Midlife Mastery Journal

The Masculine Mystique - Field of Lost Dreams

Each of us begins his or her life at the center of a perfect 3-pronged conspiracy. Born into an established environment, you immediately commence your cultural formation. After the initial explosion of neural and synaptic formations, for the first three years of your life, your environment plays a 'use-it-or-lose-it' game with your neural pathways: those that meet little external challenge tend simply to fade away, leaving those pathways most in demand to serve your life-long needs. In the game of your life, genetics determine the rules, and only the most essential players make the final cut.

The second element in the conspiracy that unwittingly determines your future was provided you by your family of origin. Only at midlife can you really appreciate how uncommon the 'common sense' approach that they took to raising you really had been. Every glance, every word and gesture, every fragment of information that they provided you came packaged within a set of cultural biases of which they had little or no conscious awareness. Through their eyes, you gained your own appreciation of the world into which you were born. Through their example, you learned how to interface with that world.

Finally, the last element that set your worldview in concrete arrived under the guise of your formal education. There, as you assimilated the knowledge that was made available to you, you also absorbed the presuppositions and the value systems in which this knowledge was embedded. Presented with an outlook that sold itself as 'objective facts', you learned to distrust your intuition, to discard socially discordant values, to accept the assumptions of the crowd over the evidence of your own perceptions and observations. You learned to replace your own hopes and dreams with more socially-acceptable goals. Together, these three influences (like the sheep in George Orwell's Animal Farm) taught you to bleat, "Objective good; subjective bad."

Your Deadly Assumptions

Have you ever been traveling from one city to another, and you're in the airport at the gate, waiting for your flight to load? You look out the wall of glass at the workers moving around on the ramp, unloading and loading baggage while the plane disgorges its complement of arriving passengers. You may have noticed one of the pilots descending the metal stairway from the jetway onto the tarmac and then taking a leisurely stroll around the body of the aircraft. It's the flight's first officer, and he's doing a preflight visual inspection of the fuselage to make sure that everything is properly secured and that there's no visible damage. It's all part of the extensive preflight checklist that all pilots must complete before both takeoffs and landings. Those checklists are there to make sure that no one leaves anything to chance when lives and property are at stake.

Pilots would be crazy to fly on assumptions. There's an old saying that says, "There are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots." I'd like to take this occasion to remind you that you are the pilot-in-command of your own life, even when it doesn't feel like it. You'd think that, with your own life and property at stake as you face the prospect of turbulence during your midlife 'flight,' you'd want to be at least as careful piloting your daily existence as the fellows who have command of that jet you're about to take. Yet, I think that most guys take action — especially during the midlife transition — based on assumptions rather than on research, introspection, and careful deliberation. Chances are that those pilots that are prepping their plane for your trip know more about the condition of their aircraft than they do about their own lives.

Barack Obama and the World at Midlife

Never fear: this is not a political exposé. Instead, it's a reflection on a fascinating conversation that I had with Dr. Jed Diamond last night on my internet radio program. As you may know, Dr. Jed is the author of the best-selling books, Male Menopause and The Irritable Male Syndrome. What I didn't know about Dr. Jed (until last night's conversation) was that he's quite an accomplished futurist. In retrospect, how could he not be? He has spent his life dealing with men in transition, and one critical aspect of the syndrome relates to the way men in midlife transition have to cope with a world that's in transition. I was very much taken aback when I realized in the course of the interview that the world itself is going through a midlife transition!

What exactly does that mean, and what does it have to do with the US President-elect? Fundamentally, it means that human beings in general, and men in particular, now have to redefine their role in society, in culture, and in history. All of our traditional roles are very quickly becoming obsolete as the very meaning and purpose of human existence shifts in response to seismic shifts in humanity's interrelationships with one another and with nature transformed by human activity. "Future shock" is now. The information explosion, coupled to the communication explosion heralds what very well could be the emergence of the next stage of human evolution: social networking on a scale never before imagined. In the process, the female of our species, as empathetic connector and nurturer, rises to prominence while the aggressive, systematic male, a holdover from the age of the hunter-gatherer rapidly faces extinction. When what it means to be a man in the near — very near — future bears little or no resemblance to what it has meant for countless millenia, the shock can only shake the foundations of our human society to its very roots.

Get Proactive or Face the Consequences

I'm putting out a warning call that the wise (especially wise men) will want to pay attention to: get proactive about midlife or face the consequences. For almost 20 years, author Stephen R. Covey (The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People) has been trying to convince people that taking a proactive stance toward life's problems works, whereas being reactive just doesn't work. Yet, folks still play the odds and hope they won't have to deal with the consequences. If you're one of these gamblers, 'risk' is the name of the game, but, in this case, it's a risk that's being swept under the carpet and ignored so long as you can dodge the bullet. This is precisely the attitude that brought us the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans: "Don't worry so long as it hasn't happened . . . yet."

What I'm finding as I pursue my studies on midlife issues (particularly for men) comes down to the same sort of attitude: "The midlife crisis only happens to other people." People seem to think that just because they don't sense trouble in their relationships and their family, and just because they feel relatively secure in their careers and financial situation, and just because they haven't experienced any serious problems with their health or sense of well-being that things are going to continue along without much change or difficulty indefinitely. The bad news is, they won't! That's guaranteed. The midlife transition will occur, regardless of how happy or content you feel, regardless of how smoothly your life seems to be progressing, and regardless of how unprepared for it you may be. Like Hurricane Katrina, midlife is no respecter of persons. Whether or not you weather the situation depends entirely on how proactive you choose to be.

Xenophobia and You

"Xenophobe: A person unduly fearful or contemptuous of that which is foreign, especially of strangers or foreign peoples" [Wikipedia]. Regardless of where you fall personal on the spectrum of political opinion, you have to be at least a little awestruck at the recent US presidential election. There's a reason why there's been such an outpouring of public jubilation: as a country, we've just punched through another critical cultural barrier that for generations has kept our country from achieving its highest aspirations. I can't stress strongly enough how significant this process of tearing down cultural biases in public and private is for a person or a people to gain access to a life of significance.

In other articles, I've written about how damaging the cultural biases toward extreme individualism and ruthless competition have been to the male psyche, putting serious roadblocks in the way of self-examination, self-expression, and essential network-building so that midlife for many males becomes literally an overwhelming crisis, rather than the path to full maturity that it should be. To overcome this debilitating isolation, men need also to overcome their life-long cultural biases. Today, I want to add this third cultural bias — uncertainty avoidance — to the other two. As a matter of fact, I believe that this cultural bias, that afflicts peoples as well as individuals, must be overcome in order for a person (or a nation) to attain maturity.

Circle of Influence vs Circle of Concern

In the middle of his chapter on his first habit ("Be Proactive"), Dr. Stephen R. Covey, in his famous Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, lays out two circles: the outer circle being your circle of concern, the inner circle representing your circle of influence. His point is that we are concerned with a great number of important universal issues: the economy, global warming, the spread of international terrorism and radical fundamentalism, as well as local issues that affect your particular country or state or locality. Of course, you're very concerned with a large number of important issues. They're all encompassed in your Circle of Concern.

Covey's point (which I pass on to you) is: how many of these issues can you or should you directly influence? Let's say, for example, that you're very concerned with the rise of international terrorism.  How can you, as an individual, influence global politics to such an extent that you're going to have a personal impact on the future of this issue? Unless you've committed yourself to a career in international politics, the chances are that this concern of yours, critically important though it may be, will not fall within your circle of influence. Fundamentally, outside of being well-informed on these issues that concern you, your time would be much better spent focusing on the issues that lie directly within your Circle of Influence. It's like that old saying, "Everybody's talking about the weather, but nobody ever does anything about it:" Circle of Influence vs. Circle of Concern.

When it comes to Midlife Issues, your circle of influence actually proves to be much wider than you've been led to believe. "I can't do anything about getting older," you may say. True: you can't do much about the fact that you're aging (and have been doing this since the day you were conceived). On the other hand, how you go about the process of aging lies almost completely in your power. It's a 'cop out' to see yourself as a 'victim' of downsizing, or a 'victim' of a deteriorating relationship, or a 'victim' of accident or disease. You have a role to play in each of these scenarios, if you but have the courage to play it.

The Other Side of the Mountain

Just because I've made it "over the hill" doesn't necessarily mean that it's smooth sailing from now on. As a matter of fact, think back to when you were a teenager still walking riding your bike everywhere you wanted to go. Couldn't you just taste the freedom and all the possibilities that were waiting for you when you reached those magic ages: 16, 18, 21? And, of course, you weren't disappointed, were you? All that freedom and all those possibilities were really there for you, weren't they? But, along with them came sets of duties, obligations and responsibilities. You may have been aware of some of them beforehand, but, until you made the transition from dreaming about the opportunities that awaited you to actually living them, you didn't quite appreciate how big a deal they were, did you?

The situation has a lot of similarities to the way it appears when you make the transition through midlife into maturity. However (and this is a big difference), most people secretly dread having to get older. Yet, perhaps, when people read my articles or attend one of my teleseminars, they may begin to have the realization that the midlife transition starts a new and improved chapter in their lives: one where they've been released from their bondage to other people's expectations, and they experience (perhaps for the first time) the freedom to follow the urgings of their own spirits and live the life defined by their own personal destinies. If it sounds too good to be true, it's not — it's very real. However, that doesn't mean that there isn't another 'side of the mountain' as the song suggests.

Living a Life of Regret

Emily Dickinson wrote, "Remorse is cureless, the disease not even God can heal." 'Remorse' arises as a sorrow for past decisions that you've made, while 'regret' serves as a broader, more useful term, describing a wish that you'd made other choices in the past: choices either to avoid doing something that you've done or to do something that you avoided. At their root, the two emotions are practically synonymous. They're both cases of feeling sad because of choices that you made once upon a time.

As the disappointments that characterize the midlife transition slowly strip away the feelings of achievement, success and personal adequacy that used to keep you going as a mere adult, oftentimes what remains — like grounds stuck to the bottom of a drained coffee mug — are all your regrets: "I wish I hadn't done that;" "I wish I hadn't said that to him/her;" "If only I'd listened to him/her;" "I shouldn't have passed up that opportunity." Regret, exposed by present disappointments, leaves you pining over a lifetime of unfortunate detours and roads not taken. No wonder the midlife transition feels so depressing!

Detecting the Deadly Detour

Just a couple of days ago, our family interred my uncle at Arlington National Cemetery will full military honors. He was an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel who once served in the Pentagon under Robert McNamara during the Kennedy-Johnson administrations. He was quite a brilliant and accomplished man. As a pilot in the Army-Air Force attached to Gen. Montgomery in North Africa, he won the Distinguished Flying Cross, one of the highest medals of honor awarded to pilots for heroism in flight.

One of the reasons for his extraordinary promotion from enlisted man to Lieutenant Colonel was his remarkable attention to detail. He had an insatiable thirst for knowledge, particularly technical knowledge. He firmly believed that there wasn't anything he couldn't do.

I remember many years ago when a young wild bird was injured flying into their glass sliders, he took the bird inside and nursed it to health. Not only that, but he researched, and kept detailed records of the bird's diet and feeding. He began by purchasing meal worms from a local pet supplier to feed the bird, and wound up turning his family rec room into a home-grown meal worm factory to care for the bird.

This wasn't at all unusual for my uncle: whether it was researching family genealogy, repairing a broken dishwasher or installing an HVAC system from scratch, the methodology was always the same. It was all about the research, the development of specialized skills, and detailed documentation of everything he did. His life should have been a model for unqualified success; unfortunately, it was not.

Why Men Get Lost in the Clouds

Just before we moved from Connecticut to Delaware (where we now live), I was only about a month away from earning my instrument rating on my private pilot's license. From everything I've heard, the instrument rating is the most difficult rating for a private pilot to achieve. If I were to characterize the course content for the instrument rating in two words, I'd have to say "precision navigation" is the key.

When you're first practicing for instrument flight . . . particularly shooting an instrument approach to an airport, you're flying with your instructor using either a 'hood' or 'foggles': wearable devices that restrict your vision so that you can't see outside the cockpit of your aircraft. It simulates the zero-visibility conditions that you'd encounter in real instrument flight. Only toward the end of your extensive training period will your instructor take you up into real instrument conditions (the likelihood of experiencing debilitating spacial disorientation is rather high for a novice — like in the fatal situation experienced by John Kennedy, Jr. some years ago). I have to tell you, though, that there are few experiences more gratifying than, for the first time, breaking out of a true cloud cover and seeing the end of your runway appear directly in front of you perfectly aligned for landing.