When I was in my mid-forties, I noticed a remarkable number of similarities among my friends all with some version of the same story. These were adults with a reasonably functioning sense of self, who’d managed to establish themselves fairly well in life, finding satisfying work and developing stable relationships. But yet they had symptoms of depression or anxiety.
While their stories were all different, the core problem was often remarkably similar. Some kind of disappointment in work or in love, a serious illness, or some breakdown in the familiar structures of their life, or perhaps something more positive, like a new love affair or a serious promotion at work, had awakened them from the trance of their daily life.
A crisis had forced them to look under the surface of things. In the process of falling apart, these folks had been forced to discover a richness of inner resources they had not known existed within them, and in the process, they found a hidden depth to themselves and the world around them.
Like my friends, I was also struggling with similar growing pains, as I called them. Retired early from my job due to having a bone marrow transplant for leukemia, I found myself re-inventing myself over in mid-life.
I realized I needed support in my search for the self I had not, at first, realized I had even lost. The structures around which I’d built a complicated and seemingly full life no longer seemed recognizable.
Through the disastrous drama of a cancer diagnosis, treatment and recovery I was actually being initiated into a new but hidden aspect of my own humanness. And it was not lost on me that I was also the recipient of a brand-new bone marrow and immune system; a brand-new whole me that I didn’t really know.
I spent several years feeling anxious and restless as I came to the knowing that the second half of my life would look extremely different from the first half. A very kind nurse in the cancer ward once told me that I would have a new normal; meaning not to expect life to return to what it was prior to the diagnosis and treatment and that while that might seem sad or scary—in fact was something to be celebrated. I didn’t think so at the time…..
As I pondered more carefully the dilemmas of midlife, I discovered that for many of us, the developmental tasks of the second half of life are primarily spiritual. Carl Jung had come to the same conclusion more than a half century ago. Jung believed that at midlife, most of us have refined our external selves, what he called the mask we wear to assure some stable, ongoing sense of identity. But that most of us also come to the realization that there is more to life than how we present ourselves to the outside world.
When this occurs, a difficult period of introspection follows. For me, personally not only did I have to deal with the natural changes that aging brings but with changes my body sustained through a long arduous cancer recovery. Not sure I was really loving the new normal despite feeling gratitude to just be alive.
We celebrate our early adulthood moments, which are mostly about identity, and are culturally supported with rituals and celebrations—weddings, graduations, ordinations etc., yet we largely ignore the mid-life changes.
Unless one grabs hold of the cliché mid-life crisis idea where it appears that someone is acting way out of their normal personality.
Somewhere in my own middle years of life I was ready for a deep pilgrimage to my center to find what Jung called “the whole self.” My own homegrown version of a mid-life crisis.
It was not a fun or easy task. It was layered with fears about my health, my security and about my purpose in life. This entry into the unknown began a period of metamorphosis. I have come to the conclusion that the second half of life is about learning to let go of everything we feverishly collected (beliefs, habits, toxic relationships, fears and baggage) in the first half of life.
Let go, let live and just be.
I found that it was in the quiet moments of life that I had picked up the thread of an altogether new sense of realness; through meditation, writing and being open to hard conversations.
Insight arose, along with a different kind of happiness and a bit of sweetness, even in the midst of pain. For me the lesson learned was to be open to waking up to a new journey, a new normal and trusting the wisdom of all the hard work that got me to this merry old age of awareness.
Wow , I love this