Midlife Mastery Journal

The second hallmark of maturity is a life that is committed to the service of others. Directing our midlife transition from the dissatisfaction of a life lived for ourselves to a level of spiritual and ethical maturity and personal fulfillment just by daily prayer and meditation seems way too simple and easy a solution.

There’s no honor, no virtue, no benefit in simply ‘putting it all on the line’ unless your cause brings benefit — true value — to humankind. That, my friends, takes experience, hardship, patience, and humility to achieve.

If we’re going to be successful at navigating the many life-altering transitions that we have to face at midlife, we’re going to have to be prepared to be fierce about it. As in all things worth doing, “Half measures avail us nothing.”

Nobody sets out to ruin his or her life; that outcome only results from a steady stream of small, seemingly insignificant poor choices that eventually lead to a bad end. We call this an error cascade: when a series of small, almost unnoticeable missteps conclude in catastrophic results. For the person entering the midlife transition, it most often begins with the mistaken belief that he or she is ‘going downhill’ and that somehow the process is reversible.

Perhaps we should start, not so much with how your team won the game, what happened to your bottom line, or what you’ve adopted as your battle plan, but with what you learned about yourself from your last failed relationship, or the values that compelled you to walk away from that last job, or how you maintained your self esteem in the face of unemployment, or what it meant to you to have to cope with the death of a loved one or with a chronic illness.