Midlife Mastery Journal

Do You Speak 'Heart'?

Ever since I was young, I've had a fascination for language. Over the course of the years, I've learned a little of a lot of them. I noticed that each one required not only learning a new set of vocabulary (you could get that in a phrase book or a dictionary) and a specific set of grammatical and syntactical rules (they sell books with that stuff in it); what you learn when you embrace a new language is a new way of thinking about the world. 'Translation' never means simply replacing one set of words and phrases with another. It also means trying to migrate an experience from one cultural context and create a space for it to live in another, foreign, context. There are always things that you can say in one language that can't be said in any other.

What a poverty of outlook we impose upon ourselves and our children when we turn against multilingualism (and, therefore, multiculturalism)! People who insist that theirs is the best (and, therefore, the only reasonable) perspective on the world condemn themselves to a narrowness of viewpoint that only reinforces their distrust of others as a cultural norm (that Geert Hofstede calls 'uncertainty avoidance'). Don't get me wrong: we are all most comfortable when we're in familiar surroundings and most uncomfortable when our surroundings (physical or cultural) seem unusual or strange. At midlife, it's common for everything to feel unusual and strange.

In fact, at midlife, we're being challenged to see life and our place in it from an entirely new perspective. The language of the adult — and particularly the language of the adult male ('sports' 'business' and 'the military') — is particularly ill-suited to grasp and communicate about things that really matter. There's another language that talks about these things (dreams, passions, values, integrity, compassion, commitment, and spirituality), the language that I'm calling 'Heart'. I could as easily call it 'Spirit'. Either way, it has little in common with our language of the every-day.

The Only Way to Win the Battle of the Sexes

Here's a double spoiler for you, first for the 1983 movie, War Games, then for this article: as the computer, Joshua, comments at the end of this picture: "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play." It works as well for global thermonuclear war as it does for the age-old conflict between estrogen and testosterone. The masculine and the feminine are meant to be complementary — yin and yang — two essential dimensions of the whole. Yet, throughout human history, that complementarity has been distorted into a kind of warfare where the spoils become nothing less than human dignity itself.

The stakes are especially high as 21st Century men and women encounter the midlife transition. As you might expect, the effects of midlife on men and women couldn't be more different. Most men have been so severely acculturated that they believe (not with their rational minds, but in their gut) that feminine characteristics (gentleness, accommodation, cooperation, social intercourse, emotional acumen, self-knowledge, etc.) are not only diametrically opposed to their masculinity; these things are actually considered to be destructive to it. In contrast, many women have adopted the belief that, unless they adopt the masculine characteristics of aggressivity and emotional impassivity, they can't be capable managers or entrepreneurs. They (as well as their male counterparts) often interpret their femininity as a professional liability.

Sorry, Guys — Time's Up!

You know what they say: "Time and tide wait for no man." And, you know, they're right. Time's up, guys! Tide's gone out, and there's not enough water left to float your boat. For the past four months, I've been focusing my energies on addressing the single most critical time in a person's life — the midlife transition — from the point of view of that half of our population that has the greatest difficulty making that transition successfully and with a minimum of crisis and collateral damage. Many times, I've written that one of the core processes that take place during this transition directly affects guy's belief systems, assumptions, and expectations.

It's time to remind both you and me of the fact that the processes in question aren't temporary; they come into their own during the midlife transition (when the denial systems that prevent their going forward start to give way). Yet, as life processes, they continue on for the rest or your life, at the same time burrowing ever deeper toward the core of your personhood and also confronting new (but inadequate) belief systems, assumptions and expectations that come up along the way. Not only do you get flushed out of your hiding place during the midlife transitions, but every new one that you find or create gets targeted for demolition as well.