Midlife Mastery Journal

The Cost of Doing Nothing

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?

Paving a Road to Hell

"Paving a road to hell." Strong words, aren't they? As a theologian, I think I have sufficient qualifications to speak to that subject, though. Furthermore, midlife emerges as that period of a person's life where he or she can be most prone to create that painful pathway. No doubt, you've often heard the saying that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. I think that more often than not, however, the road to hell is paved with cowardice. People — good people — of various religious persuasions have allowed themselves to be seduced by the graphical images with which our Judeo-Christian (and even Muslim) cultures have provided us in an attempt to illustrate the pains of hell. What emerges from taking these images literally is a laughable caricature of the truth that all of these traditions are struggling to convey.

The fundamental essence of hell lies in an absolute isolation. In their attempt to transform the lives of criminals, the Quakers who designed the original penitentiary system (a place where wrong-doers could do penance and thereby reform) envisioned them as places where men and women would spend time in solitude and contemplation. Instead the total isolation that these people experience frequently drove them mad. We humans are at the core social beings; even infants deprived of social contact (and touch) will die. The hell that we create for ourselves and upon which the descriptions of perdition are based is a state of utter aloneness. Some have said, "If I'm going to hell, I'll have a lot of good company." On the contrary: in hell there would be no "good company" . . . in fact, there would be no company at all!

What to Do When You're in Hot Water

Earlier this week, my partner, Craig, sent me a story in an e-mail from his work. I thought it was one of the best of its kind that I had read in a very long time, so I want to share it with all of you. Here's the story:

A young woman went to her mother and told her about her life and how things were so hard for her. She did not know how she was going to make it and wanted to give up, She was tired of fighting and struggling. It seemed as one problem was solved, a new one arose.

Her mother took her to the kitchen. She filled three pots with water and placed each on a high fire.. Soon the pots came to boil. In the first she placed carrots, in the second she placed eggs, and in the last she placed ground coffee beans. She let them sit and boil; without saying a word.

In about twenty minutes she turned off the burners. She fished the carrots out and placed them in a bowl. She pulled the eggs out and placed them in a bowl. Then she ladled the coffee out and placed it in a bowl. Turning to her daughter, she asked, ' Tell me what you see.'

Building Your Emotional "Fallout Shelter"

When was the last time someone dropped 'the bomb' on you? You know what I mean: the last time you heard someone say, "I love you but I'm not in love with you;" or "I'm sorry but we're going to have to let you go;" or the ever-popular "The doctor wants to see you in his office right away"? Ouch! For many reasons, midlife winds up being 'ground zero' for many of life's most upsetting moments. Back in the '50's, we were universally taught to "duck and cover" as a strategy that was supposed to help us survive a nuclear bomb explosion. I'm not sure that we have any generally-accepted strategies for recovering from these kinds of midlife blasts, though. Emotionally, we're stuck with a kind of 'every person for him- or herself!' sort of approach.

By their very nature, our emotions are reactive. They're indicative that something (for better or worse) is going on with us. We're liking or disliking, fearing or fighting something in our environment. When we're hit with one of these life-bombs, our emotions first generally register shock and disbelief. We feel the emotional 'kick in the gut' that initially (at least) sends us reeling. Then, quickly or slowly, we progress through the famous Five Stages of Grief that Elizabeth Kübler-Ross wrote about: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and, finally, acceptance. It's critical that people develop effective personal strategies for dealing with these midlife 'bombs' because, as likely as not, regardless of what our past experience has been, there are probably more just like them yet to come.