Midlife Mastery Journal » culture

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

Begin with the End in Mind

Les Brown — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 15:05:35 +0000

I want to begin my article series for 2010 with the seemingly incongruous topic of ‘death’ for a number of very good reasons, the first of which would be having experienced the unexpected death of a favorite aunt only a few days ago on New Year’s eve. We certainly had not planned on ringing in a new decade with the rituals of mourning. However, life’s vagrancies pay no attention to our expectations. Not ever. Yet, as a culture, we seem to be obsessed with the denial of death. We’ve even changed our language so that we don’t even have to use the word ‘death.’ Nobody dies anymore; they just ‘pass away.’ After all, isn’t ‘death’ such a morbid subject? We wouldn’t want to be accused of having a morbid fascination, would we? So, our culture attempts to expunge death from our lives by hiding it under platitudes and insulating us from it as much as possible by hiding (or hiding from) the evidence.

Obviously, the middle ages were infused with what we would consider a ‘morbid fascination’ with death. Yet, they had good reason. Back then, there was no hiding from the end of life. Infant mortality was rampant. Life was short (the average age at death was 40 or less). Disease swept Europe in waves that killed millions. Families encountered death ‘up close and personal’ on a disturbingly regular basis. Death, back then, was certainly an unavoidable ‘fact of life.’ Indeed, the experience of death and dying was so pervasive that it was completely taken for granted, like eating and sleeping. People needed to be reminded of what it meant: “Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris” (“Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return” from the Ash Wednesday service). Even Thomas Moore, Lord Chancellor of England under king Henry VIII adopted a famous motto: “Memento Mori” which is a Latin pun meaning both ‘remember death’ and ‘remember Moore.’ We would not want to return to the fixation on death that characterized the medieval period. Yet, what have we replaced it with?

Rather than focus on our ultimate destiny, leaving this world behind, our culture has chosen to replace a morbid fascination with death with a morbid fascination with rigidity and changelessness. Our obsession with youth and nostalgia for an imagined halcyon age in times gone by permeates not only our decision-making processes, but also the meaning we give to the world. ‘Living in the moment’ seems to have become ‘living for the moment.’ Haven’t our lives been overtaken by an obsessive pursuit of security? How much thought, time, and resources have you devoted in the past year alone to achieving security for yourself and your family? Even the term ‘conservative’ has shifted from meaning a forward-looking, thoughtful decision-making process to meaning a kind of reflexive instinct for self-preservation. Yet no real security can ever be attained.

Sometimes the discipline of philosophy can bring sense to a worldview that appears confusing and contradictory. Medieval writers spoke of everything having a ‘final cause.’ That meant for them that things happen with an inner logic that drives them forward (whether or not we are aware of what that logic might be). If the universe had a beginning (and it did: the ‘big bang’), then it has a direction and an inner logic that drives its evolution toward some future, as yet unknown, ending. The universe is not static. It’s not rigid. It’s not eternal and changeless. The only constant in the universe is change. Although its inner logic drives it forward, the universe’s unfolding is anything but ‘secure.’ All we know for certain is that, at some point, the earth will be swallowed up by the sun, the sun will become a super-nova and die, our galaxy will collide with others and be ripped apart, and the forces of the entire universe will eventually play themselves out. Time and space as we know it will just cease.

The life that each of us enjoys can be understood as a microcosmic reflection of the universe itself. For us, as for the universe, there is no security, no stability, no guarantees. We grow and our lives play themselves out by an inner logic over which we have only limited influence. We call that inner logic our ‘destiny’ — that complex of possibilities that work together with our understanding and our decision-making powers to determine who and what we shall become. We absolutely must look backward to appreciate where we’ve come from. However, in life, there’s no room for sentimental nostalgia. We can’t — we shouldn’t want to — turn back the clock. At midlife, youth has gone; good riddance! Enlightened by the past, our decision-making power must be focused rather on achieving our destiny whatever that may be. Our choices need to be forward-looking, enlightened by our ultimate end, our ‘final cause,’ our purpose for being here. Looking forward gives meaning and direction to our lives; obsessing on the past can only leave our lives frustrated, empty and meaningless.

Now how do we put this understanding into practice? One of Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits is, “Begin with the end in mind.” How will you know if you’ve made the right decisions if you have no idea where you’re going? As the Cheshire Cat told Alice, “If you don’t know where you’re going, then any path will take you there.” As you begin this new year, do you know where you’re going? Do you have a clear mission for your life? Defined values? A vision for the next 12 months? A written intention statement that defines specifically what you want to accomplish? If you knew that death awaited you a year from now, how much differently would you live today? Death overtook our aunt while the rest of us were making plans for the New Year. Every time something like that happens, it’s a wake-up call that reminds us with stark finality of our own end. Most of those who read this will end this year with a greater or lesser degree of success (however you choose to define that). Yet, some of you may not. Eventually, each of us will come to a year without a New Year’s eve. Should we not begin this one with the end in mind? Indeed, “Memento Mori.”

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

Your Cultural Obstacle to Growing Up

Les Brown — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 13:00:00 +0000

So you think you're all grown up, do you? You might want to think again! If you haven't navigated your way successfully through the midlife transition to full (physical, mental, emotional and spiritual) maturity, then you're not 'all grown up' . . . yet. There's no shame in growing, mind you. As a matter of fact, that's what life is all about: becoming. The only time that someone can truthfully say that you've 'made it' is after you're dead. Then, there's no more becoming to be done. You'll be finished, in every sense of that term. If you're not 'all grown up' yet, don't fret. Wear it as a badge of honor that, as the saying goes, "God isn't finished with me yet."

Whether you're 15 or 50, you've got some growing to do. Yet most people who are reading these words are unaware that there exists a huge obstacle to your growth that you're just taking for granted. In fact, if you're like most people, you probably think that this major obstacle to growth belongs there: it seems like that's the way things are supposed to be. What could it be that's slowing or stopping your progress, and yet you just accept it as 'normal'? It's your culture. You can think of your culture as the lens through which you view yourself and the world. Or, as sociologist Geert Hofstede describes it, it's the mental 'operating system' that underlies the functioning of your reason and your judgment. Culture consists, in fact, of the unconscious assumptions that you make about how life in this world ought to function. The sad truth is that, for most people, culture stands in your way, however: so long as you don't confront your cultural assumptions, you're powerless to grow beyond them.

Every group is a system, and every system has a specific culture (an 'operating system' of assumptions about how that system works). Whether or not you're aware of it, you live in a world of cultural diversity. Since you belong to a number of different groups simultaneously, the various cultures of those groups overlap one another — more or less peacefully — like overlapping circles, with you as the common element in all of them. Your groups (and cultures) include your family, your neighborhood, your community, your state, your nation, your religion, your ethnicity, your age group, your workplace, the organizations that you belong to, and on and on. When these overlap peacefully, it's because they share certain cultural points of view.

Some people call these points of view 'cultural values,' but not all of them are genuine 'values' at all. They may not be truly conducive to your personal, social, ethical or spiritual growth. In fact, very often, cultural viewpoints can be decidedly unethical. Ironically, when you're in a certain culture, even unethical standards seem 'right' because you share them with all the other members of your group. Bigotry is one perspective of that a number of cultural groups share and, to those groups, bigotry seems not only logical, but also virtuous. Just because an assumption has been adopted as a cultural norm, doesn't make it right.

Obviously, bigotry in all its forms (religious, ethnic, political, racial, sexual, etc.) can generally be recognized as what it is (by those not in its clutches). You may think that's an extreme example. There are cultural norms that are not so obvious, but which, over time, can also prove to be crippling. In our own Western culture, one crippling cultural assumption that can actually block your growth is an exaggerated individualism. I invite you to think of individualism not as something obviously valuable, but as one extreme of a scale that stretches from extreme individuation (isolation) all the way to communitarianism. At one end, only the individual exists and has importance; groups are just loose associations of individuals defined by and for their members. At the other extreme, only the group exists, and each individual's purpose and role is defined by and for membership in the group. These are cultural extremes, although they exist at opposite ends of one cultural scale. You can quickly see that 'individualism' describes Western (our) culture; while 'communitarianism' applies to a greater or lesser degree to many Asian cultures. Which one is right? Neither! However, if you aren't aware of where you (and your culture) stand on the scale, you'll remain powerless over it.

When scientifically measured, it's fascinating to realize that, in this aspect, our Western culture lacks moderation. It exists at the extreme end of 'individuation' scale. There are no major cultures on earth outside our own where individuality holds such high importance. That's one reason, according to Lalei Gutierrez and her husband, Phil Belzunce (recent guests on my internet radio program), that the United States holds such attraction for so many Asian people: it's the one place where they can go to discover who they really, truly are, apart from the cultural groups that have so strongly defined them. Lalei mentioned that in her native Philippines, 'you' do not exist. There is no 'you' apart from your family. In the West, Filipinos and Filipinas come to the United States hungry to discover their identity as individuals. In doing so, they do not leave their Filipino culture behind, rather they're seeking to broaden and enhance it.

For us who are native to this culture, the story (and the issue) presents itself quite differently. Everything we honor and value celebrates our individuality. Here are some specific characteristics of our individualistic culture (adapted from Geert Hofstede, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind) You look after yourself and your immediate (nuclear) family only. You derive your sense of 'self' from your own capabilities and achievements. From infancy, you think of 'I' rather than 'we'. Doing wrong leads to feelings of guilt and loss of self-respect, rather than shame and loss of face. Education teaches you how to learn rather than how to do. Your employment is a contract, rather than a social bond. You're hired and promoted according to rules and based on your skills, rather than on what social group you belong to. What you do is more important than whom you do it with. For us, these things seem self-evident. For most Asians, those statements are counter-intuitive. At both extremes of the scale, we find serious issues.

Over the past century, our culture has moved farther and farther away from group-centeredness (your family, your neighborhood, your religious and ethnic peers) and more toward isolationism. One casualty in this cultural drift has been the Western family. It is true that the family is in trouble, but not for the reasons that many people may think. Those who are most combative in the current 'culture wars' are certainly fighting for their own cultural interpretation of life in these United States, but keep in mind that there are, according to Hofstede, five cultural scales. Although individualization may be the cause of the breakdown of the nuclear family, it's the one cultural value all of us in the West can agree on, so we don't recognize its causal influence and look to other cultural difference as the cause. The more we encourage individualism, the more we further the breakdown of the social group (including the family), often in the name of saving it! What effect does an exaggerated individualism have on your personal growth?

For one thing, it deprives you of context. The meaning that we give to things and events in our lives derives primarily from the context in which we live, the same way words derive their meanings in contrast to the meanings of similar words. When we're deprived of context, we humans tend to give things and events random and arbitrary meanings. Like Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass, words tend to mean exactly what we want them to mean, nothing more and nothing less. Deprived of context, we tend to ascribe cause where no cause exists, and blame where it doesn't belong, like believing that lack of closeness in the family derives from lack of prayer in public schools rather than from that attitude that doing things together as a family (like meal times) is inconvenient for the individuals involved. You tend to think of loneliness and depression as maladaptive behavior in yourself rather than as a consequence of the disconnection from others, and the consequent lack of care and concern for others, that your culture demands.

And, at midlife, individualization leads directly to a kind of powerlessness, especially among men, where individualization as a value has been honed to a fine art. Men must not admit weakness. Men must not ask for help. Men must not share with others their feelings or inner struggles. Men must not be vulnerable. All of these deadly attitudes are a direct result of our cultural obsession with exaggerated individualization. Our culture's unreasonable expectations may be focused on men, but neither sex is completely free of its stultifying effects.

In your own life, take a look at how you manage a few simple interactions (since individualization is fundamentally a relationship issue). First, how often and how easily do you ask for help? Does it come naturally? Are you comfortable doing it? How far do you go to avoid it? Next, how do you give or receive complements? Although you'd think that being complemented would be a recognition of your achievement as an individual, it is rather a stark reminder of your vulnerability in relationships. The more individualized you have become, the harder it is for you to complement or to be complemented. Next, how often do you use the words, 'have to,' 'got to,' 'need to,' etc.? These are words that pretend to be polite excuses, whereas they're really masks behind which you hide your self-interest. A more relational person won't mind saying the truth: "I want to." Likewise, and finally, how often do you use the word 'can't'? Again, it's an excuse so that you won't need to recognize your social connectedness. What you really mean, but decline to say so, is 'I won't!'

How does all this stunt your growth as a mature individual? The answer is clear so long as you keep in mind that navigating the midlife transition from self-absorbed adulthood to other-centered maturity involves a relational process. You can't (not because you don't want to, but because it's not emotionally or spiritually possible) make this transition alone. Yes, you have to make all the critical decisions along the way, but unless you've developed the capacity to be vulnerable, to share with others what's going on with you, to ask for help, and to offer genuine gratitude and apology, you'll lack both the courage and the context to make — and to stick to — the tough decisions. Look around you at those whom you know who are stuck and struggling. Can you now see how, in most cases, their growth is being stunted by their cultural assumptions? Now, what about you? What cultural changes (changes in attitude and assumptions) do you need to make to put your own growth back on the fast track? And whom are you going to ask for help to do it?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

The Masculine Mystique – Field of Lost Dreams

Les Brown — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 17:11:47 +0000

Each of us begins his or her life at the center of a perfect 3-pronged conspiracy. Born into an established environment, you immediately commence your cultural formation. After the initial explosion of neural and synaptic formations, for the first three years of your life, your environment plays a ‘use-it-or-lose-it’ game with your neural pathways: those that meet little external challenge tend simply to fade away, leaving those pathways most in demand to serve your life-long needs. In the game of your life, genetics determine the rules, and only the most essential players make the final cut.

The second element in the conspiracy that unwittingly determines your future was provided you by your family of origin. Only at midlife can you really appreciate how uncommon the ‘common sense’ approach that they took to raising you really had been. Every glance, every word and gesture, every fragment of information that they provided you came packaged within a set of cultural biases of which they had little or no conscious awareness. Through their eyes, you gained your own appreciation of the world into which you were born. Through their example, you learned how to interface with that world.

Finally, the last element that set your worldview in concrete arrived under the guise of your formal education. There, as you assimilated the knowledge that was made available to you, you also absorbed the presuppositions and the value systems in which this knowledge was embedded. Presented with an outlook that sold itself as ‘objective facts’, you learned to distrust your intuition, to discard socially discordant values, to accept the assumptions of the crowd over the evidence of your own perceptions and observations. You learned to replace your own hopes and dreams with more socially-acceptable goals. Together, these three influences (like the sheep in George Orwell’s Animal Farm) taught you to bleat, “Objective good; subjective bad.”

Everybody — regardless of who you are — wends his or her way through life toward the midlife transition carrying this cultural baggage. Some of it gets dropped off during adolescence when rebellion against authority provides the cover you need to challenge social values for the first time. However, you didn’t know what you didn’t know, and, no matter how rebellious and ‘counter-culture’ you may have been then, the deeper layers of self-distrust most likely survived intact. In fact, it often happens that, during adolescence, your deeper fears about challenging social expectations become so threatening to you that you may transform them into ideologies that you’re willing even to fight and die for.

Incidentally, here’s were the ‘misfits’ among us — those whose life experience and worldview contrast starkly with the cultural ‘party line’ — actually have an advantage. While most people are happily rationalizing their way into acculturation, these souls are unable to perform the ‘doublethink’ necessary to accommodate cultural requirements. Their subjective experience refuses to be extinguished by contrary acculturation. They stubbornly refuse to be mastered by a world that insists that the elephant grazing in their living room is only a stain on the carpet. For many reasons, their refusal to abandon their personal experience in favor of what they ‘ought’ to feel can be extremely challenging to cultural purists. After all, these people challenge the very values and assumptions upon which that culture is based. Psychologically unstable and unprincipled people aside, wise cultures see these individuals and minorities as spiritual visionaries; ignorant cultures only see them as ‘perverts.’

Midlife offers you the opportunity to rediscover and, once again, embrace your uniqueness. While you’ve been spending your life striving to identify yourself with your cultural and social role, midlife whispers in your ear that it may no longer be necessary. While your cultural assumptions provide a healthy and necessary framework — like a hothouse — where you can grow roots, strong branches, bloom and bear fruit, after a time, they can also constrict and strangle your progress. At some point, the stakes and wires that helped the sapling grow straight have to be pulled away before they cut into the trunk of the tree. At midlife, you’ve grown big enough and strong enough to change your mind. Neither your culture nor the ‘objective’ world owns you nor do they provide you with your destiny. As a mature person, passing through the midlife transition, you can separate yourself from your various roles (mother, father, son, daughter, provider, nurturer, protector, defender, etc.) and begin to explore the person who lies underneath all that.

For men, here’s the point where too often a stake is driven through the heart of an evolving maturity. Masculinity is more than secondary sexual characteristics. Masculinity itself is a role . . . much more than femininity is. The triple-threat that men have lived under (in most cultures) for untold ages has convinced men that to challenge the masculine role (as defined by environment, family, and society) means that you’re not a ‘real man’ and, therefore, you have no objective worth. If a man can’t challenge his most fundamental role (‘masculinity’) and redefine it in terms of his own hopes and dreams, he’ll never successfully be able to challenge any of the roles that are dependent on that one, especially the roles of protector and provider. So long as this masculine role — this masculine mystique — remains unquestioned and unchallenged, not only will the deepest longings of his heart and the primordial dreams that spring from them remain unfulfilled, ultimately, so will the pursuit of his life’s destiny.

The shame that results from a man’s challenging his understanding of masculinity (or from having it questioned by people in his social environment) tears painfully at a man’s self-image and self-respect. It can be so painful that when it becomes unrelenting it can sometimes even drive men to suicide (and men are much more successful at suicide than women are, because their weapons of choice are so much more effective). As painful as this male self-doubt directed toward the ‘masculine mystique’ may be, it remains a temporary pain that vanishes once you’re courageous enough to confront it head-on. If you manage your midlife transition well, you’ll discover that you’re not your roles, nor do your roles define you. On the contrary: those men who fail this ultimate test of manhood by retreating into a culturally-defined ‘masculinity’ find themselves living with a much more intense and protracted pain: the ultimate realization of dreams and longings unfulfilled, a unique and precious destiny denied, and a life devoid of meaning beyond its surface conformity. An unchallenged ‘masculinity’ is the potter’s field where the unfulfilled dreams of a lifetime are interred.

Why Men Get Lost in the Clouds

Les Brown — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 20:24:54 +0000

Just before we moved from Connecticut to Delaware (where we now live), I was only about a month away from earning my instrument rating on my private pilot’s license. From everything I’ve heard, the instrument rating is the most difficult rating for a private pilot to achieve. If I were to characterize the course content for the instrument rating in two words, I’d have to say "precision navigation" is the key.

When you’re first practicing for instrument flight . . . particularly shooting an instrument approach to an airport, you’re flying with your instructor using either a ‘hood’ or ‘foggles’: wearable devices that restrict your vision so that you can’t see outside the cockpit of your aircraft. It simulates the zero-visibility conditions that you’d encounter in real instrument flight. Only toward the end of your extensive training period will your instructor take you up into real instrument conditions (the likelihood of experiencing debilitating spacial disorientation is rather high for a novice — like in the fatal situation experienced by John Kennedy, Jr. some years ago). I have to tell you, though, that there are few experiences more gratifying than, for the first time, breaking out of a true cloud cover and seeing the end of your runway appear directly in front of you perfectly aligned for landing.

One of the features that gives aircraft navigation — and instrument flight — the extreme precision that it has today (and also one of the reasons why a single pilot becomes so incredibly busy during an instrument approach) is the redundancy of navigational methods and devices currently available. There’s a variety of different systems, compass (dead reckoning), ADF (automatic direction finder), VOR (very high frequency omnidirectional radio beacon), GPS (global positioning system), and ILS (instrument landing system), just to name some. Newer systems are continuing to be introduced as avionics become more sophisticated. The higher the redundancy factor, the more accurate (and trustworthy) the navigation.

How can we relate all this to men at midlife? It doesn’t take much of stretch of imagination to be able to relate decision-making during the midlife transition to navigating through a thick cloud cover. Disorientation in midlife can have the same kinds of fatal effects as in powered flight, only in the latter case, the consequences come at you with a good deal more suddenness. The technical term is ‘powered flight into terrain.’ That’s a fancy name for a crash. In the case of disorientation during the midlife transition, it may spell the end of a career, the loss of a precious relationship, or much, much worse. In that case, how do you navigate your way through the clouds of midlife? How do assure yourself of accuracy for your navigational decisions? And where are you going to get the redundancy you’re going to require to avoid getting lured off course by a rogue signal?

For guys, this whole process can be too demanding. After all, men are culturally programmed to be ruggedly individualistic and self-reliant. For whatever reasons, our English-speaking North American culture uses the incredibly powerful psychological motivator shame to reinforce men’s required isolation. If you dare to allow yourself to become reliant on others in any meaningful way, says our culture, then you’re not a ‘real man’. You’re a cultural outcast and pariah, not only to other men but, more particularly, to your own sense of masculinity. Remember the difference between ‘guilt’ and ‘shame’: guilt is the negative emotion you feel when you recognize that you have done something bad; shame is the negative emotion you feel when you begin to believe that you are bad (incompetent, defective, inadequate, or unacceptable).

Whereas women are very much accustomed to re-setting their inner moral compass by their constant interrelationships with trusted people in their environment: people with whom they can be comfortable sharing their innermost secrets and most hidden fears, men have no such facility. What’s the advantage that women have in their capacity to share their secrets with one another? It gives them the sense that they’re not unique, and that others are dealing with the same issues that they are and at the same time. It’s not about going around from person to person ‘shopping’ for advice; the advice that’s exchanged turns out to be more or less irrelevant. It provides women with that sense of redundancy in their moral navigation systems that helps them to gain (and maintain) a sense of confidence in their own right judgment.

In most cases (except where they are introduced to a depth of personal spirituality that goes quite deeply into the core of their moral decision-making process), men have to fly by the seat of their pants, guessing and hoping that they’re at least close to being on-course. When your own inner compass is your sole navigational aid, the kind of pin-point accuracy that I’ve been talking about here remains nearly inaccessible to you. Think about how often your interpretations of other people’s behavior winds up being off the mark. It’s the old story of "What’s the matter with you, are you blind???" And the answer comes back, "Yes." Without the depth of communication that women enjoy, men just have to watch one another from the outside and guess as to what’s really happening inside. There’s not much chance for precision there.

It’s time that 21st Century men get over their cultural biases and start adopting an attitude that’s less arrogant, self-reliant and shame-based, and adopt a healthier attitude that’s more personally vulnerable and more open to others’ experiences and viewpoints. Bouncing your problems and the decisions that you’re being faced with off other people, and allow them the possibility of doing the same with you can provide you with the kind of navigational redundancy that every instrument pilot demands. If nothing else, the midlife transition is marked with the inability to rely on all the old assumptions, habits, and behavior patterns that used to get you by. In midlife, you’re genuinely flying blind. If you want to get through it without a ‘hard landing,’ it would benefit you to learn new and other-centered ways of evaluating your choices and making the decisions that will effect (for better or worse) the rest of your life . . . starting now.