Midlife Transition
Midlife Transition: Career change
by Diane Topkis…
To paraphrase the Cheshire Cat “If you don’t know where you are going any path will do.” Or this quote from Yogi Berra “If you don’t know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.”
That’s how many of us women got to our current career. At midlife, that’s no longer enough. It’s time we find the path to our true career.
How do you start down your own path? It’s best to turn toward something positive – your vision, as opposed to turning away from something. You’ll have more of a reason to stay focused and ignore distractions. But it’s harder to know what you want than what you don’t want.
Once you know where you are headed, don’t just choose an end point and then plan the fastest way to get there. Instead, with the end in mind, choose a starting point. Your path might zig-zag a bit in the beginning. Recognize and act on warning signs if you move away from your values and priorities. Create milestones or markers along the way as check points to correct or adjust your route.
Leave room for opportunities that might come up that you could not have planned for when you started. That will allow you to continue developing yourself. But in time as you’re further along, your true path will emerge and deepening your commitment to just one path will be more rewarding than keeping all options open and just floating on the surface.
Your chosen path will need to include both short term and long term plans. To make it manageable, break your long term plan into smaller bits that can be integrated into your daily short term plan. Celebrate those smaller accomplishments to stay motivated. It’ll keep the momentum going so you don’t abandon or get discouraged.
Even if your short term plan is focused on being sure you can pay your bills while in transition, life will be more tolerable since you will still be on the path and making progress toward that longer goal. It brings your future into the present little by little.
Spiritual Growth – a Major Midlife Transition Task
Spiritual growth is the process of evolving our consciousness. What exactly does this mean? We can define spiritual growth in a number of ways:
1) As we grow spiritually, the way that we perceive the world should be changing for the better. For example, in the early stages of our spiritual development, we might take a relatively bad experience that we have and simply chalk it up to being bad luck, and possibly play a victim role in how events unfold. We react to the experience in a negative way and make little or no growth from it.
As we make spiritual growth, we can choose better actions to deal with such negative experiences, turning them into positive ones. Instead of playing a victim role when something bad happens, we can reflect and look for the deeper meaning, and try to see our part in how we might have brought such an event on.
2) As we grow spiritually, our attitude shifts for the better, in a number of ways. Spiritual growth isn’t so much about changing our world or our lives, but about changing ourselves and how we perceive the world. It is like waking up and seeing the world through “a new pair of glasses,” as it says in the AA big book.
One way that our attitude changes is in terms of pride and humility. As we make spiritual progress, pride starts to melt away as we realize that we really don’t know it all, and that every experience can become a learning opportunity for us if we approach it with genuine humility. People that we might have dismissed in the past come to have new meaning for us, because we know that each person might have a potential lesson to teach us. Pessimism doesn’t play well with this idea. Instead, we start looking for the silver lining in things in terms of our experiences and what we might possibly learn from them.
3) Our connections with others change as we grow spiritually. One way that this happens is mentioned above, in that we come to see others as potential teachers. Another way that our relationships change is that we tend to place more value on them as we grow, and there is also a tendency towards reaching out and helping others. These ideas replace what is normally selfish and self-seeking behavior that used to dominate our lives.
4) A holistic approach to our life and our overall health comes into being, as we start to realize that everything relates to our spiritual growth. For example, we might start eating better, quit smoking, start exercising, and so on. We see the connectedness of these holistic ideas and realize that we can’t make further growth until we address certain problem areas. A balanced lifestyle becomes the goal, as we see how this further helps us to grow spiritually.
In addition to these ideas, spiritual growth is also characterized by a growing connection with a higher power, which some might experience through prayer and meditation. We come to learn that our greatest teacher can be either the stranger we meet on the corner, but also the quiet and still mind that we achieve in solitude while meditating.
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Life Transitions – Midlife
The Death And Rebirth Of Self
Sometimes a part of us must die before another part can come to life.
Sometimes a part of us must die before another part can come to life. Even though this is a natural and necessary part of our growth, it is often painful or, if we don’t realize what’s happening, confusing and disorienting. In fact, confusion and disorientation are often the messengers that tell us a shift is taking place within us. These shifts happen throughout the lives of all humans, as we move from infancy to childhood to adolescence and beyond. With each transition from one phase to another, we find ourselves saying good-bye to an old friend, the identity that we formed in order to move through that particular time.
Sometimes we form these identities in relationships or jobs, and when we shift those areas of our life become unsettled. Usually, if we take the time to look into the changing surface of things, we will find that a shift is taking place within us. For example, we may go through one whole chapter of our lives creating a protective shell around ourselves because we need it in order to heal from some early trauma. One day, though, we may find ourselves feeling confined and restless, wanting to move outside the shelter we needed for so long; the new part of ourselves cannot be born within the confines of the shell our old self needed to survive.
We may feel a strange mixture of exhilaration and sadness as we say good-bye to a part of ourselves that is dying and make way for a whole new identity to emerge in its place. We may find inspiration in working with the image of an animal who molts or sheds in order to make way for new skin, fur, or feathers to emerge. For example, keeping a duck feather, or some other symbol of transformation, can remind us that death and rebirth are simply nature’s way of evolving. We can surrender to this process, letting go of our past self with great love and gratitude, and welcoming the new with an open mind and heart, ready for our next phase of life.
From The Daily OM
