Midlife Mastery Journal » health

God Is in the Details

Les Brown — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 12:00:18 +0000

Maybe you’ve heard the saying, “The devil’s in the details”? It probably means something like whatever details you overlook in whatever you’re doing will come back to bite you. That saying is actually a corruption of an earlier motto, attributed to Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880): “Le bon Dieu est dans le detail” (“God is in the details”). Evidently, I prefer the earlier form of the idiom. Although everyone’s life experience is replete with examples of the ways in which this saying proves true, the great temptation remains to focus our attention on the big items we see playing out on life’s stage all around us. These critical issues are the ones that grab our focus and demand our attention in our careers, our relationships, and our personal condition. These are the both ‘important’ and ‘urgent’ tasks that inhabit Stephen R. Covey’s “Quadrant One.” What you won’t find in “Quadrant One” are things like success, intimacy, peace, harmony, and, ultimately, happiness.

Do we really need to ask why a preoccupation with the big issues eventually leads to failure and unhappiness in careers, in relationships, and in regard to your personal health and well-being? When it comes to your health, what happens when you wait until things get really bad (a crisis) before looking for treatment? Don’t you then find yourself racing to beat the pathology to the finish line? The closer you allow issues to come to the tipping point (that point at which failure is unavoidable), the more important and urgent the need to engage in corrective action becomes, and the lesser your chances of meeting that challenge successfully. At the same time, the more your resources are dedicated to handling any crisis, the greater the chances will be for other issues to approach their tipping points.

Conserving your energies to handle the big issues does little to address or solve them; in fact, the approach that focuses only (or mainly) on the important things risks creating an error cascade. Let me explain. An error cascade begins with just one overlooked detail. When that detail goes wrong, it becomes an attention grabber (Quadrant One again). While your attention is focused on taking care of that one errant detail, you ignore several other details that are needing your attention. As your attention is drawn away in a rapidly-increasing complex of (relatively) minor failures, your capacity for reacting to the situation erodes until you are unable to stop a catastrophic collapse of the system. The disasters at Three Mile Island and, to an even greater degree, at Chernobyl are graphic cases in point.

As early as the 14th Century, we find the following poem:

For Want of a Nail

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

No, paying attention to what’s ‘most important’ may be ‘common sense,’ but it’s also a recipe for failure. Success comes from recognizing, heart and soul, that “God is in the details.” In fact, take care of the details, and the ‘big issues’ will take care of themselves. The wisdom of this approach has been proven many times over. Taking a detail-oriented approach to your job may provoke ridicule from some co-workers, but it will certainly produce the kinds of quality results that any reasonably healthy management team would find difficult to ignore. Paying close attention to your communication and the needs and wants of your spouse or partner cannot help but improve the depth of intimacy between you. Paying attention to your diet, exercise, rest, reading, recreation, prayer, meditation, and all the other things that go to make up a physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually healthy person will certainly give a significant boost to your quality of life.

At midlife, when all the old paradigms of adulthood seem to be breaking down, you have the perfect opportunity to change the way you ‘do business’ — your ‘standard operating procedure.’ Start with your greatest problem area: career, relationship, or your personal health and well-being. Instead of trying to manage whatever you perceive as your biggest issue, try focusing your attention on the details of the situation. What little things are you ignoring or neglecting? What details are you overlooking? What are three little issues that you could take care of right away? What three things you could do today to address these little issues? Will you commit to accomplishing these three things today?

Don’t forget that creating serious change requires assistance. All of us have mastered the art of self-delusion. Only when you invite someone else to ‘champion’ your plan in with you will you have the support and accountability that you’ll need to be able to change your focus effectively. Remember the Bible story of Elijah:

The LORD said, “Go out and stand on the mountain in the presence of the LORD, for the LORD is about to pass by.” Then a great and powerful wind tore the mountains apart and shattered the rocks before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake came a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire. And after the fire came a gentle whisper. When Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over his face and went out and stood at the mouth of the cave.

As life progresses, you’re going to be faced with the equivalent of whirlwind, earthquake and fire, but success, intimacy, health, happiness and your Higher Power will be found in none of them. It’s in the still small voice of those tasks and details that may very well seem most unimportant and most beneath your knowledge, skills and dignity, that your Power will be found. For, after all, Flaubert was right: God is in the details!

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

The Meaning of Life: a Manifesto

Les Brown — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 13:00:03 +0000

Ever since people were able to distinguish the idea of ‘I’ from the idea of ‘my’, they’ve been asking the question, ‘why?’ In a hundred million different ways, people ask, “Why am I here?” For as long as I remember, that question (in its myriad of different forms) has sometimes boggled, sometimes driven, but always infused my conscious reflection. When I was just an adolescent, a therapist once commented to me that (in his words) I was “obsessed with the truth.” His appreciation of what was really going on was close to the mark (maybe as close as my adolescent powers of expression could take him): my true obsession has always been with meaning. I am one of those intellectually driven dudes who absorbs all the ‘why’ questions that people constantly throw at the universe and I remake them, refined and condensed, into one great challenge to All That Is: “What is the meaning of life?” Oddly, there’s nothing rhetorical about me. I actually expect an answer.

Today, I’d like to share with you the (always-tentative) response that I seem to be getting from my six decades of reflexively auto-dialing a universal ’411′. 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.

We were all born selfish. You may know that in biology there’s what they call the ‘recapitulation theory’ that suggests that every life form goes through all the stages of evolution on its journey from fertilized egg to viable organism. I have no idea whether or not that’s exactly accurate, although there does seem to be a general pattern observable across all forms of life. It seems clear to me that at least human consciousness in its earliest stages develops along the lines of how consciousness emerged on this planet. At birth, our consciousness makes a giant leap forward that takes the developing distinction between “me’ and ‘mine’ to a whole new level. Birth can be seen simply asa quantum leap in the ever-increasing viability and independence of the organism. Early life outside the womb closely parallels life inside: the infant remains totally dependent on its care-givers for all the conditions necessary for its survival. From that point on, the nascent person must assume ever-greater responsibility for his or her own independent existence. Life begins with the understanding that I must get what what I need in order to survive. I learn to value who I am and what I have been given. ‘Love’ and ‘need’ start out life as synonyms.

As I lead you through this ‘recapitulation theory’ of mine, I hope you’ll take the opportunity to reflect back on your own life’s experiences to see where the crises you’ve encountered indicated ‘sticking points’ in your own evolution. If you try, you can see how they imitate the earth’s plate tectonics: the plates in the earth’s crust push against each other and their energy imperceptibly builds until, at one random moment, they suddenly become unstuck and shift — sometimes with catastrophic seismic results. Each of the crises in your own life represents a seismic shift across every aspect of your life: physical, mental, emotional, relational, economic and spiritual.

If childhood can be defined as that epoch of life during which we learn to take care of ourselves and to become increasingly self-reliant and responsible (we gradually take on the responsibility of providing for our own survival) then that life transition stage that we identify as ‘adolescence’ must be that period where we are forced by nature and culture to confront our own self-centered self-interest and begin very tentatively to open ourselves to others as well as to the Other. It’s the time when we learn to both value and care for others above and beyond our own selfish needs, even our own need to survive. Love and need split apart in adolescence’s tumultuous soul-quakes. The adolescent transition from childhood to adulthood takes on the features of a transformation.

Learning to love . . . learning to accept unconditionally, to trust unconditionally, to become fully engaged with another . . . committed to another. These lessons of love take a long, hard time to learn because the real lesson (that love is a choice, a decision) only begins when the ‘other’ love — the emotional surrogate of love — starts to fade away. Love is what’s left after all the needing and wanting has dissipated, been satisfied or disappointed.

My first prayer as a young man entering the chapel on my first day in the major seminary was: “Lord, teach me to love.” That was the prayer of a foolish youth who didn’t understand that the prayer to learn to love, like the prayer for patience, is one that’s always answered and always in startlingly unexpected ways. “Greater love has no one, than to lay down life itself for another.” What they don’t tell you is that it’s much more difficult to live for others than it is to die for them.

Just as some people never quite learn the ‘independence’ lesson from childhood, others never quite get what it means to love selflessly. There’s a type of grieving involved in every act of true love, because it means letting go of all of our expectations. We want to be loved back, to be unconditionally accepted and trusted, to have someone somewhere somehow commit unconditionally to us. We feel as though we need that affirmation of self: if we don’t receive it, we’ll just die.
But, we don’t fully receive it — we don’t fully give it either — and we don’t die. Instead, we learn life’s Great Lesson number one.

Then comes midlife. Just when we think we’ve gotten our Master’s degree in loving, life turns the tables on us. We positively freak out when we first turn to that page in the book of life’s instructions that our parents and our whole culture and upbringing gave us for guidance and we read, “Everything in this book may be wrong.” Here begins life’s Great Lesson number two: letting go.

Letting go begins with relaxing our death-grip on our opinions, starting, of course, with everything we were once so certain and sure of. Today, on the other side of the midlife divide, I am certain of very few things. As certain as I am that there exists a universal Truth, I am equally certain that I will never fully know or understand it. And, as far as God is concerned, the God of my understanding has been replaced with the God of my lack-of-understanding. In fact, all that I really need to know about my God is that I am not he. Everything else is open to interpretation. In life, as both Martin Buber and Karl Jung so clearly saw, there is an I (a Self) in constant dialogue with a Thou (an Other) and, as with all true dialogues, meaning is always given by the receiver, not the giver. Contrary to popular belief, what God said is relevant only in regard to what we actually heard and understood.

The crises of midlife arise from the difficulty that each individual has letting go of the certitude that we hold with regard to our beliefs and opinions. At midlife, we are brought face-to-face with the great transcendental ideals that Plato and Aristotle proposed: absolute Goodness, Truth, Beauty, and Unity, and we begin to recognize that we in this world enjoy only their analogates: relative goodness, truth, beauty, and unity. We will never know (nor can we as humans really adequately even understand) such things as Life, Love, Security, Health, Peace and Freedom. The famous midlife crisis is the struggle that we wage against having to give up our pretensions to these Divine attributes. When the crisis is over, we find that we have let go a little bit more of our pretensions to the divine. The answer to the great question, “Why me?” (as though we had some divine right to Life, Love, Security, Health, Peace and Freedom) is always the humiliating, “Why not you?”

Our topic today of the Two Great Lessons of Life has brought us to the understanding that all of life is, in fact, one great process in two distinct stages: learning to let go of self (what we call love), then learning to let go of everything else (what we call death). It makes me think of the Jewish proverb that says: Shrouds have no pockets. All of this lifetime of learning to let go is just preparation for the Great Letting Go that silently awaits each of us. Like all lettings-go, life’s Great Lessons involve grief in (at least) five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. How you think about death and how you feel about the lessons that life is handing you right now, today can be very good indicators of where you are in the learning process. The more you learn to let go, the more grieving there is. The more grieving you do, the farther along you progress toward acceptance. So, where are you?

And, just a final word to the wise, if the Roman poet Horace was right when he wrote, “Non omnis moriar” (“I shall not wholly die”) — and I believe he was — then whatever letting go and whatever grieving you don’t get done in this life, you will carry with you into the next. That’s just something to about it.

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC
Copyright © 2010 H. Les Brown

It’s Always Something — If It’s Not One Thing, It’s Another

Les Brown — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 16:15:00 +0000

Do you remember the world's greatest authority on everything? I mean the Saturday Night Live special features reporter, Miss Roseanne Roseannadanna herself (a.k.a.: Gilda Radner)? She'd always end up her 'report' with the same lines: "It's always something — if it's not one thing, it's another!" But, isn't it the truth? Doesn't seem like there's always something that you and I have to deal with; something that seems to make the road at least a little little bit bumpier than it needs to be? If you've had any experience at all with the midlife transition, you'll relate: more than any other period of time in our life thus far, it really is "always something!"

Our futile attempts at creating a reasonably secure world for ourselves often enough run smack-dab into the challenges of the real world and, particularly, the challenges of the midlife transition. Like the amusement park game, Whack-a-Mole, just when you successfully clobber one problem, another one pops up out on the periphery. "Is there," you might ask, "a strategy that I can use to handle this constant barrage of difficulties that keep me stressed out by threatening everything that I've worked so long and hard to build?" What can I do to bring my life back into focus?

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. Here are a number of strategies that you can use effectively when 'it's always something' comes upon you.

The only constant is change. This means that, as the old saying goes, "Into each life some rain must fall." Nobody — in fact nothing — in the universe is immune from difficulties. As I've said very often, trying to build a secure future is a foolish quest. 'Security' is simply not a part of the universe as it presents itself to us. There is no where you can go, nothing you can do to find a 'stasis' where trouble won't find you. It exists in you down to the marrow of your bones and beyond . . . even to the structure of your reality itself. There's no escaping it. This means that much of living a successful life must revolve around the two poles of assessing and mitigating risk, and contingency planning (for those times when risk becomes overwhelming).

This, too, shall pass. Since the only constant is change, then both feast and famine are transitory. When difficulties come (and, at random intervals, they seem to come in clusters), we can fight our natural inclinations to believe that things will always be this way by reminding ourselves that, regardless of how bad it may seem, this, too, shall pass. So long as we live, each of us will experience the alleviation of our suffering and our emergence from whatever disaster or tragedy we may be facing. Truly, where there's life, there's hope.

What did I do to deserve this? The answer, my friend, is, most likely: nothing! Certainly, virtue (living a life in alignment with genuine values) goes a long way toward avoiding unnecessary pain and vice often leads to predictably bad consequences. However, living an authentic life is no guarantee of a life free from trouble (as I mentioned, no such thing exists), nor is living an inauthentic life a guarantee of hardship. When looking at the challenges you're facing right now, you can answer the complaint of the victim within you who cries, "Why me?" with the true answer: "Why not you?" What makes you so special as to be spared the challenges that the rest of the world faces? And, when you're tempted to look around you and compare yourself with others who seem to have it easier than you, remember that old saying about walking a mile in his or her shoes.

Pain is required, suffering is optional. Difficulties come into every life. Whatever the source, no one is immune from experiencing pain: we have no choice in the matter. Our choice comes into play when we must decide how we're going to respond to the pain. When we choose to play the victim (crying, "Why me?", looking to lay blame, comparing ourselves with others, building resentments, etc.), we effectively ratchet up our own suffering. Pain, as I've often said, is just the universe trying to get our attention. When we decide to allow ourselves to descend into suffering, we not only magnify the hurt by prolonging it over time, we also render the experience impotent to produce the lesson and the strengthening experience that it was meant to deliver. More than anything else in life, choosing blame and resentment will turn growing pains into meaningless, useless suffering.

A successful life is built on progress, not perfection. On one hand, the universe is structured so that life's lessons keep coming: growth is a direction not a goal. 'Who you are' will only be known completely when your life is over: until then, you can only be known as the person who you are becoming. The direction in which our lives take us is determined by a combination of the potential that we were born and raised with (our nature and nurture), and the choices we've made along the way. The greatest lessons we learn are often those that result from our worst choices and, because growth happens in a determined direction, when we foul up, the opportunities to learn our lessons keep coming back again and again until we 'get' them. When we want to say, "Why does this keep happening to me?" we have to ask, "Why indeed?" What's the lesson you're not getting? And, on the other hand, it's important to realize that you're not an unbiased judge: you're most often the last person to recognize your progress. Unless you're avoiding life's lessons, each time they come around they have the potential to teach you more, and to deepen the core of your moral strength.

Here's a practical approach to life's difficulties. Take one challenge that you're facing in your life right now. Identify exactly what change is happening (that perhaps you're resisting). Which of your three great concerns are being affected: your career? your relationships? your health and well-being? Pain often comes from loss, or the fear of loss. What do you risk losing? Change also brings with it new possibilities and opportunities. What opportunities for growth are you facing? When the change is done, what's your best case scenario? Are the possible benefits worth the risk (the cost)? What can you do to cooperate with the challenge to ensure the optimal results of the change (whether it's come voluntarily or not)? What do you need to do to rid yourself of blame, fault-finding, and resentment over this situation? If you believe that you've been victimized, what choices did you make that contributed to the situation? Whom do you have on your 'success team' who's willing to tell you the truth about where you are and where you're headed?

As they say, "When life hands you lemons, make lemonade!" It isn't about where the lemons came from, it's all about what you're going to do with them. Isn't it about time to get squeezing?

H. Les Brown, MA, CFCC

Copyright © 2009 H. Les Brown

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Les Brown — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 13:00:00 +0000

Robert Kiyosaki in his book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, makes the point that houses aren't really assets, they're liabilities. Anyone whose mortgage has been caught in the current economic mess has first-hand experience of what he means. Anyone who owns property knows that just paying the mortgage isn't nearly enough. There's also the extensive cost of maintenance to be considered as well. Property depreciates, and that means that, without you doing anything at all, everything you own decays at a given rate. For buildings, the average rate of decay comes down to from new to worthless ruins in about thirty years. Although it may not be directly measurable, depreciation is a real, calculable cost of doing nothing. Think about it: for a nice $300,000 home ($150,000 home + $150,000 property), your cost of doing nothing comes down to as much as $5,000 a year!

Obviously, a house (or a car or a boat or any other big-ticket item) has a calculable monetary value. Now, how about those incalculable 'assets' that go to make up your life? There are a few universal and inviolable laws in this world, and one of them is the law of entropy: the tendency for all things to move toward maximum randomness (otherwise known as 'decay'). It's not really the chaos theory that we have to worry about (the theory that the behavior of large, complex systems [like the weather] is fundamentally unpredictable): that just tells us that we can't tell when or where disaster may strike. It's entropy that assures us that, without taking preventive action, disaster is inevitable. The true cost of doing nothing — whether the cost is calculable or not — is eventual disaster. Assuming that the midlife transition is upon you, what exactly does that mean?

It means, primarily, that allowing yourself to become comfortable with the status quo (or, even worse, striving to maintain the status quo) is a sure recipe for disaster in the three critical areas that matter to you the most: your career, your relationships, and your personal health and well-being. If you're like most people, you're extremely generous when it comes to your toys and your fun (your possessions and your recreational activities), but you're proportionally cheap when it comes to taking care of yourself. Most of us don't mind going into debt (bank loans and credit cards) to purchase something we want, but, when self-care is involved, everything seems too 'expensive,' whether it's in time or money. For every time we've denied ourselves some luxury by telling ourselves, "I can't afford that," I'll bet there are many more occasions when we've encountered something that could genuinely improve our quality of life, but we've passed it up because of the cost. Let's look at some pertinent examples.

Here's the most obvious (and the one that almost everyone readily admits): "I should take better care of myself." Your health and well-being are dependent on three essential elements: nutrition, exercise, and rest (along with quality health care, when necessary). Is there anyone reading this to whom this is news??? It's been well-proven that stress is a killer and that a combination of excellent nutrition, exercise and rest can go a long way toward reducing the ill effects that stress brings on. In the book, Change or Die, Alan Deutschman reveals the stark facts: 90% of all people who are told that they must change their behavior or die, sooner or later go back to their old habits. What excuses are you using to hasten your demise? Healthy food is too expensive? Doesn't taste as good as all those round, fatty molecules? Takes too long to prepare? And why aren't you exercising regularly (and how many unused health club memberships, exercise devices and weight loss supplements have you collected)? What happened to last night's eight hours of sleep? What excuse did you use for cheating yourself of stress-reducing rest?

Now, about that person you're married to (and to whom you professed your love). How's your communication? How about the amount of quality time you're spending together? When was the last time that you took time to work on your relationship? How much has each of you changed over the years? How much do you (personally) still need to change in order to keep your relationship not only strong but growing? When was the last time that the two of you took your issues to an impartial third party (or do you imagine that the two of you are somehow unique and don't need outside help or advice)? You say that you don't have issues?? Then things are worse than I had imagined! People change — particularly during midlife — and, if you're not working at growing together, then you're growing apart. 'Disaster,' in this case, comes in the guise of waking up one day and wondering, "Who is this person, and what did they do with my husband/wife? I want them back!" Have you read Dr. Jed Diamond's book, The Irritable Male Syndrome, and, if not, why not?

Finally, let's look at your career. Regardless of whether you're an entrepreneur or you work for someone else, your career (and your health and your relationship) depend on what you're willing to invest in it. I'm not talking about how long you spend at the office or the volume of the output of your work day. That won't get you anywhere beyond where you already are and, in fact, it's a sure route to obsolescence. They say, 'If you want to keep getting what you're getting, keep doing what you're doing,' but, in fact, when you keep doing what you're doing, you're going to keep getting less of what you're getting. If you're not going forward, you're going backward. And remember, you're a boomer! You're not working toward 'retirement;' you need to be planning for your next career! What are you doing to prepare? The number one factor that every expert quotes as being an indispensable element in their (and anyone else's) success is: having a coach or mentor. So, who's yours? How much time, energy and expense are you willing to dedicate toward the end of advancing your career prospects? What's your exit strategy?

Consider at the name of my business, ProActivation. It's quite obviously made up of two terms: proactive and activation. Whether or not you take these two terms to heart may very well spell the difference between thriving in your health, relationships, and career . . . or not. 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. In maturity, nobody's going to be able to tell you what you must or can't do. Here's a radical statement: laws are made for children and adolescents. If you're still operating on the level of what somebody else is telling you that you can or can't do, you're ethically still a child (and have no business reading this yet). In maturity, making the right choices has to do with alignment with the principles and values seared into your heart and soul. If your proactivation isn't coming from what's in your heart, it'll never have any lasting effect.

Every morning when you wake up, you have a choice to make: whether today you're going to invest in your own personal future or not. Every morning you have the opportunity to just let it ride for one more day: to do nothing. That's your prerogative. I just hope that, after reading these few words, you'll no longer be able to do that with a clear conscience, however, imagining that doing nothing costs you nothing. Indeed, the cost of doing nothing is very, very high: sooner or later, it could cost you your health, your relationship, your career, your future, even your life. That kind of puts the cost of hiring a trainer, a marriage counselor or a life or business coach into perspective, doesn't it?

Five Stages of Midlife Transition

Les Brown — Mon, 11 May 2009 18:52:00 +0000

This promises to be a very personal article: personal rather than theoretical. Last Monday the movers came, I guided them as they filled up their truck (and emptied our long-held storage bin), and, separately, we headed to Washington, DC. I arrived there first (on Monday evening). They were to follow and land at our 12-story, brick-faced residence’s loading dock on Tuesday morning. We spent Monday night in our empty bedroom comfortably enough on a queen-sized Aero Bed. In the morning, I set up our new coffee makers (first things first) and dug out the plastic plates, bowls, and utensils I had brought with me in the car. After breakfast, Craig decided to go in to work early and leave at noon time, because we weren’t expecting the movers until 11:00 AM. I wasn’t alone a half an hour when sirens started blaring down below our front windows on Massachusetts Avenue. They were very loud even for the city, and even from nine stories up.

To properly appreciate what happened next, you have to understand that Craig lived in DC for almost 20 years before we sold his condo ten years ago. He’s from South Carolina and, whenever relatives or friends would come to visit, he was always able to find some diplomatic entourage or other passing through, so that he could tell his guests, “Oh, look! There goes the president’s motorcade!” That way, every visitor got to ‘see’ the president!

Now, back to the sirens and me at the window above Massachusetts Avenue. First there were a half a dozen motorcycle cops, lights flashing and sirens blaring; then came four or five DC police cars, then a big black SUV with tinted windows or two, followed by two big black limousines, and then came another big black SUV — this one with antennas sticking out all over — then more big black SUVs, and more DC cruisers with lights flashing and sirens blaring. It couldn’t be, could it? My first morning in DC, and not a stick of furniture in the apartment, and President Obama passed underneath my front window. Talk about auspicious beginnings! Just to make sure, I called Craig at work and described the scene. “Yup!” he said, “that really was the president’s motorcade!”

I’d like to say that the rest of the week continued with that level of excitement, but it did not. As a matter of fact, it’s not been an easy week at all, and that’s given me a deepened appreciation for what guys in midlife are experiencing all around me right now. Transitions — both the pleasant ones and the not-so-pleasant ones — are most often tough.

I would like to be able to say that I’m overjoyed to be here in DC. The fact is that I’m not. Don’t get me wrong: we found a great apartment and, after a week of opening and emptying boxes and putting things together, our place is really very, very nice. We found an apartment in a building that feels more like a hotel than an apartment complex: they even post funny little graphics about the current weather daily in both of the elevators. All of the neighbors we’ve spoken to say that love living here. I like it quite a lot. Also, I’m not very busy these days, so I’m able to focus on putting everything in its place and making sure everything works the way it’s supposed to (punctuated by innumerable trips down to the loading dock to recycle stacks of flattened cardboard boxes). You’d think that I’d feel really good about it all, wouldn’t you?

Regardless of my age, I’m experiencing first-hand a midlife trauma: career change. It’s one of the three ‘biggies’ of the midlife ‘apocalypse’: career change, relationship change, and health change. Even with all my experience, even with all my knowledge, changing careers ‘gets’ me where it really hurts: in my self-image. Much as I (or anyone) maintains a spiritual awareness and realizes the fallacy of ‘I am what I do,’ still, it may very well be a practical impossibility not to identify with your work. If I’m not a minister, if I’m not a corporate manager, if I’m not a life coach, then who am I? It doesn’t feel at all good to have to look the man in the mirror in the eye and admit that I’m not really sure anymore. I keep thinking that I know, but then the rules of the game seem to change and, whenever they do, the grieving process begins all over again. So, I grieve: I grieve for my comfortable home in Rehoboth; I grieve for my community of friends; I grieve for the clients that I’ve had to leave behind; I grieve for the connections I made in cyberspace.

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. That’s why I think that ‘s/he’s in a better place’ is such a pitiful response to news of a death. Regardless of the truth of the matter, that’s not where the bereaved is emotionally right now, nor is it where s/he should be yet. From this side of the fence, it now seems almost cruel to reassure someone who’s just lost a job or a career that ‘something better will assuredly come along.’ That may be true; however the grieving unemployed shouldn’t be forced to look there quite yet. The onset of a transition has to be a time for licking one’s wounds and undergoing the grief experience — all five stages.

I have to admit that, although I know what needs to be done to complete this transition in my life, I don’t quite know what to do about it today. I still have to deal with ‘those pesky emotions’ (as we say in recovery). One of the most difficult aspects of any sort of grieving process relates to how painful emotions drain our energy and sap our initiative. It’s very hard to get anything done at all. Everything seems like an up-hill climb, getting steeper all the time.

The very worst thing that anyone (including me) can do in this situation is ‘keep a stiff upper lip,’ as the British used to say. In our culture, we call it ‘stuffing your emotions.’ That’s a sure-fire way to catapult yourself right into a crisis because the repressed emotions will come out, either obliquely (“Sure you have a headache… tense, irritable…. but don’t take it out on her!”) or in a moment of vulnerability. Rather, the only healthy way through grief is straight ahead, feeling every step of the way.

And, by the way: talking about it with others (or, if that’s not convenient, writing about it) as much and for as long a time as you need to get it all out provides you with the healthiest outlet possible. That’s one of the reasons that women seem to process trouble more quickly and thoroughly than men do: they’re not afraid to talk about it. Men, it takes a lot of courage to face and share what’s going on with you emotionally. Do you have what it takes to go against the cultural grain and to really live your feelings? Trust me. It’s the only way to go.