Have you ever been surfing and suddenly got wiped out? Your gorgeous fiberboard was upended and fractured, and you took quite a spill, swimming for dear life.
You can’t always predict when the next super wave is coming, but, when it hits you, you will sure know it.
What Is It?
We are all open to a mid-life crisis at various points in adulthood. For some of us, it is sooner, and for some of us, much later. For many of us, it happens more than once.
Something triggers it, and life loses all its flavor. You are hit with boredom and listlessness. The same old rewards no longer work.
You feel like “tuning in, turning on and dropping out.” You are straddled with career and family responsibilities, when all you want to do is go out and play.
The Oscar-winning film, American Beauty, poignantly illustrates all this. Kevin Spacey plays Lester Burnham, a fumbling ad executive who is losing his edge, while Annette Bening plays his wife, Carolyn Burnham, an uptight realtor totally preoccupied with self-improvement to boost her numbers. Husband and wife can no longer relate.
It just so happens that Lester meets his daughter’s adolescent friend, Mena Suvari as Angela Hayes, at a high school basketball game. Unannounced, Lester quits his job, begins weightlifting and otherwise behaving like a juvenile to put the make on beautiful young Angela. The story unravels when Lester finds himself getting unwittingly knocked off.
How Does Midlife Crisis Work?
A mid-life crisis is far more than a seven-year itch. It is entails a glimpse of your mortality, and a longing to retreat into childhood or a more innocent youth.
Your values, priorities, sensibility and beliefs all do a sudden reversal, almost like a religious conversion. Your current lifestyle seems irrelevant and meaningless. The temptation merges to cut off your most important relationships and find a better way.
Gail Sheehy first popularized this syndrome back in 1976 with her classic study, Passages: Predicable Crises of Adult Life. Gail was emphatic that these crises are recurrent and difficult to predict.
It is not simply a question of having a bad day. It is a matter of questioning everything. Nothing makes sense any more; you are compelled to create a whole new identity.
While much of this can be very comical, it can easily become tragic, even suicidal. It is most often a call, in the midst of physiological, hormonal changes, to look a little deeper into the meaning and purpose of your life.
What Is the Best Approach?
The trap is to withdraw from counsel, hastily make sweeping changes in your life and assume the answer is all “out there.”
It is destructive to blame everyone and everything other than yourself. We should, indeed, question our life from time to time. However, it is self-defeating to panic, not realizing that “this too shall pass.”
I have been through numerous identity crises, starting with adolescence and occurring intermittently throughout my life until I was able to presence the sacred on a fairly consistent basis.
I was concerned about those round years, 20, 30, 40 and above, when society likes to remind you that you are growing older. Ironically, I found that passing 40 was not nearly as intimidating as becoming 20, when I realized that I would never again be a teenager. I could never again be truly “cool.”
Passing 40 didn’t put me over the hill. Rather, it was the beginning of me really growing up. Today, people are living into their 80’s, 90’s and beyond. The old expectations no longer apply.
Napoleon Hill reminds us in his masterpiece on personal achievement, Think and Grow Rich, “Every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit.”
The way out of midlife (or any other kind of identity) crisis, is straight through.
The Way Out Of This Mid-life Stressor
A midlife crisis (or stressor) is an open invitation to find a new integration of body, mind and spirit.
All are important, but spirit deserves special attention. The triggering event, be it the loss of a job, the parting of a loved one or a sudden infatuation, is an invitation to stop taking life for granted. Go deeper. Find your soul and cherish every moment.
Related article: Your Perception of Reality Is Holding You Back
There is no pat formula, as each of us has our own experience of Ultimate Reality. Here are some suggestions for finding your inner core and rebalancing your life:
- Reach out to someone you trust who really listens. Expressing your feelings is a good way to get a handle on them. This might be through a spiritual mentor, a close friend or relative, even a peer counselor. You may find firsthand that you are not alone, that your friend has had similar experiences and may be happy to share how he or she coped.
- Consider human potential and transformational workshops and seminars that get participants deeply in touch. It could be a conference in Bali, a yoga workshop in Costa Rica, a seminar in Esalen, or taking the Landmark Forum. Whatever works for you. You will most likely pick up a whole new context that can make life a joy once again.
- Revisit a spiritual path, East or West, that speaks to you, or even your childhood religion, which may now have much deeper meaning. With the profound stress and uncertainty of our post-modern world, spiritual community is increasingly a necessity. The great religious traditions offer an unequaled depth and richness. Huston Smith’s, The World’s Religions, is a wonderful place to start.
- Revisit your mission in life and seek out a new way to serve people. Richard Bolles' annual edition of What Color Is Your Parachute? has a dazzling array of exercises that reveal your hidden talent and possible mission. In his book, Richard suggests paying attention to where your greatest joy, your unrecognized talent and the world’s burning pain all come together. Your deep sensibility and childhood preferences are the Creator’s best hints as to what you should be doing with your life.
You will never be more surprised when you discover that your mid-life crisis has been the doorway to a new burst of freedom and a whole new life.
How To Find Your Way Through a Mid-Life Crisis appeared first on http://consciousowl.com.
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