“Midlife’s gotten a bad rap! Sure it can be a crisis, but it’s also an opportunity to re-invent those parts of your (self/life) that aren’t working.” – J Keil
Midlife Crisis
Midlife Transition: Changing the Way the World Views Midlife
When Social Security first came into being in 1935, our life span was thought to be about 70 years at most. Now, we have learned so much medically and nutritionally that people are living far longer. In 1776, someone born in the US was expected to live to about 35. Lifestyle and technical advances have more than doubled that figure. The National Institute of Aging projects that by the middle of the next century, life expectancy will be nearly 92 for women and 86 for men.
Today, more than 35 million are over the age of 65 (that’s about 1/7th of the population) and with the baby boomers coming of age, the Census Bureau in the US predicts that the over 70 million born between 1946 and 1964 will reach retirement age. One thing we can count on the current population to do is to redefine ‘middle age’.
Until recently, aging was regarded with disdain, with an expectancy of waning vigor and even social uselessness. But the stereotypes are changing and middle agers and seniors are becoming more and more interested in life- long learning, healthy lifestyles and political activism as well as new meaning for the later years of life. We are truly seeing a population reinventing itself and reinventing midlife. These changing conditions call for new ways of being, and new perspectives and new role models that we can follow to make certain that life doesn’t end at or after midlife. It is time to end the myth that Midlife is synonymous with “Crisis”. As a society, we have begun to somewhat change our views on aging, but we still have a way to go to arrive at a vision where we “change the way the world views midlife.”
A taste of advice that can solve ANY problem – Midlife or otherwise
Minto wrote, in The Results Book: Your brain operates under the law, as you believe so shall it be done. Your brain is a computer-like guidance mechanism and it guides you according to the beliefs you have programmed it with. However, there are different degrees of belief.
What are some of the things you believe in? You might answer God, gravity, myself, night and day. These are things we might all believe in, but there are things we believe in stronger than any of these. The simple truth is that the things we believe in stronger than anything else are the things that we fear.
I will guarantee you, if you are walking down a narrow path through the woods and you come face to face with a grizzly bear, you are going to believe in that grizzly bear stronger than you ever believed in God or gravity or yourself or anything else. If you believed in God that strongly, you would be getting answers to all your prayers, but you’ve probably never prayed with that much energy and emotion. You see, fear is the same thing as belief except that you put more energy and emotion into something you fear and so it becomes a stronger belief.
You believe in God, gravity, yourself. That is believing. Then there is really believing, and really believing is worrying about something. And then there is really, really believing. And the things in life you really, really believe in are the things you fear. Realize that you use the same faculties of your brain-mind functioning to believe in God as you use to fear the dentist, except that when your believing reaches the degree of fear, you are putting more energy and more emotion into it so it becomes a stronger belief.
If you can grasp the fact that worry and fear are the strongest forms of believing, and as you believe so shall it be done unto you, then you will understand how allowing your problems to be O.K. will solve 90% of your problems in life without even directing any attention to the problem.
The simplicity that makes this work is this: Have you ever worried about something or feared something if you knew it was O.K.? No! If something’s O.K., you don’t worry about it or fear it.
The reason you have failed to reach many of your goals in life is because you have not been aware that worry and fear are the strongest forms of belief. There is an ancient message, ‘That which I feared the most came upon me.’ What the message is really saying is, ‘that which I really, really believed in happened to me.’
If you will allow your problems to be O.K. just the way they are, then your subconscious mind will stop worrying about them or stop fearing them. This allows your subconscious mind to stop really, really believing in your problems. Then the conscious desire or answer has a chance to become a reality. In other words, by eliminating worry and fear you allow your mind to see answers instead of problems.
Your brain is designed in a computer-like manner to seek answers, but through worry and fear you have taught it to see the problems instead. If all of your attention is focused on the problem, you will not see the answer. Worry simply develops a habit of having or doing or being what you are worrying about. When you worry, you create a predominant brain cell pattern of the problem. When you say it’s O.K. you are creating a new pattern that releases the worry and thereby releases the problem.
