Sliding Downhill from Commitment to Denial

You see all those fancy letters after my name? The 'MA' (at least one of them) is the result of my fascination with Western (Greek) philosophy. These ancient brilliant minds, after all, laid the foundation for our entire cultural perspective. What to us 'sophisticated' contemporary thinkers seems to have been simple and naive statements of the obvious in fact made possible the complex tools that we depend on today: tools like mathematics and the scientific method. I'm afraid that sometimes we have a tendency to dismiss what they had to say because the language that they used seems simplistic and overworked to our complexity-jaded eyes. When looking at their statements, we always need to push beyond our arrogant and dismissive habits and ask, "What are they trying to say here?"

Our forebears in thought gave a lot of attention to understanding the nature of 'health.' We find, buried under the archaic language of 'humors' and 'temperaments,' an incredibly simple yet insightful definition: 'balance.' Try it: imagine your health as a delicate balance of factors working together. Now, envision what happens when this delicate balance is upset: how easy it is for the whole assemblage to disintegrate into illness, and how much effort it takes for you to (and perhaps the whole medical establishment) to restore that healthy balance. Much as you'd like to dismiss the ancient's insight as primitive, it does describe what 'health' is about as well as any human is capable of doing. Life (to say nothing of maturity) absolutely depends on this balance, yet the forces of entropy are strong, always nudging us closer to death, destruction and disintegration.

There we were last night, four highly-intelligent, intensely-committed people sitting around a table in an otherwise empty restaurant: two recently-introduced middle aged couples getting to know each other for the first time. The parallels between us were striking: we had lived highly-committed adulthoods of careful diets (vegetarian and macrobiotic) interlaced with long hours running and lifting weights; they had both been committed body-builders. Now, we shared our common plight: 40 extra pounds each on our side of the table, 30 extra on theirs. The sense of our health tilting out of balance (to say nothing about tipping our several scales) was palpable. We were wise enough not to see ourselves as victims of midlife, but as paying the necessary consequences of coping with the changes that midlife brings; yet we all faced the dilemma of how to regain that balance that we once had while acknowledging our age-lessened energy levels and the ever-increasing cost of maintaining our health status quo, let alone restoring it to where it once was.

Has midlife changed our commitment? You've got to believe that it has. As we were once so focused on building our careers, our families and maintaining our peak performance, now time has forced our focus to shift. We've encountered our share of brick walls stopping our advancement along our chosen pathways dead in our tracks. More than once, we've had to stare our own mortality in the face, eye to eye. We're no longer so fully convinced of our immortality, and the myth of our invincibility has been 'busted' too often now to ignore. In the end, we who have entered fully into the midlife transition, have been challenged to question, to confront, and to discard many (most? all?) of our favorite preconceptions. Like the condition of the economy in which we live today, when you're constantly being forced to pay more and more with fewer and fewer resources, something's eventually got to give. Economically, that slide ends in bankruptcy; spiritually, our slide leads us (eventually) to a fundamental option.

A fundamental option represents a turning-point in your life. It can come at any time, as entropy hustles you along the path of least resistance from your commitment to an idealized vision of your life toward that brick wall (or, alte
atively, that abyss) that awaits you along your chosen (however unfortunate) course. Choices must be made — serious choices, choices with serious consequences. We ignore the wisdom of the philosophers at our own peril: Jean-Paul Sartre was the one who starkly reminded us that "not to choose is a choice." Whether you act, or whether you refuse to act; whether you hold your course, or whether you change direction: the choice is yours, and yours alone. The one thing that you cannot do — that it's impossible for you to do — is to avoid making that choice and taking that fundamental option.

As you slide down the slippery slope of entropy ever farther away from the commitment of young adulthood that fundamental option of midlife awaits you. Decay always forms the line of least resistance. Pretending that the choices you made as a youth and as a young adult can carry you through into maturity with health and balance can be characterized by one word: denial. As entrepreneurial guru Marshall Goldsmith recently wrote, "What got you here won't get you there."

There's a saying that arose in the mid 1930's around the growth of the AIDS plague that killed (and continues to kill) hundreds of thousands of people all over the world: 'Denial equals death.' Curiously, in many ways, life itself is an incurable disease. Nobody's going to get out of this alive. Yet, when faced with all the powerful forces that converge around the midlife transition (physical, emotional, mental and spiritual), the saying still rings true: 'Denial equals death;' 'Not to choose is a choice.' Those who are wise — those who are willing to probe the wisdom of the ages and learn from the triumphs and mistakes of those who have gone before — will recognize that fundamental options must be taken and the earlier they do so and the more courage they bring to those choices, the more successful the results will be. Those who are not so wise will stubbornly and arrogantly hold on to their old ideas and their old behaviors and insist on how right they've been in the past and slide almost effortlessly into crisis and beyond.

What's beyond crisis? I think US President Obama has spelled it out brilliantly: if you don't anticipate the crises that are to come, if you don't deal with them when you've allowed them to overtake you, you'll inevitably continue the frictionless slide into catastrophe. What's the difference between crisis and catastrophe? A crisis is formed when fundamental options have been obscured by denial until their urgency has become unavoidable. A catastrophe occurs when you've passed the tipping point and there's no longer any way to avoid the consequences of your (lack of) actions. Once you've passed the tipping point into catastrophe, you're into full-blown reactive mode.

It's important (but not difficult) to understand the workings of catastrophe theory. Imagine that you've set a container full of water under a slowly dripping faucet. As each drop of water falls into the container and the contents expand gradually beyond the top of the container, the surface tension of the water increases, forming a kind of bubble that contains the overflow contents. When the pressure of the excess water pushing outward overcomes the surface tension holding it in the container, the tension breaks and the excess water overflows the edge of the container, running down the sides. That instant is, technically speaking, referred to as the 'catastrophe', because the occurrence of the overflow is, from the perspective of physics, irreversible. Once the overflow is triggered, there's no turning back.

Do we need to be reminded of Edmund Burke's famous saying, “All that's necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing”? Allowing entropy (increasing chaos) gradually to take over your life is courting catastrophe. There will inevitably come a moment when the slide from tipping point into denial will become irreversible and you'll no longer be able to avoid the consequences of your inaction. Your catastrophe point overtakes you when your relationship reaches the point where it's no longer sustainable, the point where those who employ you are no longer willing to put up with you, and/or the point when your health is no longer in balance and — in the terms of the ancient Greek philosophers — you tumble over the edge into dis-ease.

The only remedy for catastrophe, whether it be in your relationship, your career, or your personal health and well-being will be to live proactively: to avoid at all cost taking the path of least resistance downhill into denial. The work of midlife remains forever 'work.' There's no practical way that you can rest from keeping yourself in balance without allowing yourself (sooner or later) to slip into catastrophe: the point of no return. The work of staying alive is a full-time job!