The World As You Never Saw It

When I was growing up, way back in the old days of black-and-white television (in the very early 1960's), the US Army produced a weekly half-hour program that they called The Big Picture, and it opened with a graphic depicting the globe. John Glenn had not yet taken his first manned orbital ride and we were still almost a decade away from the first moon landing. The subject of the amazing photograph from the Apollo 8 mission that we call "Earth Rise" (that shows the Earth rising above the lunar horizon) existed only in some sci-fi imaginations. I remember an earlier time when experimental jets reached the stratosphere and we got our first images of the curvature of the earth. What had been well-documented theory was, for the first time, directly humanly observable. During that scientifically critical age, all of humanity gained a whole new perspective on the earth.

For men, the midlife transition offers a critical opportunity to connect — for the first time — with the Big Picture. Think of all the dissociations that hit you during midlife: dissociation from your naive imaginings of what marriage and family life would be like; dissociation from the mad scramble to land that dream job in your perfect career; dissociation from imaginings of what accomplishments you were going to get to enjoy by this time. One by one, your assumptions and the expectations that relied on them have been stripped away. Whatever bright goals you had been striving for have, by thins time, been tarnished by the brutal forces of time and the realities of life. Even your highest achievements never turned out to meet your expectations. Perhaps, as you look at your personal world at midlife, you feel cheated and resentful. "Is that all there is?" you may well wonder.

Midlife is your invitation and your opportunity to rise above the world as you know it and to see it from an entirely new perspective: equally as revolutionary as that 'Earth Rise' photograph was when we first saw it. The new perspective on the Earth that we obtained from space is very analogous to the shift in perspective that the midlife transition forces on you in its own way, challenging you to accept it. Of course, you don't have to change anything if you decide not to. After all, the Flat Earth Society still has plenty of members on its rosters. Like any serious shift in perspective, you're going to gain some new viewpoints as you're being forced to relinquish others. Your challenge boils down to whether or not you're have the courage to see things differently and to put aside many of your most closely-held beliefs in the process. I want to provide you with a little list of some of the things you'll have to let go of.

First and foremost, you're going to have to give up the belief that anyone is doing anything to you (or ever has done anything to you). I'm talking about a shift in your belief system that goes beyond mere forgiveness. Forgiveness, after all, recognizes that someone has attacked you unjustly, then attempts to exercise some sort of magnanimous 'gift' that you can award to the perpetrator. You 'find it in your heart' to let go of your injury. The problem with this approach rests in the (false) belief that you have been an innocent victim of the injustice. To pass successfully through midlife requires that you give up that belief and come to the appreciation that painful events come to every life (and you're no special exception) and that, whatever happened to you came only as a learning experience that, as an adult you're able to see simply as one of the myriad of patterns that have been woven into the fabric of your life. Furthermore, if you're capable of analyzing your (adult) experiences deeply enough, you'll often find that you also had some complicity in the painful experience.

This brings us to a very delicate but critical issue: what about painful things that should never have happened to you when you were a child, but did? The other day, I heard the heart-wrenching story from a young woman who, as a child, was abused at home and shuffled beck and forth between foster homes. It was the story of childhood horrors that no individual should have had to endure. Why should that have happened to her — or to any of the other thousands of abused infants and children who suffer from the inexcusable behavior of so-called 'adults' who should have known (and done) better. No one can answer the question, "Why me?" In the realm of human tragedy, the only (admittedly cold-hearted) response has to be, "Why not you?" No one gets out of childhood unscathed. The only differences are the depths and severity of the wounds. The only lesson that we can take away from all this is that blaming others for the pain (and damage) that was caused only exacerbates the situation. It relieves nothing. Even when we have absolutely no responsibility for the misfortunes that we're forced to undergo, we have full responsibility for how me manage the effects of our woundedness. Before we're able to move forward, we need to let go of all blame-seeking, and focus entirely on accepting the hand that life has dealt us and playing it the very best we know (or can learn) how to.

Accepting that every single thing that has occurred in your life amounts to little more than an opportunity to grow into a stronger, more responsible and wiser person, can release you from the corrosive effects of playing the blame game. Resentment and revenge always compound your pain and injuries and make your condition worse. Often, these negative reactions cause more harm to yourself than they do to the object of your hatred. What, on the contrary, would happen if you were able to accept the fact that you are ultimately invulnerable, living or dead? All pain — even that afflicted on 'innocents' — serves only as an invitation to growth. When you step back from the minute details that consume you — and particularly the details of 'who did what to whom' — you can suddenly discover that the world that surrounds you results, to a very great degree, from your own decisions. You created this 'world', and you can re-create it at will. That's the lesson that the midlife transition exists to teach you. Your victimhood results not from the fact that the world's problems are too big, but that your vision of your place the world is too small. The challenge to your courage comes with the realization that you could change everything if you so chose.

The Judeo-Christian Scriptures teach that God created humankind in "His own Image and Likeness" granting to you and me the power of creation. Accepting that fact at face value (as most of us are wont to do) leaves us in a quandary about what we want our creation to look like. Most people (especially we men) know what we think others expect our world to look like, but, at the same time, they remain clueless as to what they themselves want their world to look like. When other people's expectations are removed from the equation (as they are at midlife) it comes down to having to decide for yourself. You can no longer blame others for your plight; you can no longer rely on others to let you know what it is you're 'supposed' to do; you're forced, maybe for the first time, to confront what it is that you really want out of life, and can be terrifying to wake up to the fact that you really don't know. When you arrive at that point, you've come to the real midlife crisis. It's a crisis of self-knowledge, and how you resolve it will determine what your world will look like for the rest of your life. You get to see your world as you've never seen it before: once again for the first time.