Beauty of a Wilting Flower - A Mid-Life Chronicle

I have just finished listening to a program on what is popularly conceived of as the 'mid-life crisis.' As a middle-aged woman I experience this from a feminine perspective and I don't frame it in terms of crisis as much as initiation into the latter portion of my life. 

I think it is important to understand mid-life as an important component in one's life journey, a transition from some of the inexperience and frivolity of youth to a deeper appreciation of life in all its guises which, of course, includes death. There is beauty inherent in this time of life as much as any other, but the word 'crisis', among other things, alerts me to the fact that the beauty in this time of life is routinely overlooked and under appreciated.

For women I think this is particularly true. Living in a culture obsessed with youthful forms of beauty means that getting older is something of a rite of passage, a liminal place, but I don't think we have to buy into society's narrow vision of beauty. There is nothing I have more respect for, and find more attractive, than a woman (or man) who has kept their graying hair, while at the same time keeping fit, eating well and basically demonstrating great self care, at a time in life when many people throw in the towel and stop trying.

 Self-respect is sexy and we show that we care about ourselves, by taking good care of ourselves, no matter what time of life we are in.

Part of the problem with this idolization of youth is that it seems to perpetuate the same superficial and narcissistic engagement with life that often characterizes us in our youth. Mid-life offers the potential for liberation by a deeper, richer, more satisfying engagement with all aspects of our life. 

If we spend our middle years avoiding the inevitable through plastic surgery and re-partnering with those more youthful than ourselves, to my way of thinking we only succeed in making a mockery of both ourselves and the mid life experience. I personally am not interested in living the rest of my life as a caricature of my youthful self, I have come too far for that.

I am inspired by the beauty of a gently wilting flower and see much potential for this passage in my life to elicit a greater degree of personal integrity and authenticity, a deeper and more pervasive sense of being alive, and a more intimate engagement with life generally. 

This means I will listen to myself more closely, the life inside me, and take more seriously what I am hearing. I will say 'no' more often to requests for the expenditure of my limited energy and 'yes' to opportunities that energize and elicit psychological warmth. 

I will look upon the altered beauty of my face and body with the sensitivity of an artist, appreciating the way in which the beauty of my soul is increasingly visible.

Mid-life augurs well, but only when we choose to show it some reverence and respect. To the degree that we resent and perceive this as an imposition on what was our youth, is the extent to which we will be rendered unhappy and blame mid-life itself. 

But, it isn't midlife that is the problem, it is us and how we choose to see it and manage it. I vote for seeing it brimming with the same full-bodied possibilities as a fine red wine or warm, sensuous bitter-chocolate cake--rich, sophisticated and delicious possibilities.

Empathy, Understanding and World Peace

When I think about peace I see it as being dependent upon compassion which is dependent upon empathy. 

Empathy is that ability to put ourselves in the shoes of another, to see things from their perspective and to feel what they must feel based on that perspective. Understanding arises out of this and when we understand, really understand, forgiveness and compassion are inevitable. Consequently, I don't think real peace is possible unless we choose daily to cultivate a deep and pervasive sense of empathy for others.

Empathy requires us to see the other as ourselves, it wants us to remove the filter that gives us a distorted vision of the other, in order to reveal the other nothing more or less than a mirror image of ourselves--however unsettling this may be. As human beings we have much in common with each other, guided as we are by similar, predictable impulses and responses to stimuli in the environment. 

Consequently, it is a mistake to assume that another's objectionable behaviour is something that bears no relationship to one's own. Conversely, it has everything to do with one's own and exists as an opportunity for learning something about the nature of humanity both as it expresses itself in ourselves and others.

One of the temptations when trying to locate empathy and compassion is to look outside one's self, but compassion and empathy already exist inside each one of us, and so the job is more to clear any discursive emotions clouding our perceptions, and to allow the empathy and compassion natural to us, to flow unimpeded to others around us. 

As with many other things this is an inside job. Coming to terms with the dark side of ourselves and others is no small undertaking, and it is incumbent upon us to maintain a firm commitment to acknowledging its presence, respecting the lessons it has to teach us and to integrate it into our lives, so that it doesn't run wild and wreak havoc in our lives or the lives of others.

Peace and love are often cheapened by sentimentality, but nothing could be more important for the present and future vitality of our lives, and the life of the earth on which we depend, than choosing to care deeply and make a commitment to facing our demons in a bid for resonant, harmonious living. 

Compassion is only alive when it is lived. Likewise, peace-talk will only go so far, we must live passionately the values of love and empathy in both small ways and large, for the sake of both ourselves and others. Peace rests on our ability to forgive and forgiveness on our ability to understand. 

Communitas - Love and Be Loved

Victor Turner is a well-known anthropologist who has written much on the subject of something he terms 'communitas.' Communitas is born of the human desire for social connection, essentially, the need both to love and be loved (my interpretation) which can only arise in social situations of relative equality. This is opposed to a life lived within the confines of artificial social structures whose status barriers, among other things, separate and divide humanity, limiting or preventing the experience of communitas. It therefore is largely, though not exclusively, present among people living on the margins of society. 

There is some debate as to what degree our social structures actually aid in the smooth functioning of society and to what extent they are the origin of problems we believe them to be keeping in check. My interest in this subject is related to something Joseph Campbell once said:

"I don't believe people are looking for the meaning of life as much as they are looking for the experience of being alive."

It is my sincere belief that people feel most alive when they are intimately engaged with life. By intimate I mean that experience of warmth that is the result of an emotional openness and closeness to life, not restricted to one sole individual--one's husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, lover or best friend. 

Those relationships are only one way of possibly experiencing an intimacy with life. A more pervasive experience of being alive is dependent on a much broader sort of openness to life generally, including, paradoxically, the end of life, which is simultaneously also a beginning--death and vitality are intimately connected and so any experience of being deeply alive requires an openness to both.

Widening our circles of connection may be one way to inject a little vitality in our lives, deepening our existing connections could be another. Cultivating greater appreciation of, and sensitivity to, the subtle beauty and nuances in the details of our lives may be helpful as well.

Communitas to my way of thinking is the only way we can experience true social vitality. There is a lot of truth in the well known aphorism 'united we stand, divided we fall.' It seems to me that any experience of being alive as a human is dependent on social openness and inclusiveness, the necessary component of which is a sense of relative equality, a sense of all being in this together.

I recommend the Czech film Divided We Fall. It came out in 2001, won some awards and conveys in story form some of what I am trying to talk about here. Enjoy!

Defining Success For Yourself

Middle age has made me more thoughtful about what the true measure of success is in life. When I was younger and more energetic, I thought of success strictly in terms of my ability to make my dreams come true, to find an occupation by which to support myself, to build a life with that special someone. Now, that I'm in a position which provides me with some perspective on those aspirations, I can see that the goals I had were in many ways limiting. Success comes in many forms besides the conventional.

I would argue, in fact, that true success is best measured unconventionally, by our ability to care about ourselves, our neighbours and the world in some tangible, deeply rooted sense, whatever our circumstances. 

This sort of success is not something that will necessarily make front page headlines, living a small, conscientious existence will not make any of us rock stars, no one is going to remunerate us with bucket loads of cash for being a good person. And yet, I think that it is imperative that we cultivate the ability to care about ourselves and whatever work we happen to find ourselves engaged with, even if that is just the mundane, everyday tasks like taking out the garbage, making the bed or washing the floor. 

When we treat those things like they matter, we are, by extension, treating our lives like they matter, and this sort of caring ripples out into the world, energizing it with the same care with which we attended to those mundane tasks. This is no small thing.

We must not worry so much about any lack of so-called 'greatness'--that which is everyday paraded in front of us in movies, magazines and on television, much of which revolves around the acquisition of money, the ultimate standard of success in a capitalist society. 

We need to be more skeptical about money (and all the nonsense that it can buy) as the standard by which we measure our success in life. Life happens in our hearts, we feel most alive when we care for the life inside us and all around us. The presence of this sort of intimacy in our lives, is the real measure of success from my point of view.

Einstein said, "Few are those who see with their own eyes and feel with their own hearts." I think we need to measure our success not in terms of the material, but more in terms of the quality of our hearts and minds. We need to cultivate more faith in our own perspectives and listen carefully to the contents of our own hearts. 

The degree to which we measure our success in life according to the standards of a society that, in many ways, seeks to divorce us from an intimacy with life, robbing us of our passion for living, is the degree to which we may have failed both ourselves, our neighbours and the world on which we all depend.

In the end, we need to define success for ourselves. This requires breaking free of the conventional ties that bind and venturing out into the unknown. It is an adventure that has the potential to inspire creativity and elicit innovative thinking. The results are our gift to humanity.