“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.”

We might consider this age-old lament — first thought and then spoken — to be the “opening theme,” so to speak, for the entrance into the midlife transition. “Why are you doing this to me?” is the sound an adult makes when her or his world has been upended. To understand this, we need to remember the characteristics of adulthood. Once we have become an adult, we assume our independence and personal authority. Not only are we emancipated from parental controls, we also emerge from parental protection. The burden of providing for our own security is transferred onto our own shoulders and, to a great extent, we are judged (and we judge ourselves) on how successfully we’re able to provide for ourselves (and, eventually, for our families).

Adulthood provides us with some preliminary answers to life’s greatest questions: Am I good enough? Am I smart enough? Am I capable? Am I lovable? Am I respectable? Am I honorable? Am I the woman or man whom my parents, my spouse, my children, my community can be proud of? Do I measure up to expectations? Adulthood defines success as receiving a resounding “Yes!” to all of these questions. For the adult, even kindness and generosity will be motivated and judged by what we imagine others are expecting of us, which, unsurprisingly, is most often identical to what we are expecting of ourselves. This is how the adult defines self-esteem, and this is precisely why, when one of those ‘but bombs’ hits an adult, it can be so devastating. “Why are you doing this to me?” means, in effect, “Why are you deliberately sabotaging everything that I’ve been trying to accomplish?”

Welcome to the midlife transition! Here’s your opportunity to leave the misconceptions of adulthood behind, and to step out into the clear light of maturity. All of the misconceptions of adulthood — that your value as a person is based on how well you perform and how effective you are at achieving a reasonable level of security — are based on one fundamentally flawed concept: that it’s all about you. How successful you are at making the midlife transition depends almost entirely on how effective you are at ridding yourself of that one erroneous concept. No, it’s not all about you, and it never was. ‘Success’ can never be achieved through living up to anyone’s expectations . . . even God’s!*

So long as we’re stuck in the ‘me-centered’ universe of adulthood, challenges and adversity will continue to appear to us to be focused on us (because that’s where our unconscious focus lies, and that’s the perspective from which we view everything that happens around us). As I mentioned before, “Why are you doing this to me?” is the cry of the ‘innocent victim.’ You may, possibly, be ‘innocent’ (although in the majority of cases, you have very probably been guilty at least of neglect and/or misprioritization), but you are not a victim. Keep this in mind: nobody can make you a victim without your permission. Victimhood represents the childish ‘it’s all about me’ attitude taken to its logical conclusion: I’m the cause of everything that happens.

What if you’re not all that important? What if it’s not “all about you”? What if the challenges that you’re facing in life (including all the ‘but bombs’) are simply examples of the collateral damage that occurs naturally as the universe struggles to sort itself out in its evolution? There’s the paradigm shift — the evolution in perspective — that differentiates mere ‘adults’ from those who are spiritually mature: stuff happens. Very often you may become implicated in that stuff that happens, and you have to deal with it, even though it’s not about you. The longer you live, the more stuff you’ll encounter: you’re going to lose every job you hold; every relationship that you value is going to break up; your health will be compromised; you will die. Nobody — God included — is ‘doing this stuff to you.’ It’s just life, and, with birth, you’ve bought your ticket and you’re on the ride.

Once you’ve attained this shift in perspective that so characterizes the midlife transformation, your whole approach to life and love will change. You will no longer be so preoccupied with your acquisitions and your accomplishments, and you will increasingly dedicate yourself to discovering and carrying out with integrity the purpose for which you’ve been given this amazing gift of life. Happily, the mature woman or man realizes that his or her life’s ‘purpose’ is always evolving, always ‘in process’ and, therefore, always in constant need of rediscovery, reinterpretation and redefinition. Regardless of the challenges you may face, you can receive each one as it really is: just another opportunity to grow, to evolve, and to deepen your connection with and reliance on the Ground of your being, that Power greater than yourself, the One who sent you here.

God, I offer myself to Thee, to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt.
Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will.
Take away my difficulties, that victory over them may bear witness to those I would help
of Thy power, Thy love and Thy way of life.
May I do Thy will always.
Amen.

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

______
“God’s expectations” of us refers, of course, to our understanding of those expectations. God’s real expectations of us only reveal themselves gradually over time. Much of what we think are God’s expectations are merely our assumptions based on what we’ve been taught or projections of our expectations of ourselves.

Think, if you will, about the RMS Titanic, resting on the bottom of the deep Atlantic Ocean since its spectacular sinking one cold April night in 1914. I’m sure you’re familiar with the photos and videos that have been published over the years since the wreck was finally discovered by Robert Ballard in 1977. The great ship, weighing in at 46,326 tons when she left the shipyards in Belfast, is now festooned with ugly growths called ‘rusticles.’ Gradually, the iron ship’s massive hull is being consumed – eaten actually – by iron-eating bacteria. Before too very long, the great ship’s entire structure will disappear into virtual puddles of bacterial excretions. The pile of refuse that remains after the bacteria have done their work will be unrecognizable.

The Jeep, the Titanic, and your most intimate relationships may have a great deal in common. We humans are subject to a corrosion that beats out the destruction caused by oxidation and bacteria hands-down. I am convinced that fear causes more destruction in the lives of men and women than any other single agent. We all have it; yet, when the bravado of self-assured adulthood begins to yield to the deeper questioning that comes with midlife, fear emerges with a ferocity seldom experienced at any other period of life.

When I was considering the subject of this article over the past week, I was troubled and questioning my own understanding and appreciation of this universal phenomenon. “If fear is so corrosive and damaging to life and to relationships,” I wondered, “why is it so universal? Why is it there at all?” I’ve often heard that a little fear is a good thing. The more I think about it, the more I am certain that fear provides us with the necessary protection that we need to avoid getting into life-threatening trouble. There definitely is such a thing as a ‘healthy’ fear. We all need it to keep us from getting too irresponsibly cocky and making rash and self-destructive decisions. A little fear is a very good thing, I concluded. “So,” I asked myself, “is a little fear like a little rust?”

I have come to believe that there are actually two types of fear. The one – healthy caution – provides us with the protection that we need against rash decision-making. There is another type of fear, however, that arises from insecurity and self-doubt. This kind of fear, like the iron-eating bacteria in the hull of the Titanic, slowly but consumes its host. Psychologist Carl Jung located the core of self-doubt in what he called the ‘ego,’ while the true personality he identified as the ‘Self.’ In this sense, your ego, convinced of your fundamental vulnerability, lives in mortal terror. While the Self continues to try to convince you that you’re fundamentally OK – regardless of what’s happening within or around you – the ego drowns out that more rational voice with its own terrified screaming.

At midlife especially, when the Self finds itself beset with radical changes on all fronts, the Ego’s constant doubts have a chance to erode not only your self-confidence, but also, at the same time, your capacity for acceptance, trust, and engagement. Under the fearful influence of your ego, your willingness to accept life on life’s terms (and your most significant relationships on their own terms), to trust in your own judgment and others’ good will, and to engage yourself unreservedly in the work of giving of yourself begins to collapse. Self-preservation begins to assume a priority beyond anything you’d previously experience. Your choices no longer to accept, no longer to trust, and no longer to engage begin to take their toll. Fear begins its corrosive corruption of your quality of life.

The popular spiritual work, A Course in Miracles, defines the ego as “a fearful thought.” I completely agree. The ego is convinced (and is determined to convince you) that you are in mortal danger and that only you can save yourself by withdrawing from intimacy. Ironically, under the guise of self-preservation, your ego infects you with the fear of being killed, while, at the same time, it’s in love with death. Its strangling fear begins by cutting off your vital connection with the divine Spirit by convincing you that your Higher Power, or God, cannot and will not save you from death and destruction: that the only Savior you can count on is yourself.

Next, its corrosive influence extends to your most intimate relationships, seeding doubts and watering them with imagined faults and failings in the other that “threaten” your security and well-being. It convinces you that, once again, only you can “protect” yourself from ruin. Finally, as its work runs its course, it not only cuts off your capacity for unconditional and unqualified love of others, it locks you into a kind of imagined self-protective mode where not even the grace of God can reach you. Ego-driven fear, left to run its course, will eventually succeed in causing you to forget, at the deepest level of your being, who you are.

Who are you? You are the beloved Child of a Power greater than yourself Who called you into being from the origins of the universe and who sustains and protects you in all your ways, regardless of any detours your fallible human consciousness my send you on along your way. All your Higher Power or God requires of you are the ‘virtues’ that I wrote about in my last article: acceptance, trust, and engagement (or ‘faith,’ ‘hope,’ and ‘love’). If only you would choose to ignore the fearful screaming of your ego and focus on the invulnerability of your Self and your connection with your Higher Power, you can be set free from fear to choose to respond to that Power with unconditional Faith, unconditional Hope and unconditional Love. Only then, in truth, can you accept, trust, and love yourself or anyone else.

Do your choices show that you actually believe that you are who you are? As a Child of your Higher Power, do you exercise unconditional acceptance of life on life’s terms and of the others with whom you share the gift of intimacy in this life? Do you trust that, no matter what happens to you or to others, you will always be cared and provided for? Are you willing to accept that your life depends on the quality of the commitments that you’re prepared to make on a daily basis?

“What about getting hurt?” “What about betrayal?” you may ask. In return, I want to ask you, “What is your circle of influence, and what is your circle of concern?” You may well be concerned about other peoples’ ideas or behaviors, but you have no control over them! You have control only over your own attitudes and choices. Your decisions to accept, trust, and be committed never depend on what the other person says or does. They depend wholly and exclusively on you and your willingness to love regardless of the cost. That’s the way your Higher Power loves you; that, in a nutshell describes the essence of Love itself. Love doesn’t necessarily involve intimacy; love doesn’t necessarily involve intimacy (those things require two committed people). But love does require you to choose commitment over fear, and forgiveness over anger and resentment. Can you handle it?

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

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Today, I’d like to share with you the (always-tentative) response that I seem to be getting from my six decades of  reflexively auto-dialing a universal ’411′. It seems — to the best of my ability to understand the answer — that the universe and all it contains is nothing but a mega-University that’s only function is to educate Consciousness (in all its known and unknown iterations) in just two interrelated subjects: what I’m calling the Two Great Lessons of Life. I won’t keep you hanging there in anticipation. The First Great Lesson of Life comes down to this: learning how to love. The Second Great Lesson of Life is its complement: learning how to let go. That’s it. That’s all there is. Once you’ve mastered both subjects, you’re ready to graduate. If it were only that easy.

We were all born selfish. You may know that in biology there’s what they call the ‘recapitulation theory’ that suggests that every life form goes through all the stages of evolution on its journey from fertilized egg to viable organism. I have no idea whether or not that’s exactly accurate, although there does seem to be a general pattern observable across all forms of life. It seems clear to me that at least human consciousness in its earliest stages develops along the lines of how consciousness emerged on this planet. At birth, our consciousness makes a giant leap forward that takes the developing distinction between “me’ and ‘mine’ to a whole new level. Birth can be seen simply asa quantum leap in the ever-increasing viability and independence of the organism. Early life outside the womb closely parallels life inside: the infant remains totally dependent on its care-givers for all the conditions necessary for its survival. From that point on, the nascent person must assume ever-greater responsibility for his or her own independent existence. Life begins with the understanding that I must get what what I need in order to survive. I learn to value who I am and what I have been given. ‘Love’ and ‘need’ start out life as synonyms.

As I lead you through this ‘recapitulation theory’ of mine, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to reflect back on your own life’s experiences to see where the crises you’ve encountered indicated ‘sticking points’ in your own evolution. If you try, you can see how they imitate the earth’s plate tectonics: the plates in the earth’s crust push against each other and their energy imperceptibly builds until, at one random moment, they suddenly become unstuck and shift — sometimes with catastrophic seismic results. Each of the crises in your own life represents a seismic shift across every aspect of your life: physical, mental, emotional, relational, economic and spiritual.

If childhood can be defined as that epoch of life during which we learn to take care of ourselves and to become increasingly self-reliant and responsible (we gradually take on the responsibility of  providing for our own survival) then that life transition stage that we identify as ‘adolescence’ must be that period where we are forced by nature and culture to confront our own self-centered self-interest and begin very tentatively to open ourselves to others as well as to the Other. It’s the time when we learn to both value and care for others above and beyond our own selfish needs, even our own need to survive. Love and need split apart in adolescence’s tumultuous soul-quakes. The adolescent transition from childhood to adulthood takes on the features of a transformation.

Learning to love . . . learning to accept unconditionally, to trust unconditionally, to become fully engaged with another . . . committed to another. These lessons of love take a long, hard time to learn because the real lesson (that love is a choice, a decision) only begins when the ‘other’ love — the emotional surrogate of love — starts to fade away. Love is what’s left after all the needing and wanting has dissipated, been satisfied or disappointed.

My first prayer as a young man entering the chapel on my first day in the major seminary was: “Lord, teach me to love.” That was the prayer of a foolish youth who didn’t understand that the prayer to learn to love, like the prayer for patience, is one that’s always answered and always in startlingly unexpected ways. “Greater love has no one, than to lay down life itself for another.” What they don’t tell you is that it’s much more difficult to live for others than it is to die for them.

Just as some people never quite learn the ‘independence’ lesson from childhood, others never quite get what it means to love selflessly. There’s a type of grieving involved in every act of true love, because it means letting go of all of our expectations. We want to be loved back, to be unconditionally accepted and trusted, to have someone somewhere somehow commit unconditionally to us. We feel as though we need that affirmation of self: if we don’t receive it, we’ll just die.
But, we don’t fully receive it — we don’t fully give it either — and we don’t die. Instead, we learn life’s Great Lesson number one.

Then comes midlife. Just when we think we’ve gotten our Master’s degree in loving, life turns the tables on us. We positively freak out when we first turn to that page in the book of life’s instructions that our parents and our whole culture and upbringing gave us for guidance and we read, “Everything in this book may be wrong.” Here begins life’s Great Lesson number two: letting go.

Letting go begins with relaxing our death-grip on our opinions, starting, of course, with everything we were once so certain and sure of. Today, on the other side of the midlife divide, I am certain of very few things. As certain as I am that there exists a universal Truth, I am equally certain that I will never fully know or understand it. And, as far as God is concerned, the God of my understanding has been replaced with the God of my lack-of-understanding. In fact, all that I really need to know about my God is that I am not he. Everything else is open to interpretation. In life, as both Martin Buber and Karl Jung so clearly saw, there is an I (a Self) in constant dialogue with a Thou (an Other) and, as with all true dialogues, meaning is always given by the receiver, not the giver. Contrary to popular belief, what God said is relevant only in regard to what we actually heard and understood.

The crises of midlife arise from the difficulty that each individual has letting go of the certitude that we hold with regard to our beliefs and opinions. At midlife, we are brought face-to-face with the great transcendental ideals that Plato and Aristotle proposed: absolute Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Unity, and we begin to recognize that we in this world enjoy only their analogates: relative goodness, truth, beauty, and unity. We will never know (nor can we as humans really adequately even understand) such things as Life, Love, Security, Health, Peace and Freedom. The famous midlife crisis is the struggle that we wage against having to give up our pretensions to these Divine attributes. When the crisis is over, we find that we have let go a little bit more of our pretensions to the divine. The answer to the great question, “Why me?” (as though we had some divine right to Life,  Love, Security, Health, Peace and Freedom) is always the humiliating, “Why not you?”

Our topic today of the Two Great Lessons of Life has brought us to the understanding that all of life is, in fact, one great process in two distinct stages: learning to let go of self (what we call love), then learning to let go of everything else (what we call death). It makes me think of the Jewish proverb that says: Shrouds have no pockets. All of this lifetime of learning to let go is just preparation for the Great Letting Go that silently awaits each of us. Like all lettings-go, life’s Great Lessons involve grief in (at least) five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. How you think about death and how you feel about the lessons that life is handing you right now, today can be very good indicators of where you are in the learning process. The more you learn to let go, the more grieving there is. The more grieving you do, the farther along you progress toward acceptance. So, where are you?

And, just a final word to the wise, if the Roman poet Horace was right when he wrote, “Non omnis moriar” (“I shall not wholly die”) — and I believe he was — then whatever letting go and whatever grieving you don’t get done in this life, you will carry with you into the next. That’s just something to about it.

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

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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

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Everyone brings to a relationship an odd mixture of personality traits, learned behaviors, and a set of expectations, some realistic, others not so much. Everyone also brings to a relationship a certain capacity for trust, for communication, for openness to change and growth. Finally, each person brings his or her own willingness to commit. As always, my guest on this past week’s internet radio program, “The Unstoppable Coach” Frankie Picasso, gave us some wonderful insights. One of these was the difference between ‘trying’ and ‘committing.’ It was a distinction I had never thought of before, and one that bears more consideration. I’ll get back to that in a minute.

With everyone coming to his or her relationships with a different and, perhaps, completely unique set of personal ‘baggage’, you’d think that preparation for getting involved in a relationship would be of paramount importance. At the same time, I’d be willing to bet that a very large percentage — if not the majority — of failed relationships happen because of inadequate preparation: those involved haven’t done their ‘homework’ and haven’t done the hard work necessary to develop necessary skills like self-reflection, or empathetic questioning, or even just ‘fighting fair.’ Some years ago, I took instrument flight instruction. Up to that point, I had thought that I was a decent pilot, and had been very successful flying all over the East Coast, into Canada and even to the Bahamas. As I started my training and learned the skills necessary to perform precision flight maneuvers, I was shocked to consider that for so many years I had been allowed to fly with such a poor skill set. For a mature person, one who is going through or has gone through the midlife transition, recognizing the poverty of our relationship skill set should be a real eye-opener. In flight, my life (and the lives of my passengers) depended on my maneuvering skill set; in living, the life of my relationship depended on my communication skills. I believe the bottom line here is the quality of your relationship will depend greatly on the amount of effort you’ve spent preparing yourself for it.

People make mistakes. Besides lacking even basic preparedness for the stresses of an adult relationship, very often people with a tendency toward addictive behaviors become strongly attracted to those with complementary issues. We call it “diseases calling to one another.” These are often people who consider their partner to be their “other half.” They feel incomplete, and the sense of completeness they experience around the pathological ‘yin’ they find to their pathological ‘yang’ (or vice versa) becomes not only compelling: it can become overwhelming. Yet, in relationships, two sick people do not a well person make. Instead, such relationships exhibit strong symptoms of dis-ease, such as cling-clung behaviors or the ever-popular ‘I love you; go away!’ behavior. Have you ever experienced a couple whose very existence as a couple could be designated a war zone? These dysfunctional relationships are often mistakes and may need to be terminated in order to free both parties to start again on a new basis. These may often be mistakes, but they’re not always so. If each partner is committed to developing a new tool kit of healthy attitudes and behaviors and if each partner is committed to learning new ways of interacting, then even a once-dysfunctional relationship can be salvaged. It’s certainly not easy, there are no guarantees of success, but it can be done!

Once we move beyond the realm of unpreparedness and mistakes, that doesn’t mean that we’re beyond the issues posed by our human relationships. The assumptions that we carry with us into our commitments begin to be challenged almost from the outset. But, it’s generally only at midlife, when our core assumptions are put on the line, that relationships can get really dicey. Remember that the attitudes that most people carry with them as they approach midlife are denial (there’s nothing wrong) and blame (even if there is something wrong, it’s certainly your fault). The conflicts that arise in a maturing relationship are never about the other person, no matter what s/he has done. There’s a wise saying that goes, “Dating is for learning about yourself. A relationship is a 24/7 date.” Keep in mind, also, that if a relationship has lasted for the long term, all the obvious easy lessons have been learned. What remain are the covert, deep-seated, core issues that are very hard to get at and even harder to address. If you keep hacking away at the sweet pulp of any fruit, you’re eventually going to be left with the bitter seeds. At midlife, you face serious challenges to your assumptions about who you are and who your partner is. There’s very little room left for window-dressing.

If you’ve passed the ‘preparedness’ test, and you’ve weathered the ‘mistake’ phase, you’ll probably, sooner or later, wind up here at the “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” question. Here’s where the difference between ‘trying’ and ‘committing’ that I spoke about earlier comes dramatically into play. A relationship is a living entity that is more than either one of you. Yet, it’s wholly dependent on both of you for its very lifeblood. You can’t ‘try’ to be in a relationship with someone, anymore than you can ‘try’ to pick a pencil up off your desk. As Master Yoda told young Luke, “Try not; do.” Or, as some are fond of saying, “Trying is lying.” Your relationship depends entirely on your level of commitment; but it’s not just a commitment to the relationship, it’s also a commitment to change and growth on your part. Even a so-called ‘toxic’ relationship can be saved, but only if both parties are completely committed to becoming personally more healthy.

Every day, someone leaves his or her life partner to find or to acquire someone ‘better’. And very often, some of these people discover that the relationship they created was as bad or worse than the one they left. If patterns of dysfunctional behavior are following you around, take a look at the common denominator: it’s YOU! Change lies at the heart of the midlife transition experience, but it’s not about changing the world or changing others; it’s only about chaning yourself. If you’ve accepted that challenge and you’ve committed yourself to growth and change and to building the best relationship possible, but your partner is only ‘trying’ to get along, then the answer to the “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” question becomes evident. However, if both of you have what it takes (the commitment to growth) to make the midlife transition into maturity — no matter what kinds of difficulties you may be having in your relationship today — then where there’s life there’s hope. The midlife transition, once completed, brings with it miraculous transformations; so, if you’re both in it for the long haul and for better or worse, don’t quit before the miracle happens!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

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