Midlife Mastery Journal » despair

As Your Worldview Turns

Les Brown — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 17:13:55 +0000

Yesterday was the Sunday after Christmas, and it was 50° F and bright sunshine here in Rehoboth Beach, so we drove down to Gordon’s Pond Park Seashore to take a walk on the pristine beach. The surf was high and came crashing in on the shore. Out on the water, it looked like there was a long line of white-capped waves being tossed up by the steady wind blowing from the northeast. Suddenly, the line of ‘whitecaps’ rose up into the air in a gray mass of fluttering wings: a cloud of thousands of seagulls hovering over the water for a few minutes, then slowly settling back down into a streak of white flotsam gently riding the swelling waves.

Just before Christmas, I had stumbled upon the archives from Craig’s friend and performance poet, Chasen Gaver, who had died of AIDS in 1989. In those archives were listed audio tapes of conversations that the two of them had recorded many years ago. Seeing the list of familiar tapes and documents now part of a university library collection really affected Craig. He mused, as we walked along the water’s edge, about how strange it was to be confronted by the person he had been back then, when life was new and full of possibilities and ideas were exciting and heavy with promise. Now, he said, he felt as though his life was in ‘maintenance mode.’ It made me think: this is the shift of perspective that sets maturity apart from mere adulthood. It’s a tough change of perspective to navigate successfully.

Can you remember the thoughts and feelings . . . the dreams . . . that you held so dear when you first emerged into adulthood? So much was new! There was the first time you decided that you had found your partner in life. There was your first foray into politics. Your first career. Your first trip abroad. I’m certain that you can think of many, many more ‘firsts,’ each one seeming to open up new vistas, new possibilities, new promises. Life, for adults, appears like an endless series of adventures. Remember “Don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it”? All the while that your storehouse of experiences grew more complete, your ideals were tested by time and adversity, your tastes became solidified, your hopes and desires tempered by disappointments.

The final transition between adulthood and maturity happens when reality forces you to acknowledge that your own hard-won experience has let you down. You look around at all that you’ve accomplished and built for yourself and suddenly you see it for the first time as emotionally and spiritually unsatisfying. You hunger for more, but everything that you’ve experienced and everything that you’ve learned tells you that ‘more’ promises only more of the same. The midlife awakening can be summed up in one sad phrase: “Is that all there is?”

Beneath the surface of your conscious thought, you’re experiencing a transformation. ‘Hope’ is robbed of the meaning that it once had for you. What’s there to hope for when you’re left trying simply to maintain yourself in a reasonable semblance of well-being until you die? What’s the point? Believe it or not, this is the turning-point of the midlife transformation. This is where you’re given the opportunity to create a solid foundation of maturity that goes beyond anything that you could have experienced in your adult life thus far. Leaving behind the ‘hope’ of the child waiting breathlessly for Christmas morning (mere anticipation) actually represents a major step forward toward living a fulfilling life. For the mature person, ‘hope’ comes to mean the kind of trust that sinks down into your very bones that, in the words of the Desiderata, “No doubt, the universe is unfolding as it should.” And that universe encompasses you.

The meaning that you find in your life no longer needs to be dependent on your accomplishments from yesterday. They helped to make you the person who you are, but now they are faded and stale. Regardless of how exalted your position, by now someone somewhere has bested you. Few accomplishments remain notable for very long. Nor can you expect to discover the meaning of your life in those things that you are yet to accomplish. By now, you’re way too cognizant of your limitations to imagine that you’ll be changing the world any time soon. What’s left? Ah! There’s the gift that you’re being given to ease you into maturity! What you discover that you have left is all you really ever had: today.

We’re looking at the immanent close of this year and our entry into the teens of this new century. Of course, we do well to look at where we’ve been this past year and where we hope to go in the one that begins anew in a couple of days. This could be a time for a radically new approach to living, if you want it to be. You have the choice of turning away from the regrets and recriminations that kept you stuck in the past and letting go of the fruitless habit of making ‘resolutions’ for the new year, as though you could by sheer act of will change what’s coming tomorrow.

There are but three decisions (call them ‘resolutions’ if you wish) that are worth making for this New Year (and every one thereafter): 1) to lay aside and detach yourself from every expectation that you may entertain about yourself or others for the coming year, 2) to deepen your personal contact with your Higher Power (however you may define that Power) Who supports and sustains you through every moment of your life, and 3) to live fully just for today in conscious awareness that you are an integral part of the divine plan and to do what you can to bring that sense of purpose to those around you who languish without it.

Every year at this time, I am reminded that my first coach, Lyn Christian, discouraged me from making New Year’s resolutions, and, instead, encouraged me to adopt a theme for the new year. Here is my theme for 2010: “Be the hope you wish to experience.” What will your theme be? E-mail your theme for 2010 to me at lbrown@proactivation.com, and I will share it with my readers. A happy and blessed New Year to you all!

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

The Well-Spring of Hope

Les Brown — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 13:00:00 +0000

Midlife doesn't just come upon you all of a sudden and without warning like a roaring avalanche. Instead, it creeps up on you gradually and quietly. In 1986, carbon dioxide gas, bubbling up from Lake Nyos, West of Cameroon, softly and silently killed more than 1700 people and livestock within a 25km radius. Most of those affected had no idea what had overcome them. Although you'll probably not experience those kinds of dire consequences at the onset of your midlife transition (it would probably not rob you of your life), you can, nonetheless, be robbed of much that you value and much that makes your life worthwhile.

As you progress more and more deeply into your midlife transition, if you haven't prepared yourself physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually for what's coming, you may find yourself plunging almost imperceptibly deeper into a sort of life-draining depression. You can almost feel your joy ebbing away, as those experiences that used to thrill and delight you now feel boring and silly. You may feel like some of your favorite pastimes are no longer worth the effort. For many men, even their sex lives become — dare I say it? — boring. How does it feel to be sinking ever deeper into a dull, gray sameness with no clear indication of a direction you could take that would improve your sorry state? It's a feeling not unfamiliar to many in the midlife transition: hopelessness. Is it any wonder that so many people try to break out?

I don't want to indulge in petty partisan politics here: but the contrast been last week and this feels extreme. If you've never had the feeling of being ashamed of your homeland, it's a 'must miss,' let me tell you! For many reasons that were brought out over the course of the US election campaign (and for many personal reasons), my sense of patriotic outrage after the attacks of September 11, 2001 faded into a sense of embarrassment — and even shame — over the face that this country presented to the rest of the world. I'm not speaking 'right' or 'wrong' here, only how I felt as a guilty bystander. I lived through the Viet Nam era (although I was a seminary student and exempt from the draft, many of my friends weren't). In fact, I watched most of the 1970's from my school abroad, which gave me an incredible 'world's eye view' of the whole complex of events. I saw what the world saw, and it taught me how (and why) to assume a global perspective. I saw and I felt what's been going on here for the last number of years, and it disturbed me badly enough to encourage me to make plans to expatriate. 'My country: love it or leave it?' "OK," said I, "just point the way."

I tell this personal tale only because so many others walk that same walk, only instead of a country or a society, it's a career, a position, a marriage, a family . . . something that weighs heavily on their shoulders and makes them want out. How bad does it have to get for a man to turn vicious toward the woman he loved (or a woman toward the man she loved)? How bitter do you have to feel to make you walk out on your career in the middle of the worst economic situation since the great depression? What kind of desperation do you have to reach to let yourself go into any of the -isms that afflict the middle aged? Yet, if walking (or running) away doesn't help the situation, what does? Take a look around you right now, and you'll see the answer perhaps more clearly than at any other time, at least in my lifetime. The answer to our midlife dilemma is simply this: hope.

I know that I've written about this before, but folks generally get the ideas of 'faith' and 'hope' all confused. When they say, 'I believe that God will get me out of this,' what they really mean is that they have hope that they'll escape the current predicament. So, when people talk about faith but really mean hope, what are they talking about when they talk about hope? Many times, I'm afraid, it's just wishful thinking: 'I hope I'll win the lottery this week.' 'I hope it won't rain on our picnic this afternoon.'

In that case, what is 'faith'? What is 'hope'? Faith implies the acceptance of things as they are ("the serenity to accept the things I cannot change"). Faith means having the conviction that, regardless of how things may appear, there really is a greater purpose behind it all, even if I can't see it. Life, with all deference to Samuel Beckett, is not a theater of the absurd. If 'faith' can be defined as 'acceptance', what, then, is 'hope'? My synonym for hope is trust. If you can accept that there is a higher or deeper purpose behind all the insanity that surrounds us, you should as easily (or with as much difficulty) conclude that whatever purpose brought you here to this moment has the power to sustain you. Where can you find the wellspring of hope in the world that can keep you from caving in to any avalanche of despair? More importantly, where can you discover the wellspring of hope that will keep you from giving up on your dreams, your career, your relationship, your family, or yourself?

The wellspring of your hope arises from your awareness of your own destiny and purpose. Think for a moment about the universe. There are only two possibilities: the universe is eternal (always was and always will be), or it had a beginning and will have an end. Everything that our studies of the universe have shown us tells us that the universe is finite, not infinite: that it had a beginning, and that it will have an end. What many people who acknowledge that much don't fully appreciate is that therefore the universe is vector: it must be expressed as a line with direction. It's going from somewhere (the Big Bang?) and it's going toward somewhere (the Big Crunch?). It therefore has a destiny. Once it set out on its course, it's destiny was established — not as a foregone conclusion, but as a distinct set of possibilities. If that's true with the universe, it's equally true for you.

Before you've gained an understanding of your personal destiny and purpose, or when circumstances have disrupted your equilibrium and left you questioning your own identity, no flight, no hiding, no covering up the issues will ever restore your hope to you. That can only happen by going within . . . deep within. The midlife transition, because it brings you face to face with both your hopelessness and your hope, is no place for sissies or cowards. It's essentially a spiritual transition that challenges your own self-awareness. 'Alright, you!' it seems to shout, 'Who are you really and what are you doing here?' If you're man enough (or woman enough) to stammer out an honest answer, if you have the strength to grapple with your life's purpose without flinching or pretense, you will — I promise you — uncover and unseal the wellspring of your hope. Once you've drunk deeply of hope, you'll never more have need either of cowardice or of despair. Hope, after all, springs eternal.