Midlife Mastery Journal

The fourth article in this series of “Cleaning Up Your Wreckage” takes on the deepest levels of pain that we experience from messing up. It’s a pain beyond the embarrassment, guilt and even shame of experiencing our fallibility. It comes from recognizing that, from now on, we have to see and to do things differently.

Learning to live life on life’s terms is the great spiritual lesson of midlife: allowing us to transition from the adult attitude of self-willed self-determination to the more mature and realistic attitude of acceptance and trust.

There are many ways to deal with the onset of emotional pain. Some approaches are more effective than others. There’s one approach that has all the advantages and few of the drawbacks: write it out.

Apart from outright physical and emotional abuse, I believe that many (if not all) relationships “on the rocks” could be healed under the right circumstances. From my perspective, the fact that this healing so often fails to take place could be an indication that one or both of the partners have stopped listening. Additionally, ceasing to listen indicates a spiritual problem.

We’re looking at the immanent close of this year and our entry into the teens of this new century. Of course, we do well to look at where we’ve been this past year and where we hope to go in the one that begins anew in a couple of days. It could be a time for a radically new approach to living, if you want it to be.