Midlife Mastery Journal

You may find managing important duties and issues a real ego-boost, but by staying focused on the big deals and neglecting the little facets of your life — in your career, your relationships and your own personal health and well-being — you risk descending into crisis and losing it all. Success in life and love depends entirely on how well you pay attention to the humblest of details.

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.

When communication breaks down, then relationships break down, and then both party’s sense of personal well-being becomes compromised. I truly believe that many work and personal relationships (and egos) could be salvaged, if people only worked at perfecting the skills involved in resolving conflict and coming to consensus (meaning, “I can live with that decision”).

It’s a life-long task to learn to extract the meaning from the words, especially when that meaning has little to do with what the words mean. The task very often involves listening with the heart and blocking out the head — particularly in very intimate relationships.

For those who have gotten themselves enmeshed in the emotional morass of the midlife transition and remain unaware of the dynamics of this volatile period of life (both men and women), the prospects for their relationships, even after twenty or thirty years together, may seem hopeless.