Midlife Mastery Journal » evolution

Nostalgia, the Enemy of Hope

Les Brown — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 16:24:16 +0000

As I write this, Christmas 2009 is less than a week away. It’s the time of the year that’s most steeped in tradition and nostalgia for times gone by. How many times recently have you heard the song, “The Most Wonderful Time of the Year”? One verse goes:

“There’ll be scary ghost stories
And tales of the glories
Of Christmases long, long ago”

Nostalgia — the recalling of pleasant emotions from times past — is a wonderful part of the human experience, and imparts a wonderful warmth and intimacy to the close of the calendar year, especially in latitudes where warmth and sunshine are in very short supply. Nostalgia allows us to relive moments of our past with simplicity and purity, memories stripped of the inconveniences of real life that prevented us from fully enjoying those experiences at the time. Nostalgia is a creative enterprise, a cooperative effort of the memory and the imagination, that constructs a mythical world of times gone by out of fragments of events and wishful thinking.

As an emotional vacation, nostalgia is harmless enough. Only when it becomes a way of life — as it easily can — does it become a threat to our most precious gift: the future. Nostalgia the drug, when taken in too large a dose, can cause either a compulsive longing (when a return to the “good old days” becomes our fixation) or a sense of seething indignation (when we imagine the indignities and deprivations we once suffered), or both. When nostalgia in either of these forms becomes a way of life, particularly during the midlife transition, it can effectively lock the future in a stranglehold from which it cannot escape. Then hope — not wishful thinking, but the real hope that represents trust in a loving God — suffocates as well.

Each of us is engaged in a life-or-death struggle, and what’s at stake is nothing less than our very souls. If that statement sounds like religious fundamentalism, it is actually entirely the opposite. Our human souls are essentially creative, and meant to partner with a loving Creator to design and build a future of incredible possibility. We are expressions of the conscious driving force guiding and directing the evolution of the universe, no longer on the physical plane or the animate plane but in the realm of consciousness itself. As the mystic John of the Cross wrote allegorically about spiritual growth in terms of an ascent of a mountain (in The Ascent of Mount Carmel), after a certain level of growth, “beyond here there are no paths.” All the signposts of the past point us only to this decision-point. They can point us no further. Beyond this point, we walk only in blind trust of the Power that brought us this far. This is the maturity into which the midlife transition transforms us. Spiritual maturity is no country for the feint of heart.

Lurking in the background, calling to us ever more insistently, the voice of nostalgia warns us about going forward. If the creative Spirit is driving each individual forward in his or her personal evolution, then nostalgia, pulling us away from the unknown and back toward the safe haven of our imagination-scrubbed past, represents the forces of death and decay, masquerading as safety, security, self-interest, and even righteousness. Religious fundamentalism, whether represented by radical Moslems, Hindus, Christians, Marxists, Nazis, or free-market economists, represent men and women devoid of hope and without trust in Providence, however one chooses to define It. Rather, they represent humankind in midlife crisis, seeking quick and easy answers and emotional relief from the terror of the blank page that demands their writing on it in bold letters. Seeking refuge in nostalgic traditions can be the spiritual equivalent of writer’s block.

How can we move forward then into spiritual and humanitarian maturity? Ironically, it means recapturing our lost past. The ancients well understood that all ‘history’ is a distortion. As we have often heard, ‘history’ is the story as told by the winners. All memory is distorted by the same selective memory and enhanced by a similar imagination. The ancients realized that facts are of little consequence. Only their meaning really matters. To the ancients, myth — the attempt to distill meaning from the ‘facts’ — was what had importance, the ‘facts’ were simply an assemblage of meaningless data. If your personal evolution cannot be enhanced by your experience lending some significance to the present, then your experiences in the past has become little more than an emotional tranquilizer. Rather, the lessons of the past are what they are because they have the power to challenge and drive us beyond our reticence to face the terror of the unknown, the void, our future.

Sacred Scriptures are recognized as such not because they were dictated by an executive Deity to a dumb but faithful scribe. Humanity acknowledges writings as ‘sacred’ because those writings refuse to stay frozen in the past like some engraved tablets of stone, serving only as silent witnesses against an errant population. Rather, we recognize their Divine authorship because they stubbornly refuse to stay safely boxed up in the past. No, they live and breathe and enter into dialogue with us continually. What we see there today will be different from what we saw there yesterday, because we have evolved, and the world has evolved. The Word of God cannot be nostalgic, because it constantly challenges us onward toward our destiny to become hour by hour and day by day the image and likeness of our Creator: co-creators of something (our future) out of nothing (our past). Our hope embodies our commitment to become the people that we were always meant to be: regardless of whether or not we have any conception at all of who or what that may be.

It’s the holiday season. Go ahead and take your rest with smoking jacket and slippers, a pipe, a snifter of brandy, and a sentimental old book before a roaring fire, if that’s the form your reverie takes. Saunter down the path of nostalgia and, like Scrooge on the arm of the Ghost of Christmas Past, look in on happier times and enjoy the glow of fond memories. But come back to us. The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come may be fearsome and shrouded in darkness, but that is the one in whose dread eyes you will see the reflection of your true Self. For in those eyes, terrifying though they may be, you’ll find real hope. Happy holidays and God bless us, every one!

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

A Sneak Peek at the Future

Les Brown — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 13:00:00 +0000

As the world financial situation continues to unravel before our eyes, the last vestiges of that sense of security that we’ve all been led to believe in has been exposed as the fairy tale that it’s always been. We’ve always had plenty of evidence all around us that ‘security’ was an illusion presented for our consideration by those who thought (rightly) that they could win people’s loyalty by promising them the impossible; but, like many aspects of the world of our understanding, it always seems easier to believe in the improbable than to have to deal with the unpalatable. One of the challenges that confronts us as we undergo the midlife transition derives from the pain we experience as we realize the need to give up many of our pet fantasies: the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Clause, and Financial Security.

There are two basic aphorisms that I believe everyone must learn by the time he or she finishes passing through the midlife transition: 1) the only constant is change, and 2) we see only what we want to see. Even after having hung around on this planet for a reasonably long period of time, I never cease to be amazed at the incredible capacity men and women have for self-delusion. Denial, particularly for men, and even more particularly at midlife, is less an aberration than it is a way of life. Yet, the powerful lessons of the first decade of the 21st Century are starting to wear away at our comfortable, if not very realistic, façade. I think the first such illusion to fade was the myth of ‘retirement.’ The career men and women of the present and future are going to have to embrace quite an attitude readjustment, compared with the attitudes of the quite recent past.

As I have often said (quoting a number of wise people who came before me), one of the principal (and most sacred) roles of government is the protection of the weakest members of our society from the ‘tyranny of the majority.’ If we honestly believe in the absolute sanctity of human life, that means that no one — not even one person — can be left to ‘fall through the cracks.’ None of us ever earns our basic human rights, nor can we ever forfeit them (since no society can give these rights, no society can honestly pretend to take them away or even ignore them). Of course, there are times when families and societies must exercise ‘tough love’ toward some of its wayward members, but that simply means that we, as a people, refuse to enable our fellow citizens to wreak havoc on themselves or on others. Yet, people don’t lose their inalienable right to membership in the human family on account of their behavior any more than Uncle Fred the drunk loses his membership in the family by what he says or does.

Outside of the issue of tough love, we have an obligation to support our family — our human family — and we need to take this obligation more seriously in the years to come, because things are apt to get much worse before they get better. The time for laissez faire anything has come and gone. We are responsible not only for ourselves and the members of our immediate families, but for the members of our human family as well. We can’t leave our common obligation only to those who are generous enough with their time and resources to give to charity. Our obligations to one another go way beyond ‘charity’ — it’s now a matter of justice because each one of us possesses inalienable rights that everyone needs to respect. Making a good living for yourself and your family alone can no longer be anyone’s life purpose. To do so would be to court extinction, because the definition of ‘the fittest’ has changed. ‘The fittest’ no longer refers to the strongest and most aggressive; the fittest from now on will be the men and women who are the most empathetically connected to one another. It’s a new world.

One thing is certain: things will never again in our lifetimes be the way they were. The socio-economic changes that have finally come upon us will leave permanent marks on our human family. Like the passage from adulthood through midlife into maturity, our world is getting a dose of reality that (at least in the short term) may be rather difficult to swallow. When we’re ready to emerge from the other side of this, we’ll find that our socio-economic expectations as well as our understanding of our place in the world and in human history will be profoundly altered. Change, like ‘tomorrow’ from Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “creeps on its petty pace from day to day;” while we’ve been obliviously trying to seize the day and hold it. Change doesn’t stop just because, for a time, we’ve stopped believing in it. Eventually, reality wins out, the denial has to break, and we find ourselves suddenly in Future Shock, trying to catch up.

One of the illusions that we’re watching going up in smoke is retirement. Pensions? No! 401K’s? Ugh! Social Security? Huh? That leaves us contemplating serial careers: once we’ve reached an age where it’s no longer appropriate to continue in our chosen career, we’re faced with a decision concerning our next, more age-appropriate career choice. With proper planning, we may be able to avoid ending our working lives where we began them: as supermarket baggers. However, the vast majority of us are going to have to end them someplace rather than on a beach in the Caribbean. We’re also having to rethink what we mean by a career. No one anymore can expect to spend their working life with the same organization, in the same job, or even in the same profession. Even the traditional life-long professions of doctor or lawyer no longer guarantee people a permanent place in the workforce. You don’t want to be overtaken by change and left out in the cold without a ‘Plan B’ just because somebody at some time sold you a bill of goods regarding job security!

We would do well to banish the term ‘job security’ from our vocabulary. The US department of labor estimates that today’s students will have between 10 and 14 jobs by the age of 38! Also 25% of today’s workforce has been with their current employer less than a year, and half the workforce has been at their current jobs less than five years. The majority of new jobs on the horizon will require extensive education. In general women will continue to be better educated (and therefore better suited for these jobs) than men. Add to this the fact that women’s temperament will increasingly be more appropriate for these jobs because they will require advanced social networking skills and the capability to share both information and responsibility openly and freely, and you’ll see clearly that men’s suitability for the most advanced positions of the future job market will become increasingly compromised. Men’s historic role in human society as the bread-winner, provider and protector has already become obsolete . . . we men just aren’t aware of it yet, or, if we are, we’re in denial.

In adolescence, our world was turned upside-down, and we had to reinterpret everything we thought we knew. If we were lucky, we had someone whom we could rely on to guide us by our side. Now that we’re approaching or involved in the midlife transition, we’re needing our world once again redefined and reinterpreted for us. If we’re wise, we’ll go looking for someone older to mentor us through this process as well. This is true particularly now, when our whole social structure is in flux, and with it our understanding of how we fit in and what our purpose here ought to be. These are no longer obvious facts, but conundrums that we’re needing to wrestle with (on top of all the rest of what we’re going through)!

On the down side, as we break out of our comfortable illusion of security, we’re increasingly going to be finding ourselves in a world that we can barely comprehend. Yet, at the same time, if we have the courage (particularly as men) to break out of our historic molds, face our unnamed or unmentionable fears about ‘manhood’ and imaginatively reinvent ourselves, we can look forward to what promises to be one of the most innovative and creative eras in all of human history. We’re at a watershed point right now. Why not grab the opportunity and run with it?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2008 H. Les Brown

Looking into the Heart of the Beast

Les Brown — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 23:27:57 +0000

You know, there’s one thing I can say for being an expert in midlife: when an emotional crisis sneaks up from behind you and pounces on your back, you know the material well enough that you can identify the beast before it takes too bad of a bite out of you. Even if you can’t figure out in the heat of the moment which tools to use, at least you’ve got a very good idea what not to do to make the situation even worse.

You would think that that the three (relatively) stable phases of life (childhood, adulthood, and maturity) would make up three very separate and distinct ages, and, once you’ve passed from one to the next, you’d never need to go back. Obviously, during the two very unstable transitional stages (adolescence and midlife), a person tends to ricochet back and forth between childhood and adulthood in the former and between adulthood and maturity in the latter. But, you’d think that if you were a child, or an adult, or a mature person, you’d at least be able to camp out there for a while. I’m afraid that you (and I) would have another think coming.

I really appreciate irony; but not so much when it happens to me. Last night, I was featured on a teleseminar dealing with midlife issues. I spoke very eloquently (I hope) about how, in midlife, the basic assumptions on which you base your life decisions fall under attack. The beast of midlife seems to be at your throat as, one by one, all your assumptions, beliefs and expectations fall under attack. Yet, "It only seems deadly," the wise midlife expert reassured his audience, "it’s really just a rather painful passage into a better stage of life, where your sense of self-worth is grounded in your understanding and appreciation of your life’s purpose, as it unfolds." Good theory, I’d say, or even great theory. Regardless, one bad day can blow that theory all to pieces.

Here’s just another piece of the midlife puzzle falling into place and inviting you and me to grasp its full importance. Even when you’ve laid aside your old belief systems and your presuppositions, and your life’s true purpose has emerged from the fog of uncertainty that clouds so much of midlife, you’re still not out of the woods permanently. The words of that favorite passage of mine from Richard Bach’s Illusions keeps coming to mind: "Everything in this book may be wrong." It takes surprisingly little to shake up your world. You don’t have to go way up on the Richter Scale to have the foundations of your life shaken.

Talk about taking a bounce back into a less mature and less stable period of your life! There’s the bad news: just because you’ve reached some stability and serenity doesn’t necessarily mean you’re always going to keep it. But, where there’s bad news, there’s almost always some good news, and that’s that, instead of taking up residence there in the world of uncertainty, you can make it just a brief and passing visit.

So, when I was suddenly under attack from the midlife beast, I bucked up, picked up my tools of maturity and got to work. Most important of all was to break through the glass walls of isolation: pretending that everything was just hunky-dory and I was in total control. It wasn’t. I wasn’t. But I know that acknowledging how I feel and then letting the people closest to me know how I feel (and, to the best of my ability, why I was feeling that way), I could get out of the trap that the best of midlife had set for me to send me backward toward an earlier phase of my development. OK, so I’m not entirely over my upset yet. Again, the good news is that I didn’t really expect to be. I’ve got strong emotions, and I can feel them without feeling afraid of the consequences, and I can talk about them with others without feeling like I’m less mature, or less of a man. The result? It gets better.

What’s the lesson here? It’s not about the midlife expert having a touch of midlife crisis. The lesson comes down to the reassurance that, no matter the source or the kind of upset that you face in maturity, it can’t have the faith-shaking consequences that the same events might have had at an earlier stage of your personal evolution. There is light at the end of the tunnel: we know how to look into the heart of the beast without flinching. We can walk through the shadows of self-doubt without shame. And, when it’s all done, we can walk out the other side of the experience knowing, not that we’ve conquered the beast (it will, undoubtedly return), but that, once again, we’re stronger because of our encounter with it.