Midlife Mastery Journal » holidays

The Midlife Holiday Challenge

Les Brown — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 13:00:19 +0000

Why are the holidays so very challenging at midlife? There’s no question about it: they certainly are. One of the principal reasons that men and women at midlife find the holidays so difficult is that they’re all about tradition. Certainly, tradition speaks to our need for consistency, history, continuity, stability and security, but those are things that can be in very short supply around the holidays. Remember: the universe is all about change. In fact, the only constant in life as in the universe is change. No wonder we long so ardently for security and stability! It’s the one thing that’s missing from the real world. So, from an early age, we all try (mostly in vain) to create it for ourselves and our families.

At midlife, men and women enter into a phase of life that is unique. Unlike adolescence that marks the transition from childhood tutelage to adult independence, midlife marks the transition from adult independence to mature responsibility — what I recently called “the unbearable loneliness of choice.” Stuff happens at midlife that most people have been shielded from during adolescence. It’s not as though we’ve had a target painted on us at midlife that says, ‘misfortune: strike here!’ Rather, we’ve just been around long enough so that we’ve at least begun to experience the tougher realities of living: things like death, serious illness or accident, and loss of loved ones. At midlife, many of us look to the holiday season wanting to experience the comfort and joy that we may have felt in the past (particularly in childhood), whereas the reality that we find ourselves facing may be starkly different. Our memories and fantasies provoke in us an expectation that’s bound to be disappointed.

The holidays are never the real issue. What gets us into trouble during midlife comes down to a question of our attitudes. Do we not perhaps believe that life owes us a happy holiday season (especially after all we’ve been through)? Isn’t that what many of us have come to expect from the way we were raised and how we’ve been indoctrinated by the advertising media, in particular? If you’re a good boy or girl, Santa will come by to bring you everything you could ever wish for . . . or so we’re led to believe. In life, goodness has nothing to do with it. Life happens, whether we want it or not, and whether we’re ready for it or not. And, as you’re probably quite aware by now, a lot of it happens at midlife. Will this holiday season live up to your expectations? That all depends, doesn’t it? What, after all, are your expectations?

If you want the holidays to be “as good as” those in the “good old days” (and don’t pretend that you don’t remember and yearn for those “good old days,” no matter how old you are), you’re bound to be disappointed. Those days are gone, and only the memories linger. You’ll never recreate them, no matter how hard you try, no matter how many heirlooms you bring out of storage to decorate, in an attempt to recapture the feelings of those moments. Keep in mind, first of all, that our nostalgia has a way of scrubbing clean the events of the past. We don’t generally pine for the holiday disagreements and even disasters that we’ve experienced. In the clear light of day, with the sentiment set aside, we would have to admit that the “good old days” were no better or worse than yesterday . . . only different.

I know that you’ve lost something since the last holiday season. How do I know? It’s not because of the economic downturn, it’s because of the nature of change that characterizes life itself. In order for tomorrow to become today, today has to become yesterday. Living people and events must necessarily pass from immediacy into memory. Reality is like that. If, especially at the holiday season, you want to go back and revisit the past, you’re opening yourself up for a frustrating season to come. How can you celebrate when you’re living with loss?

There are two answers to that question. I take the first answer from the Jewish Passover Haggadah (I know: wrong season). The story of the exodus from Egypt begins thus: “We were slaves in Egypt . . . ” Not our forefathers: we. The Haggadah doesn’t go back to revisit the past, it makes the past present. And that’s what we at midlife have got to do: neither to forget the past nor try to go back and relive it, but bring the people and events from holidays past and include them in the living present. That brings us to the second answer.

What is ‘traditional’ anyway? It’s a ceremony or celebration or event that ‘worked’ once, and that we enjoy doing over and over again, until . . . until what? Until it doesn’t work anymore! The frustration comes when we try to make work again what used to work (in different times and in different circumstances) but may not be working anymore. What happens, for instance, when key personalities that were a vital part of holidays past are no longer there? When we talk about changes in ‘dynamics,’ that’s what we mean: the power — the impetus — has shifted. At midlife, you can no longer be carried along in passive bliss by the power of the moment. At midlife, for holidays, as for all other aspects of your life, the power and the responsibility shifts from ‘it’ and ‘them’ to you! If you want to have a happy holiday, what are you going to do this season to make it so?

When two people form a new family, one of the first negotiations that has to happen is all about creating new family holiday traditions. The same thing happens at midlife. The burden is now on you to create the holiday that you want to have. As I mentioned earlier, you can bring the events and people from the past with you and make them a part of your celebration. But, remember: it’s your celebration, not theirs! This is your opportunity to put your power and your creativity into action and make for yourself a holiday worth remembering. It’s your opportunity and your choice. You needn’t feel as though you’re being deprived of anything or missing anything. You can do a magnificent job of taking care of your needs this holiday season. It’s never too late to have a happy holiday!

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

Turning Obligation into Celebration

Les Brown — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 13:00:00 +0000

Remember Charles Dickens’ opening lines to A Tale of Two Cities? “It was the best of times. It was the worst of times.” These words apply to more than just Paris before the French Revolution. Welcome to the holidays! If you’re older than 5, these are the days that we genuinely love to hate. Depending on who you are, it’s either a time to squeeze an enormous amount of work into your already over-full schedule and pouring out money that you can ill afford so that you can entertain people (some of whom get on your nerves unmercifully). Or, you find yourself depressingly alone with no one to care about or for. Has the Grinch got me this year? No, not really. Only, as a student of the midlife transition, I see holidays as an opportunity for an already difficult situation to become desperate.

One of the principal difficulties with the holidays every year derives from the fact that people go into them without sufficient reflection. Isn’t this the same issue that lies at the heart of so much of the unpleasantness that surrounds the midlife transition? People (especially men) charge headlong into potentially stressful situations without forethought and without sufficient mental and emotional preparation. It’s all about your expectations, when you come right down to it, isn’t it? Somehow, you really want this year to be ‘perfect’. You couldn’t manage to squeeze out a hearty ‘Bah! Humbug!’ regardless of how much you want to shout it out. Because we as a culture have, for the most part, forgotten how to celebrate, we replace what should be celebrations with ritual obligations that, if not performed ‘correctly’ cause us shame. That’s an emotion that people in midlife can ill afford!

It’s no easy matter to transform a holiday obligation into a celebration. It requires some skills that are in rather short supply these days, I’m afraid. First, it takes reflection: the ability to go deeper than the surface, down to touch what sentiments you genuinely want to experience during the holiday celebrations. Next, it takes communication: sharing with the important people in your life your insights and asking them to share theirs with you. Unless this goes beyond asking, “Whose house?” and “What time?” and “What should I bring?”, you’re not going to be able to escape the magnetic pull of the old routine. In addition, it’s going to take creativity: having a shared vision of what you want the celebration to express and to feel like and then taking the effort for everyone to contribute her (or his) creative energies. If it’s going to be different this year, the women can’t be stuck in the kitchen while the men watch TV. Finally, it’s going to take shared responsibility: everyone doing his or her part with a sense of joyful anticipation to pull it all together.

If you really want to break the mold, there has to be a spiritual aspect of the holidays — regardless of the religious tradition members of your chosen ‘family’ come from. Saint Theresa of Lisieux wrote that if you so much as pick up a pin with love in your heart, the gesture has infinite worth. If everything that your family does to prepare for, to celebrate, and to clean up from the holidays is done with only just a little love, the drudgery and obligation of this time of year can be transformed into a real celebration. Without it, I have my doubts.

One last reflection on the holidays before I close. Most of the ‘obligations’ that you and I are so used to striving to live up to are all self-imposed. That saying ‘no’ can be an act of love appears as one of the hard-learned lessons of midlife. If saying ‘no’ does not save your loved ones from a difficult, stressful, even agonizing ritual that masquerades as a celebration, it will at least rescue you from that fate. Not only can you choose whom to celebrate with, if it’s truly to be a celebration, it becomes your duty to choose wisely and well. There is a Japanese saying that goes, “Rarely are the members of a family born under the same roof.” At midlife we get the gift of being able to separate our family of choice from our family of origin. Sometimes they’re the same; sometimes they’re not. At the holidays, once we’ve freed ourselves from external expectations and we’ve started listening to and acting upon the expectations of our hearts, the holidays may well become transformed into the kinds of celebrations that even surpass our hopes. It could happen!