Midlife Mastery Journal » adulthood

Acceptance: the Gift of Perspective

Les Brown — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 19:15:25 +0000

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.

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

Why Are You Doing This to Me?

Les Brown — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 11:00:42 +0000

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.”

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.

The Meaning of Life: a Manifesto

Les Brown — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 13:00:03 +0000

Ever since people were able to distinguish the idea of ‘I’ from the idea of ‘my’, they’ve been asking the question, ‘why?’ In a hundred million different ways, people ask, “Why am I here?” For as long as I remember, that question (in its myriad of different forms) has sometimes boggled, sometimes driven, but always infused my conscious reflection. When I was just an adolescent, a therapist once commented to me that (in his words) I was “obsessed with the truth.” His appreciation of what was really going on was close to the mark (maybe as close as my adolescent powers of expression could take him): my true obsession has always been with meaning. I am one of those intellectually driven dudes who absorbs all the ‘why’ questions that people constantly throw at the universe and I remake them, refined and condensed, into one great challenge to All That Is: “What is the meaning of life?” Oddly, there’s nothing rhetorical about me. I actually expect an answer.

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

The Midlife Holiday Challenge

Les Brown — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 13:00:19 +0000

Why are the holidays so very challenging at midlife? There’s no question about it: they certainly are. One of the principal reasons that men and women at midlife find the holidays so difficult is that they’re all about tradition. Certainly, tradition speaks to our need for consistency, history, continuity, stability and security, but those are things that can be in very short supply around the holidays. Remember: the universe is all about change. In fact, the only constant in life as in the universe is change. No wonder we long so ardently for security and stability! It’s the one thing that’s missing from the real world. So, from an early age, we all try (mostly in vain) to create it for ourselves and our families.

At midlife, men and women enter into a phase of life that is unique. Unlike adolescence that marks the transition from childhood tutelage to adult independence, midlife marks the transition from adult independence to mature responsibility — what I recently called “the unbearable loneliness of choice.” Stuff happens at midlife that most people have been shielded from during adolescence. It’s not as though we’ve had a target painted on us at midlife that says, ‘misfortune: strike here!’ Rather, we’ve just been around long enough so that we’ve at least begun to experience the tougher realities of living: things like death, serious illness or accident, and loss of loved ones. At midlife, many of us look to the holiday season wanting to experience the comfort and joy that we may have felt in the past (particularly in childhood), whereas the reality that we find ourselves facing may be starkly different. Our memories and fantasies provoke in us an expectation that’s bound to be disappointed.

The holidays are never the real issue. What gets us into trouble during midlife comes down to a question of our attitudes. Do we not perhaps believe that life owes us a happy holiday season (especially after all we’ve been through)? Isn’t that what many of us have come to expect from the way we were raised and how we’ve been indoctrinated by the advertising media, in particular? If you’re a good boy or girl, Santa will come by to bring you everything you could ever wish for . . . or so we’re led to believe. In life, goodness has nothing to do with it. Life happens, whether we want it or not, and whether we’re ready for it or not. And, as you’re probably quite aware by now, a lot of it happens at midlife. Will this holiday season live up to your expectations? That all depends, doesn’t it? What, after all, are your expectations?

If you want the holidays to be “as good as” those in the “good old days” (and don’t pretend that you don’t remember and yearn for those “good old days,” no matter how old you are), you’re bound to be disappointed. Those days are gone, and only the memories linger. You’ll never recreate them, no matter how hard you try, no matter how many heirlooms you bring out of storage to decorate, in an attempt to recapture the feelings of those moments. Keep in mind, first of all, that our nostalgia has a way of scrubbing clean the events of the past. We don’t generally pine for the holiday disagreements and even disasters that we’ve experienced. In the clear light of day, with the sentiment set aside, we would have to admit that the “good old days” were no better or worse than yesterday . . . only different.

I know that you’ve lost something since the last holiday season. How do I know? It’s not because of the economic downturn, it’s because of the nature of change that characterizes life itself. In order for tomorrow to become today, today has to become yesterday. Living people and events must necessarily pass from immediacy into memory. Reality is like that. If, especially at the holiday season, you want to go back and revisit the past, you’re opening yourself up for a frustrating season to come. How can you celebrate when you’re living with loss?

There are two answers to that question. I take the first answer from the Jewish Passover Haggadah (I know: wrong season). The story of the exodus from Egypt begins thus: “We were slaves in Egypt . . . ” Not our forefathers: we. The Haggadah doesn’t go back to revisit the past, it makes the past present. And that’s what we at midlife have got to do: neither to forget the past nor try to go back and relive it, but bring the people and events from holidays past and include them in the living present. That brings us to the second answer.

What is ‘traditional’ anyway? It’s a ceremony or celebration or event that ‘worked’ once, and that we enjoy doing over and over again, until . . . until what? Until it doesn’t work anymore! The frustration comes when we try to make work again what used to work (in different times and in different circumstances) but may not be working anymore. What happens, for instance, when key personalities that were a vital part of holidays past are no longer there? When we talk about changes in ‘dynamics,’ that’s what we mean: the power — the impetus — has shifted. At midlife, you can no longer be carried along in passive bliss by the power of the moment. At midlife, for holidays, as for all other aspects of your life, the power and the responsibility shifts from ‘it’ and ‘them’ to you! If you want to have a happy holiday, what are you going to do this season to make it so?

When two people form a new family, one of the first negotiations that has to happen is all about creating new family holiday traditions. The same thing happens at midlife. The burden is now on you to create the holiday that you want to have. As I mentioned earlier, you can bring the events and people from the past with you and make them a part of your celebration. But, remember: it’s your celebration, not theirs! This is your opportunity to put your power and your creativity into action and make for yourself a holiday worth remembering. It’s your opportunity and your choice. You needn’t feel as though you’re being deprived of anything or missing anything. You can do a magnificent job of taking care of your needs this holiday season. It’s never too late to have a happy holiday!

The Unbearable Loneliness of Choice

Les Brown — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 19:22:58 +0000

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.