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!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

For men, the midlife transition offers a critical opportunity to connect — for the first time — with the Big Picture. Think of all the dissociations that hit you during midlife: dissociation from your naive imaginings of what marriage and family life would be like; dissociation from the mad scramble to land that dream job in your perfect career; dissociation from imaginings of what accomplishments you were going to get to enjoy by this time. One by one, your assumptions and the expectations that relied on them have been stripped away. Whatever bright goals you had been striving for have, by thins time, been tarnished by the brutal forces of time and the realities of life. Even your highest achievements never turned out to meet your expectations. Perhaps, as you look at your personal world at midlife, you feel cheated and resentful. "Is that all there is?" you may well wonder.

Midlife is your invitation and your opportunity to rise above the world as you know it and to see it from an entirely new perspective: equally as revolutionary as that 'Earth Rise' photograph was when we first saw it. The new perspective on the Earth that we obtained from space is very analogous to the shift in perspective that the midlife transition forces on you in its own way, challenging you to accept it. Of course, you don't have to change anything if you decide not to. After all, the Flat Earth Society still has plenty of members on its rosters. Like any serious shift in perspective, you're going to gain some new viewpoints as you're being forced to relinquish others. Your challenge boils down to whether or not you're have the courage to see things differently and to put aside many of your most closely-held beliefs in the process. I want to provide you with a little list of some of the things you'll have to let go of.

First and foremost, you're going to have to give up the belief that anyone is doing anything to you (or ever has done anything to you). I'm talking about a shift in your belief system that goes beyond mere forgiveness. Forgiveness, after all, recognizes that someone has attacked you unjustly, then attempts to exercise some sort of magnanimous 'gift' that you can award to the perpetrator. You 'find it in your heart' to let go of your injury. The problem with this approach rests in the (false) belief that you have been an innocent victim of the injustice. To pass successfully through midlife requires that you give up that belief and come to the appreciation that painful events come to every life (and you're no special exception) and that, whatever happened to you came only as a learning experience that, as an adult you're able to see simply as one of the myriad of patterns that have been woven into the fabric of your life. Furthermore, if you're capable of analyzing your (adult) experiences deeply enough, you'll often find that you also had some complicity in the painful experience.

This brings us to a very delicate but critical issue: what about painful things that should never have happened to you when you were a child, but did? The other day, I heard the heart-wrenching story from a young woman who, as a child, was abused at home and shuffled beck and forth between foster homes. It was the story of childhood horrors that no individual should have had to endure. Why should that have happened to her — or to any of the other thousands of abused infants and children who suffer from the inexcusable behavior of so-called 'adults' who should have known (and done) better. No one can answer the question, "Why me?" In the realm of human tragedy, the only (admittedly cold-hearted) response has to be, "Why not you?" No one gets out of childhood unscathed. The only differences are the depths and severity of the wounds. The only lesson that we can take away from all this is that blaming others for the pain (and damage) that was caused only exacerbates the situation. It relieves nothing. Even when we have absolutely no responsibility for the misfortunes that we're forced to undergo, we have full responsibility for how me manage the effects of our woundedness. Before we're able to move forward, we need to let go of all blame-seeking, and focus entirely on accepting the hand that life has dealt us and playing it the very best we know (or can learn) how to.

Accepting that every single thing that has occurred in your life amounts to little more than an opportunity to grow into a stronger, more responsible and wiser person, can release you from the corrosive effects of playing the blame game. Resentment and revenge always compound your pain and injuries and make your condition worse. Often, these negative reactions cause more harm to yourself than they do to the object of your hatred. What, on the contrary, would happen if you were able to accept the fact that you are ultimately invulnerable, living or dead? All pain — even that afflicted on 'innocents' — serves only as an invitation to growth. When you step back from the minute details that consume you — and particularly the details of 'who did what to whom' — you can suddenly discover that the world that surrounds you results, to a very great degree, from your own decisions. You created this 'world', and you can re-create it at will. That's the lesson that the midlife transition exists to teach you. Your victimhood results not from the fact that the world's problems are too big, but that your vision of your place the world is too small. The challenge to your courage comes with the realization that you could change everything if you so chose.

The Judeo-Christian Scriptures teach that God created humankind in "His own Image and Likeness" granting to you and me the power of creation. Accepting that fact at face value (as most of us are wont to do) leaves us in a quandary about what we want our creation to look like. Most people (especially we men) know what we think others expect our world to look like, but, at the same time, they remain clueless as to what they themselves want their world to look like. When other people's expectations are removed from the equation (as they are at midlife) it comes down to having to decide for yourself. You can no longer blame others for your plight; you can no longer rely on others to let you know what it is you're 'supposed' to do; you're forced, maybe for the first time, to confront what it is that you really want out of life, and can be terrifying to wake up to the fact that you really don't know. When you arrive at that point, you've come to the real midlife crisis. It's a crisis of self-knowledge, and how you resolve it will determine what your world will look like for the rest of your life. You get to see your world as you've never seen it before: once again for the first time.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

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Most likely, you handle a lack of energy (or lack of sufficient energy to do everything) by cutting back. What you decide to cut back on depends on your priorities and, in their turn, your priorities depend on your values. If you’re like most people, your highest value will be maintaining financial security. Almost any other fear will most likely take a back seat to the rear of economic insecurity. If you wonder about this, just ask yourself how well you maintain your personal health regime and your quality family time when your busininess or career obligations call.

There’s a rule in common law that says, "Nemo dat quod non habet", or "Nobody gives what he hasn’t got." In this discussion, I want to apply this rule to the empty well of creative energy. You can’t expend the quantity of creative energy that you lack. In life, it’s your creative energies that produce the sense of joy and satisfaction that makes your life worth living. Of course, you also need to have purpose and direction; but purpose and direction and all the most exceptional plans in the world won’t do you a bit of good without the creative energy that you need to be able to bring them to fulfillment. Even our best plans sometimes go awry (as Robert Burns reminds us), but the difference between having stuff happen that gets in our way and running out of creative ‘juice’ is that the latter is almost entirely under our control.

Stephen Covey (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) talks about the ‘emotional bank account’ that we build up in our interpersonal relationships: how we make deposits, and how we make withdrawals. There’s another bank account that we have that isn’t mentioned in Covey’s book, our personal bank account of creative energy. Whenever we engage in any creative endeavor, we make a withdrawal from our own emotional bank account. If we’re not making periodic deposits, sooner or later, the well will run dry and we’ll find ourselves working harder, enjoying it less, showing less creativity and poorer results. Instead of being buoyed up by a sense of accomplishment, we’ll be further dragged down by a sense of shame and dissatisfaction as we recognize that we’re not putting forward our best work.

How can you refill your depleted creative bank account? Ironically, it takes work. It requires that you educate yourself in the appreciation of the arts . . . all of them. The list of artistic and cultural possibilities is extensive. There’s painting and sculpture, music, dance, theater (drama, comedy, musical theater, opera), literature (short stories, novels, poetry), film, architecture (residential, commercial, landscape) and interior design, just for a start. Which of these are your favorites? Of these, what do you know of their history? Which periods and artists are your favorites? Can you explain clearly why?

Are you wondering why the arts are so important for a busy person like yourself to spend your precious time on? The answers lie at the core of what it means for us to be human. First of all, ever since Howard Gardner (Intelligence Reframed and Frames of Mind), we’ve known that human beings have not one or two intelligences (‘verbal/linguistic’ and ‘logical/mathematical’), but nine intelligences all of which need to be both fed and exercised. What would your life be like if you never read, never spoke or were spoken to, and never had to figure out any problems. Wouldn’t you be afraid that your brain would atrophy? Those are just your linguistic and mathematical intelligences. What about the other seven? Are you starving them?

Additionally, the various arts stimulate and feed you not only intellectually, but emotionally as well. Artists challenge, inspire, disturb, disrupt and even upset you through their works. They confront you with the raw energy of another (foreign) creative mine. When you take the time to understand and appreciate their message (whether or not you like it is very secondary, if not entirely irrelevant), your spirit is fed and you grow emotionally just from your contact with another creative soul. Without that contact — without that stimulus — your own soul is prone to atrophy. If you’re experiencing the midlife transition as a period of dryness, boredom and lack of enthusiasm for much of anything, you may be experiencing a kind of cultural and artistic deprivation.

Am I suggesting that, when you feel depressed and empty, you should immediately go out and immerse yourself in the arts (to the detriment of your business, your health and your home life)? I’m obviously not suggesting that. But I do stronly hold that, unless you’re taking the time and spending the energy now (while you’re feeling pretty good about your life and your work), you’ll sooner or later have to deal with that dry, empty well of emotions I described earlier. I’ll go farther: education in the arts is not an optional luxury that we can just throw in the trash when our school budgets get too tight. We wouldn’t think about doing that with language and mathematics; why would we be willing to do away with education in the other intelligences? Our society — and humankind as a whole — can’t afford to raise more emotional and cultural neanderthals. So, here’s my closing question: what plans do you have this week to keep your well from running dry?

H. Les Brown, MA, FCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

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Sometime when you’re feeling important, sometime when your ego’s in bloom,
Sometime when you feel that you must be the most important one in the room,
Take a bucket and fill it with water, put your hand in it up to your wrist,
Pull it out and the hole that’s remaining is the measure of how you’ll be missed.

You can splash all you want as you enter, you can stir up the water galore,
Pull it out and its really amazing, the hole is remaining no more.
The moral of my story is simple, do the best at whatever you can,
But always be sure to remember, there’s no indispensable man.

In the 1970′s, anthropologists from the Louis Leakey team named a newly-discovered hominid species predating any other man-like creatures previously known as ‘homo habilis‘, the ‘handy man,’ because of simple tools found among the remains. The human species has always been identified with tool-making at a level and to a degree not found among other primate species. To our very core, human beings are creative (intentional) creatures. Not only that, but we pass our creations — our technology — down from generation to generation, each iteration adding its own characteristic advances to the generations that have gone before. It’s not enough for humans merely to reproduce: even bacteria can do that. No, we humans mark our passage through this world by leaving behind a creative legacy that’s uniquely our own.

Starting a new family (even if it consists of only two members) represents a hugely significant milestone in any individual’s life. For some cultures, it serves as the passageway from childhood to adulthood. I clearly remember a schoolmate of mine, a seminarian from Tanzania, son of a tribal chieftain. Even though he was nearly thirty years old, he was considered a child at home among his people, since he had not married. Once he was ordained a priest, and the village celebrated the moment with a festival as grand as any VIP wedding, only then was he treated as an adult (and even welcomed to sit among the community elders). Still, this passage, significant as it may be, says nothing at all about you or me as distinctly human.

What sets you apart from every other creature on the planet has little to do with your relationships or even your progeny. What elevates you above and beyond pond scum derives entirely from the creative contribution that you’re willing and able to make to the furtherance of humanity. It’s all about your creative legacy. From ancient times, almost all cultures have recognized that some men and women have received an inner summons to forgo bearing children and to serve as a reminder to the rest of humanity that we have a higher purpose here. Regardless of whether or not you accept the responsibilities of parenthood, you can never be absolved of your responsibility to make a positive contribution to the whole of humanity.

Instead of being the butt of endless jokes, in a more spiritually aware society, the midlife transition should be cause for a much more significant celebration than either marriage or ordination (although perhaps that was the original focus of ordination to elder-hood). This passage into maturity enables you to take a step outside the ‘dog-eat-dog’ world of wealth and power, and outside the hassles of raising a family, to concentrate more deeply on crafting your legacy. What will you, after all, leave behind? Bank accounts, investments and property evaporate very, very quickly. They’re all a part of that ‘hole in the water’ I spoke about. Here’s a great Truth: you don’t need enormous wealth or a large family to leave a significant legacy that will affect generations to come. None of them even need to know your name. All that really matters derives from the care and insight with which you interact with those around you.

Think for a moment about the significant people in your life: it could be parents or grandparents, teachers, religious leaders, inspirational celebrities, neighbors or friends. How many of them were rich or famous? How many of them were recognized as major corporate successes? I’d be amazed if any of them were any of those things. Yet, you have a uniquely significant gift that all the rest of us are waiting for, whether or not you or we are aware of it. Your midlife transition invites you to explore and experience that creative spark within you that you’ve been ignoring and putting aside for far too long. Every day you hesitate to grab hold of it means another piece of your precious legacy has been forever lost. You don’t need to be just another hole in the water; you can make a difference; you can leave behind a legacy that transforms the world. So, what, exactly is it that you’re waiting for?

H. Les Brown, MA, FCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

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Actually, the state of education in the US bears eloquent testimony to our practical values. I say ‘practical values’ to distinguish them from our ‘theoretical values’, which are far different. Theoretically, we value hard work, education, moral rectitude, the flag, mom, and apple pie. In practice, we value entertainment. That’s what we spend most of our thoughts, time, and wealth on. Entertainment heads up this list of our practical national values because that’s what we worry most about.

But I digress. In an age that would rather cut educational budgets rather than inconvenience the population (remember those opinion polls and all those up-coming elections), Popular wisdom insists that the remaining dollars be spent on reading, math, science and (the often-unlisted essential) sports rather than wasting them on artistic frivolousness like fine arts, music, literature, dance, or theater. These things don’t contribute to the gross national product, they don’t enhance our position in international academics, and they aren’t amenable to measurement by standardized testing. In short, they’re a waste of time and money.

Sadly, this all-too-short-sighted (but fairly prevalent) opinion can have a devastating affect on people experiencing the midlife transition. I say this because even when ‘practical’ knowledge has yielded its harvest of career and income and all the toys and bells and whistles that come with it, the human spirit discovers itself surprisingly unsatisfied, overburdened, and yet longing for more. What you’ve gained and what you have suddenly turn into burdens. The more ‘stuff’ you accumulate, the more it owns you: it demands your energy and attention to maintain it. The promise of contentment that it made to you once upon a time remains disturbingly unkept.

There’s a hunger in the human soul that material things just cannot satisfy, and it’s only at midlife, when you’ve done a good deal of your accumulating, that you begin to notice it. It’s a hunger to create as well as to be nourished by deeper — soul-stirring — meaning. Humans just aren’t fully human without aesthetic and artistic expression. The famous stone age cave paintings of Lascaux weren’t put there by some hired interior designer. They weren’t zoological diagrams, blueprints, or productivity-enhancements. They were aesthetic creations that somehow communicated something far deeper and more fundamental than words could ever convey between human souls. Even today, they somehow very deeply touch our common humanity — the essence of who we are — across vast distances of time and space.

There’s a longing in your heart to create and to leave something of yourself (your true inner self) behind that goes beyond mere reproduction. Your children are certainly your legacy, but is that all you want to leave behind? What’s the price you pay in your soul for stifling your inner creativity? What do you ultimately lose, and is it worth it?

Furthermore, the undeniable longing that may lie hidden and unrecognized until midlife also expresses itself in a hunger to be fed with meaning that goes far beyond the chatter of the evening news or the talking heads arguing endlessly about issues that will very soon be ‘yesterday’s news.’ Despite all the budget cuts and program droppings of our bottom-line-obsessed society, people still dig into their souls, distill what they find there (the attractive as well as the repulsive), and serve up the potent liquor of raw emotion in all the arts I listed earlier. Time and energy spent with the arts is only wasted if you measure the results in dollars and cents. But the value of dollars and cents doesn’t hold up well against the challenges of midlife. Then it’s the longings of the soul that take precedence: longings that need to be satisfied, otherwise something even more precious than life itself may be lost: your humanity.

H. Les Brown, MA, FCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

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