide you. If youth is the age for heroics, then midlife is the age for courage, since by now, experience has taught you what it feels like to play hard at the game of life and to lose.  The trick is to stay engaged no matter what else happens.

Those who, at midlife, try to reinvent themselves will undoubtedly experience frustration and futility. “No matter where you go,” they say, “there you are.” But those who, instead, work at reinventing their world will experience a life they could only have imagined. The lessons of life are unrelenting. If you choose to avoid failure at all cost, it will surely cost you dear and all to no avail. It’s all so very silly. Learning how to live with spiritual courage is a lot like learning how to fly: it’s so simple! All you really need to do is to throw yourself at failure . . . and miss!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

______
*Douglas Adams, The More than Complete Hitchhiker’s Guide, Longmeadow Press, Connecticut, 1991, page 363.

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