Mid-Life Solution

I recently heard an excellent definition of mid-life crisis. It is simply the realization that life does not get better. We spend our childhood and youths with hopes that the future is going to be a big, bright playground where all of our dreams will come true.

Next comes the reality of having to buy your own groceries, pay your own bills. The responsibilities of education or work. What cats and/or kids require. This is before we start caring for our own bodies that are inevitably ever-changing with age.

The realization that none of it is going to get any easier.

Well now, lets have a look at that. What makes life easier? Is it gadgets? Money? Health (definitive yes here). Friendships and support? Feeling worth? What does an easy day look like compared to a ‘hard’ one?

Hard days for me are the days when the things I attempt don’t turn out as I expect. I don’t have energy, I am sick or someone close to me is sick and I can’t get to the things I’ve planned. Time goes too quickly when I need more time.

What surprises me here is that receiving bad news does not make this list. Things out of my control – well, those are the things I can’t do anything about so why beat myself up about it? Disappointing, sad, infuriating – all of these things don’t necessarily mean hard. If the situation reasonably calls for anger, then that is okay for me too. These reactions are not my first choice, not necessarily easy but also not worthy of struggle.

In short, hard days are the ones where you try to control everything.

Easy days are the ones that go by as though the universe is perched symbiotically on your shoulder, making sure that all traffic lights turn when you want them to and all of your efforts work out as you hoped. Easy days can be challenging but are usually without expectation. The kind of day where you go with the flow and let things happen as they will.

In short, easy days are the ones where you give up control.

So is our problem that we built dreams in the first place? Is having expectations or willing a certain outcome the worst possible thing we could do for ourselves? Do people who have no desires end up the happiest, avoiding the great mid-life crisis altogether?

Buddhists would have a field day with these thoughts. According to Buddhist philosophy desire is the source of all suffering. But in my opinion it is not so much the desire itself that creates suffering. It is the thinking that you can completely control the when, where and how of achieving your desires.

I began writing this post without an answer. In fact, two days later I am finishing it because as always, the answer has come once I opened the door with the right question. At least an answer that works for me.

In my foray working in an ‘alternative’ bookstore in the nineties, I came across an author who spoke to me. Her name was Marianne Williamson. At the time I had no connection to the Christian faith, however, so many of her words were lost on me. Recently, I have begun reading her books again. And as these things happen, one printed from 1993 called A Woman’s Worth found me in a second hand store. It sounds like she wrote this shortly after turning forty.

In it is what I will call the mid-life solution. I will share it with you here:

“Without a spiritual life, what are we left with? What is there to strive for? Where do we look for clues? In magazines?

Here are some basics for spiritual renewal, what to do to make age less scary.

First of all, meditate. Do transcendental meditation, Christian meditation, Jewish meditation, Buddhist meditation, open-eye meditation, full-moon meditation, Quaker meditation – it doesn’t matter. Just do it.

Also, pray. Engage in some sort of daily spiritual practice – nonreligious, religious, whatever.

Above all else, try to forgive.

And lastly, treat your body well. Practice yoga or some equivalent form of concentrated physical exercise.

Do not look to your husband, your lover, your children, your job, your money, or your therapist to make you happy. It’s not their function, nor within their capacity to do so. Look to yourself, to the Goddess within you, and take responsibility for your own state of mind.

Women can be masters at negative programming. We constantly tell ourselves what is not right: our figure, our hair, our relationship, our job, the weather, someone else’s behaviour. Sometimes, we do this because we have legitimate complaints; at other times, we criticize simply because it is the turn of our minds to do so. Every time we do, regardless of why, we attack ourselves. We are programming our subconscious – the part of the mind that hears what we tell it and then creates more of the same – to manufacture the life we’re describing.

And then magicians that we are, lo and behold, we have a new, even more negative life the following day….

….We are not a little powerful; we are enormously powerful. Every time we say a negative word, we lay the mental plans for negative things. There is no escaping this law of the mind. As we think, so shall it be.

…Spiritual techniques cannot not work. The question is not whether they work but whether or not we actually do them. If we remind ourselves often of the woman we want to be, then the woman who has been masquerading as us all these years will breathe her last breath and give us back our life.”

Marianne Williamson: A Woman’s Worth – 1993 (some sentences removed, nothing changed).

My report card on this? I’ve done no manner of spiritual practise or intentional exercise since the farming season began. Some might say that farming itself can be meditative and/or exercise. I will say that the latter is true a lot of the time but the former completely depends on the individual approach. I have been a ball of negative promotion for my fragile mind.

Thank you Marianne, for reminding me to look somewhere bigger than myself for solutions.

I finish with this quote that has been circulating as an email for years and showed up in a recent blog post I read:

"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." -Marianne Williamson
"Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others." -Marianne Williamson