Midlife Mastery Journal

When You Stand at the Turning Point

You have competency. That's not enough. You have experience. So do a lot of other people. You have long-term loyalty. That's not relevant. You have a family, a mortgage, car payments, expenses, tuition. It's not even a consideration. You're over fifty; it's too late to start over for crying out loud! Nobody's listening.

Do you stay where you are and wait for the inevitable call into the boss's office (or, even worse, security showing up at your desk unannounced with an empty cardboard box)? Do you commute in to the office every day wondering if today will be the day when the flying fickle finger of fate stops spinning and points at you? Do you start your job search today, expecting the worst, getting in line with tens of thousands of other women and men just like you with similar experience and expectations all looking for the same jobs? Or is today the day you take the great leap into the unknown and become an entrepreneur? Ironically, if you're an entrepreneur, will today be the day you give it up and go out to get an 'RJ' ('Real Job')?

The Arrogance of Self-Destruction

Yesterday evening, I was working away at my desk, prepping for my Thursday evening internet radio program, when up pops an e-mail announcing that I had been befriended by someone over at BlogCatalog.com. Curious (I have few friends over there, since I'm a recent member), I stopped by to view that person's work. For the brief time I spend looking over the massive extent of the writings I found there (and you thought my articles were long!), I couldn't help also being struck by the incredible waste of a life it represented. It's not so much that I was appalled by the fact that the author was spending so much time and energy creating this vast acreage of text, but by the fact that there, before me, was a life being thrown away pissing into the wind.

The writings purported to portray five 'elements' of Truth (apparently heretofore hidden) that would transform the thinking of the world. Nobody could doubt this author's sincerity nor the energy and dedication that went into producing these prodigious postings. What was staggering — in my mind, at least — was that someone would spend that much time and energy expounding on stuff that he or she knew so little about. Personally, I'm not in a position to dictate the Ultimate Truth to anyone (although we can have a really spirited conversation about whether or not Ultimate Truth exists — I'll take the negative side). However I have spent many years of my life studying in excruciating detail the life work of many of the Western world's foremost thinkers in philosophy, theology and other scientific disciplines. I have two sets of 'MA' after my name to prove it. The greatest revelation to me, over the course of over forty years of such study, remains the vast extent of what I don't know.

Sliding Downhill - from Commitment to Denial

You see all those fancy letters after my name? The 'MA' (at least one of them) is the result of my fascination with Western (Greek) philosophy. These ancient brilliant minds, after all, laid the foundation for our entire cultural perspective. What to us 'sophisticated' contemporary thinkers seems to have been simple and naive statements of the obvious in fact made possible the complex tools that we depend on today: tools like mathematics and the scientific method. I'm afraid that sometimes we have a tendency to dismiss what they had to say because the language that they used seems simplistic and overworked to our complexity-jaded eyes. When looking at their statements, we always need to push beyond our arrogant and dismissive habits and ask, "What are they trying to say here?"

Our forebears in thought gave a lot of attention to understanding the nature of 'health.' We find, buried under the archaic language of 'humors' and 'temperaments,' an incredibly simple yet insightful definition: 'balance.' Try it: imagine your health as a delicate balance of factors working together. Now, envision what happens when this delicate balance is upset: how easy it is for the whole assemblage to disintegrate into illness, and how much effort it takes for you to (and perhaps the whole medical establishment) to restore that healthy balance.  Much as you'd like to dismiss the ancient's insight as primitive, it does describe what 'health' is about as well as any human is capable of doing. Life (to say nothing of maturity) absolutely depends on this balance, yet the forces of entropy are strong, always nudging us closer to death, destruction and disintegration.

Commit or Die

Last Friday, I had an unsettling experience. I've been spending the past few months scouring the web, looking for places where men leave — and find — wisdom-droppings. You know what I mean by 'wisdom-droppings' don't you? They're those little sayings or stories or insights that you read or hear and come away thinking, 'I never thought of it that way!' They're the stuff that paradigm shifts are made of. They're flashes of insight that you can take away with you, not so much like the punch-line of a joke, but as a kind of motto that you pull up from time to time to remind you of what it takes to make a good decision. What I found was that out of 323 blogs listed in Blog Catalog under the heading of 'men's issues,' only three actually addressed men's issues. Would you like to know more?

There were a fair number of blogs dedicated to male sexuality (not surprisingly). There were a number dedicated to parenthood . . . again, not surprisingly. Yet, by far the greatest number of blogs dedicated to men's issues dealt with what George Carlin called 'stuff': lotions and potions to keep up your looks, clothes to make you look young and relevant, cars and gadgets and adult toys to satisfy your every whim. At the same time, these blogs promised their readers that they'd deliver "Men News, Men Lifestyle, Men Health, Men New Technology, Men Fashion, Men Reality, Men Relationship, Men Gadgets, Men Tips n Trick, It's All About Men Things." And all this concerns me. Why? Because men . . . yes all men . . . are facing some pretty rough times over the next few years. And, increasingly, as they're facing their moments of truth, guys are giving up and checking out: big time.

Your Midlife Crisis, Transition, or Transformation?

I've been away . . . yes I have. But all that's behind me now, and this month is shaping up to be a transitional one. I'm needing to take my business from a disappointing conclusion with the end of 2008 into something even more dynamic and transformational as we move more deeply into 2009. Things are changing, aren't they? Old features are passing away and new ones are coming into play. Does it make you feel uncomfortable, not knowing what tomorrow will bring? What'll be on the line next? Will it be your job? Will it be your family and home life? Will it be your own health and happiness? Will it be new opportunities? Will it be a new sense of hope?

If you've been truly caught off-guard by the recent global economic downturn, part of your consternation may derive from your not taking seriously enough this simple dictum: 'The only constant is change.' When people fail to take that seemingly-simple idea sufficiently seriously, they're most likely heading for serious trouble. If the only constant in the universe is change (and it is), what allowance must you make for stability, security and certitude? I'm deadly serious when I say, "None at all." These are all ephemera and illusions. They seem to appear for a time, but then they vanish as quickly as they came, and without warning. And yet, nearly everyone (except, perhaps, the most spiritually advanced among us) continue to pursue these mirages from time to time. The more enlightened way to treat life is the famous "one day [hour / minute / second] at a time," taking seriously that "this, too, shall pass." That you live life this way is critically important, yet how you live life this way is equally so. Let's explore why this is so.