Midlife Mastery Journal

You may find managing important duties and issues a real ego-boost, but by staying focused on the big deals and neglecting the little facets of your life — in your career, your relationships and your own personal health and well-being — you risk descending into crisis and losing it all. Success in life and love depends entirely on how well you pay attention to the humblest of details.

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.

Yes, there are strategies that you can adopt to manage life’s frequent unpleasant surprises. Like most life strategies that empower you to handle the issues that midlife throws at you, almost all of these strategies involve simply changing your mind to see the reality that life presents you in a different light.

Nobody can make proactive investments in your life for you: it’s entirely up to you. As I’ve mentioned often before: at midlife, the training wheels come off. The expectations and constraints that ushered you through childhood, adolescence and adulthood have served (or outlasted) their usefulness.

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.