If you're one of those no-nonsense people who's hard-working and minding your own business, doing everything you're supposed to be doing right now, chances are you're laying the foundation for a doozie. When you wake up one day with your career in a shambles, your family shattered and your health a wreck, at least you'll be able to say, "I worked for it, I owe it to myself, and nobody is going to deprive me of it."

Remember how, in Dickens' Christmas Carol, Jacob Marley showed old Scrooge the links in the chain that he carried that so weighed him down? He told his old business partner how he had forged each link by his own hand, one at a time. And you? What kind of a chain are you forging. On one of the sites where I publish my articles, a critic complained that my thoughts were meaningless double-talk and unrelated to real-world issues like getting yourself hired. I have to admit that he's right: it is meaningless double-talk until you come face to face with your own personal, individual crisis; then you find yourself at a loss as where you are, how you got there, and how in God's name you'll ever get out.

Do I sound a bit irritated? I am. I was just talking with a fellow on a major business network who told me, "The kind of information you're offering is the kind of important information that people need the most. Unfortunately, they're just not interested in it." He's right. People want down-to-earth, meat-and-potatoes, take-it-to-the-bank sorts of information. They want to know 'how to': how to prep for the job interview, how to get their spouses to do what they want them to do, how to do more of what they want to do in less time with fewer bad side effects. Yup! We got a pill for that!

God forbid that we should ask whether that job's right for you. How many years are you going to burn up doing something you hate that leads you nowhere? And, while you're at it, that family that 'you've gotta support' with that soul-killing job cops an attitude a mile wide because you've basically abandoned them, becoming emotionally unavailable. Of course, they're the bad guys in all this because, after all, they're not even grateful to you for breaking your back in a job you hate just 'for them'? And speaking of that back of yours, how well are you handling the extra weight?

Think about it: who's responsible for the mess you're in right now? (Don't tell me it's not a mess . . . I know better!) Maybe you should sit right down and write out a list of all the people who have treated you unfairly and who got you (and keep you) in your current state. Don't forget the government and those criminals on Wall Street. Once you've completed your list (how long is it?), you might want to go back and dream up some fitting punishments for each one of them. What would you like to do to them? When you're all done, here's what I suggest: that you tear up your list and get rid of it. It's crap. There's only one name that should be on that list and that's your own. You're not a victim, you never were, and all the drama in the world that you could create around the people you blame for your own decisions isn't going to deflect that responsibility one bit from where it belongs: on you.

If nothing changes, man, nothing changes! If you've let yourself get caught in a forest of problems and you never make the effort to climb a tree to see where you are, is it any wonder you find yourself going around in circles? You're stuck in a game of your own invention! You don't need more schemes and tactics to get you more of what you already have. What you need are new strategies that can provide you not only with a way out, but with a plan. Build your crisis brick by brick and decision by decision for as long as you want. But when you're finally sick and tired of being sick and tired, come talk to me.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

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midlife, mastery, crisis, responsibility, blame, drama, victim
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What were your plans over the last five years? Did it include career advancement? Salary increase? Investment opportunities? Travel? Vacations? Advanced education for you or your children? A new car? A new home? Maybe all of these? If you're like most reasonably affluent people, your future fit into a more-or-less neat equation: hard work + sacrifices + wise choices = security for you and your family. And also, if you're like most people, you woke up one morning to find that those rules that you've been relying on all this time suddenly no longer apply. Don't you hate when that happens?

It certainly doesn't make the situation any easier to bear to hear me say to you that the situation you find yourself in today was the result of a set of naive assumptions on your part. Learning about those assumptions inflicts a painful and expensive lesson. Planning for the future may always have been important to you; critically analyzing your present condition may have been much less so. The whole global economic bubble that just burst was based on unexamined assumptions. These big assumptions that drove the global markets were based on much more modest assumptions that, over the long run, caught every last one of us in their trap. The big assumption was (and still is) that quiet, steady, orderly growth is the default. It's the assumption on which most people build everything: including our sense of security. What life, the universe, and everything has to teach us boils down to this: quiet, steady, orderly growth throughout the universe is truly exceptional. What we think of as 'security' is, in universal terms, a freakish anomaly.

The world situation today does not represent a diversion from the norm. Rather, what we're experiencing right now is the norm. The bill of goods that you and I were sold about the June and Ward Cleaver existence that would reward a life of hard work and dedication has proven many times over to be a fraud. Yet that is the paradigm set with which you and I were equipped to head out into the world of our career, our family, and our sense of self-esteem. What's happening right now is not a diversion from the way things are supposed to function. In fact, the illusion of security is the diversion: for far too long it has diverted us from our real vocation: to be adaptable, responsible, humble citizens of the universe.

Midlife presents us with the perfect opportunity to lay aside our illusions and take up our true vocations. What, for too long, we've been dismissing as 'diversions' and 'distractions' to our lives has been, it now appears, the real deal. Here's an example that I believe most of us can relate with. Say your with a corporation (as owner or as employee), and your business is faced with a tremendous challenge that could mean a lot to you and to your fellow-workers. Especially if you sense that your future depends on the outcome of this project, you very likely devoted a tremendous amount of time and energy to it to make sure that you did all you could do to bring about success. Perhaps you even got short with family or friends who suggested that you were neglecting them. Fast forward a little while, and you're standing there outside of the door of the company with a pink slip in your hand, or with a "For Sale" sign on the darkened business door. How 'critically important' does all your hard work and dedication appear then?

Midlife transition represents the opportunity to reevaluate what's really important to you before your life has the chance to devolve into the chaos and drama that inevitably surrounds the breakup of your personal, private universe. That universe was always only partly real: the rest was a fiction you were taught by the cultural forces that surrounded you or the wishful thinking that permeates the universe that Madison Avenue wants to sell us (with a frightening degree of success). In that universe, there's an assumed contract: IF you do such-and-such, THEN you will receive so-and-so. In the universe of wishful thinking, if you work hard and don't get your 'dues,' then you've been cheated. You can rightfully consider yourself a victim of whatever powers spoiled your fun.

In the real world, no such contract exists. You come to learn that your life is whatever you make it and your intention to do the right thing counts more than any trophies on your shelf or in your bank account or portfolio. In a well-managed midlife transition, you leave the dreamworld of security behind you and embrace the uncertainties of a destiny and a purpose that's seldom if ever really clear to you. After all, just as what you thought of as 'distractions' were really the essence of your life, so where you end up in life has little relevance compared to the integrity with which you accomplished the journey. In the real world, there are no victims and no need for drama, except for those who have surrendered to the illusion that victimhood has somehow become their fate. If you can do it well, the midlife transition will ultimately teach you in the most realistic possible terms what "The Universe is unfolding as it should" (from Desiderata) really means.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

Technorati Tags:
midlife, mastery, illusion, diversion, distraction, drama, uncertainty, integrity
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