Midlife Mastery Journal

There’s only one simple (but not easy) approach that we can take that will shelter us from these emotional flash-backs from midlife trauma: beware of free-floating emotions! By that I mean that we can actually train ourselves to spot emotions that come out of nowhere and that seem . . . well . . . just wrong.

Wisdom dictates that, for every life element that we humans are required to relinquish, there opens a new creative possibility. Although I genuinely subscribe to that belief (“When God closes one door, he opens another”), grieving must occur for every door that closes, and few (if any) of us can fully enter the opening door before fully grieving the closing one.

I suspect — alright: I believe — that the infamous midlife crisis is a product of our particularly western culture. I also believe that the closer one’s culture comes to the North American version, the more severe the midlife crisis is apt to be for the male (if not for the female) of our species.

Midlife — the transition into that blessed third stage of life — necessarily brings with it that emotional state that spiritual writers for generations have termed “holy indifference.”