I believe that is one of the great lessons that comes with the midlife transition: the gift of perspective and the recognition that it’s not ‘all about me.’ On the one hand, my fears of imaginary consequences are overblown. I can put my concerns in my back pocket and walk through situations that used to terrify me, knowing that I’ll either survive or not and, either way, it’s OK. On the other hand, the world is not responsible for living up to my expectations of it. I can be satisfied with “progress not perfection.” As I look at myself, starting to heal from several days of feeling (as my grandmother used to say) “lousy!” and look at the ongoing journey I’m engaged in post-midlife and, at the same time, consider the midlife trials that our country is going through on this, it’s official birthday, I see some parallels and some interesting take-aways.

My life (like that of those around me whom I know well) has not turned out as I had ever imagined it would. If it had, I’d be celebrating over thirty-four years of active ministry somewhere in Florida along with the 234th anniversary of the republic instead of nursing a bacterial throat infection in Rehoboth Beach, DE along with my partner of 15 years (next month) and getting ready for a dinner party and trip to see the fireworks this evening. Needless to say, there have been a lot of false starts, a lot of pain, and a lot of missteps between there and here. Yet, I’m confident that, as mundane and ordinary as my life has turned out, it’s exactly where my Higher Power wanted me to be (based on the choices that I made, for good or ill). It’s certainly not a perfect life, but it’s a pretty good one, all in all, and an excellent reminder of how “the perfect is the enemy of the good enough.” It’s a lesson I’ve needed to learn in life, and a lesson that we might all benefit from reviewing from time to time.

This country — like life itself — is going through turmoil. It’s never been any different (and will never be different) no matter how many patriotic stories we tell ourselves. There’s an exhibit currently showing at the Museum of American Art in DC of paintings by Normal Rockwell. The art critic in today’s Washington Post analyzed those works very wisely: they don’t depict our country the way it used to be so much as the way we wish it had been. We’ve never actually been “one nation, under God, with liberty and justice for all.” People are currently yelling very loudly (and sometimes violently) about “taking back” our country, without really considering what they might be taking it back to. Only an historic perspective will bring to light the political, social and economic sins that besmirched our political past, and continue to challenge our political future.

Our childhood was never the idyllic place we imagined it to be. Time scours away the experience of the pain we endured, leaving us to imagine, in most cases, that it wasn’t so bad. Yet, for nearly all of us, it was that bad. Growing pains hurt. And what we experience in the midlife transition — that ripping away of our cherished hopes and dreams to be replaced with a more realistic but sometimes starker reality — is hardly an illusion, either. Whether it’s facing an evening of social entertaining with a nasty and energy-sapping sore throat or walking through the fears and disappointments of midlife or dealing with a social and political system that falls far from any ideal, we’re always faced with the same dilemma: what to do when it hurts.

What I love most about my chosen Christian faith is the belief in the incarnation: that the God of my understanding is no deistic watchmaker who simply wound up the universe and disinterestedly set it to unwind on its own. Rather, the incarnation suggests to me that God chose from the outset to assume the for him/herself the limitations that the very act of creation imposes on reality. Faith brings with it the stark and unavoidable comprehension that God hurts. The lesson I take from this is that, as God did not shrink back from creation because it involved suffering, that neither should we.  The only way to get beyond suffering is to go through it. We can’t solve any of the problems of our personal or political life by trying to go back to an imagined earlier, more ‘serene’ time. The only way forward is . . . well . . . forward!

Neither form of escapism will work for us as individuals or as a collective: neither hiding ourselves in an angry, fearful, self-interested protectionism, nor simply whining and complaining that things aren’t going our way. Like our Creator, the challenges of each day summon us to get our hands dirty with the work of creation: becoming involved with the process of progress, and never allowing ourselves to become complacent or discouraged by our lack of perfection. When it hurts, we take our medicine, share our pain with those who care about us, and do whatever we need to do to keep moving forward. It works when we’re sick; it works when we’re in personal transition; it works as a body politic. It’s called ‘courage‘, plain and simple: nothing grand, just bucking up, trusting God, and doing the next right thing.

And . . . have a glorious 4th of July!

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

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This is the essential factor in the process of cleaning up your mess that rejects all blame and rationalization and commits you to a long-term program of increasing your self-awareness, deepening your consciousness, and changing those thought patterns that led you to choose poorly in the past. This, in fact, is where “the rubber meets the road” in terms of turning your attention away from reactive efforts to make up for the past and toward proactive effort to create a different future for yourself and those who depend on you (within our outside of your conscious awareness of them). Here’s your opportunity to get down and dirty with yourself, to unearth those dark corners of your soul where you feel most unloved and vulnerable, and commit to taking positive action to addressing those areas with spiritual courage.

When you create wreckage, it’s because you’ve applied the wrong formula to the wrong problem. Merely accepting the right answer isn’t enough. You need to correct the formula you’re using so that the next time the problem comes up, your answer is the right one the first time. This is how we learn and grow: try, fail, correct, try anew, succeed!

Facing the wreckage of our lives with insight and the courage to “change the things I can” defines this stage of apology as an essentially spiritual step. Whenever we need or want to create transformational change, we need to recognize the profoundly spiritual nature of our work. It’s a totally “inside job” that has three essential phases to it: honesty, openness, and willingness. Each phase contributes its part toward empowering us to make substantial change toward authentic growth and the realization of our human potential. This is the essential process that drives us toward the fulfillment of our God-given destiny — as individuals and as humanity.

The first phase is a commitment to honesty. That demands that you lay aside all blame and rationalization and that you embrace the person that your behavior has revealed you to be with humility. Are you fearful? Are you angry? Are you arrogant? Are you self-centered? Are you judgmental? Seeing your character defects this way in the light of your bad behavior can bring up defensiveness: “You’d be that way, too, if you’d gone through what I did!” And yet, we’re not responsible for what others have done to us; however, we are responsible for our reactions to that. We all have built-in defense mechanisms that we created to keep ourselves safe when we felt overwhelmed. However, now, those defenses are no longer serving us. They’re keeping us from connecting effectively with others and with our Higher Power. When bad behavior reveals our own dysfunction, it’s time that we accepted our condition honestly. It’s time that we admitted the weaknesses that we’ve so long tried so hard to cover up to ourselves, to our God, and to another human being. Humbly admitting the truth will, indeed, set us free from it.

Openness implies the readiness to look at the situation differently: to change our minds and get rid of old beliefs that no longer serve us. As an adolescent, I was deeply angry at my father for not being close to me. All that changed when I went through a spiritual crisis that caused me to take another look at the situation. I discovered to my surprise that, from my earliest recollection, I continually judged my father’s attempts at connecting with me as insufficient. There was nothing he could do to satisfy my childish demands. In effect, I pushed him away, then blamed him for not being emotionally present. Once I saw my truth, I was open to looking at the situation from a new perspective: forgiveness became possible, and I was then free to reinterpret our relationship. Once you’ve taken an honest inventory of yourself, you have the opportunity to see the same old hurts and injuries and woundedness you have always experienced festering there, and to give those experiences new meaning. You don’t get to choose your experiences, but you do get to decide what they mean for you. When you discover a meaning that no longer serves you, you can be open to experiencing it differently. That’s your choice.

Finally, willingness is just another name for courage. Many people read spiritual and inspirational books. Self-help is a popular genre. You can read inspired authors like Maryanne Williamson and what they say can resonate in your heart and in your head. Then, like many people, you can file what you’ve learned away like you’ve done with the plots of novels you’ve read over the years, and go on about your business creating the same kinds of messes that have entrapped you numberless times before. Willingness means giving practical answers to these questions: 1) how am I going to think and feel differently about these experiences when they come up again? 2) what practical steps will I take to avoid falling into the same reactive traps I’ve set for myself in the past? and 3) what decisions will I make now about how I will change my behavior when these things come up again?

This stage of cleaning up your mess is all about change, and everybody hates change. It’s painful, it requires both humility and courage, and it takes a lot of energy to change. Yet, change is synonymous with growth. As grew from childhood to adolescence, we experienced physical ‘growing pains;’ as adolescents growing to adulthood, we experienced mental and emotional ‘growing pains;’ now, as adults growing into spiritual maturity, our ‘growing pains’ are at a far deeper level than ever before: at the spiritual level. That’s why one of the most important shifts of consciousness we can experience at this stage of life is to see our messes not as failures, but as spiritual growth experiences. Take to heart the old saying, “No pain; no gain!” and embrace your mess (with all the pain that goes with it) as a gift and your golden opportunity to make a difference in your world — for that is precisely what it is!

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

“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.

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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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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