“Midlife is when you reach the top of the ladder and find that it is against the wrong wall.”
~ Joseph Campbell
Seventy-six million “Baby Boomers” are facing the midlife experience. Midlife is certainly a time of change and transition, but it is only a normal stage of life, like childhood or adolescence. Saying it is normal means that it cannot be avoided. Live long enough and you will encounter it. As you could not avoid adolescence, so you cannot avoid midlife. Midlife may be denied, but it cannot be escaped.
Midlife is greatly misunderstood. It is essentially a positive experience with the goal of making you a “whole” person. It is trying to transform you from one level of living to another. Adolescence transformed you from a child into an adult. It may not have been a pleasant experience, but it was not meant to be fun. It was meant to change you.
Midlife also intends to change you, and you may not enjoy it. Midlife is trying to guide you towards psychological and spiritual wholeness. At midlife you are only halfway to that goal. More growth is needed but may be resisted if you have become comfortably stuck where you are.
In life, there are two major identity crises. The first, occurring in adolescence, is to establish an identity. You must get a sense of who you are by focusing on achievement and accomplishment. You develop a unique personality style. You become “you,” but the danger is that “you” may be overly focused upon yourself. The second identity crisis is at midlife when you must give up who you think you are so you can become who you were meant to be. This transition is not easy and is greatly resisted as seen in well-known midlife crisis.
While midlife provides the opportunity to enliven life, many people think that it is a time to recapture lost youth. The challenge of midlife is not to become young again but to grow into your full potential. Midlife provides an opportunity for psychological and spiritual growth that encourages you to give up your self-centered nature and learn to nurture and care for others.
Ultimately, midlife is about the search for true meaning in life, which is always a spiritual quest. Midlife is an opportunity for an awakening into a deeper spirituality that takes us into caring for and giving to others. Midlife is trying to make us loving people who can focus less on ourselves and more on others. This is a difficult change, and the midlife journey cannot be taken without a certain amount of suffering.
One of the meanings of the word “suffer” is to live through or to allow an experience into your life. At midlife you must suffer — live through — the loss, change, and letting go of much of what you bring into it. You must give up one identity for another. It is like the transformation from a caterpillar into a butterfly. It is neither pleasant nor guaranteed, but if you don’t take the risk, you stagnate.
Midlife wants to take you on a journey of transformation and make you a kinder and more generous person. While it is often a harrowing adventure, it can be ultimately rewarding.
Are you willing to take the journey? Are you willing to let go of who you are in order to see who you can become?
Learn more about midlife at http://www.lessonsforliving.com/midlife.htm
Dr. Dan Johnston, Ph.D. is a clinical psychologist affiliated with Mercer Health Systems in Macon, Georgia. For 20 years he was the Director of Psychological Services for a large metropolitan Medical Center and is currently serving as an Assistant Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Science for Mercer University School of Medicine in Macon, Georgia. Dr. Johnston’s expertise is in stress management and resiliency training. He is the author of “Lessons for Living: Simple Solutions for Life’s Problems” from Dagali Press and creator of the popular Lessons for Living Web Site (http://www.lessonsforliving.com).
