Habit can be as powerful as a drug. [Read more…]
Am I Really Middle-Aged at 56?
How can I make such a claim? Do I really expect to live to 112?
Let me explain. I’ve always felt that you can’t count the first 20 years. All you’re doing is maturing into adulthood. How can preschool count when you’re figuring out how old you are? 4th grade? The teen years? No, I only count the adult years, and by that measure I’m only 36. And except for my stiff back and aching hips when I get out of bed in the morning, I FEEL 36, in my mind
But here’s the most important thing: I think you’re middle-aged when you reach that golden ground between having raised your kids, and declining. So if you’re 85 and going strong, like my mom, learning new things all the time, curious, hungry still for self-mastery and knowledge, then you might never leave middle-age, according to my definition.
May we never leave middle-age.
Are Your Friends Bad For You (Part 2)
Earlier we talked about the importance of entering into friendships consciously. Now to another tough question: What if you were raised by negative people? How might that change you?
My folks, as loving and supportive as they tried to be, were fearful and insecure people. I was raised in an atmosphere where we anticipated things would go wrong. Friends would turn on you. Rich people weren’t to be trusted. Employers would toss you from your job in a heartbeat. Politicians were crooked. Other world powers would destroy the USA if they could.
Of course, there’s an element of truth in all of those fears, but we were raised to expect such things to happen, and it changed all of us kids, I am sure. For one thing, I wonder how much it contributed to my chronic anxiety. For another, I sometimes wonder if I’m addicted to drama, as much as I hate it. For a third, when something horrible happens in my world, there’s a tiny part of me that savors it, that wants to fire up the crack pipe of negativity and take a long, slow hit.
A friend of mine who was literally tortured as a child, says with confidence that those hardships made her who she is today. My reaction is: bullshit!! That’s just a rationalization to ease the pain and regret. Who might she have been today if she hadn’t been hurt mentally and physically by her family? What heights would she have scaled with her incredible artistic and musical talents?
Some of us are living our lives in a haze, unaware of our prejudices or the knee-jerk beliefs we adopt to insulate ourselves, subconsciously protective. So here’s the big question: Are you now the person that you were meant to be, or are you the person you were made to be?
Are Your Friends Bad For You? (Part 1)
When I was a young woman there were so many things I didn’t know. I remember wishing I had an owner’s manual for evaluating whether I was making smart choices, or how to operate wisely. For reasons too lengthy to go into here, I didn’t.
Now at middle-age, I know so much more (and yes, I have more to learn, but that’s another post). One of the things I found to be true was that a negative person can drag down a positive person much more quickly than a positive person can pull up a negative one.
Along those same lines, my friend Tammy Coia shared this yesterday: “Think of your 5 closest friends. We become who we surround ourselves with. If we are surrounded by negative thinkers, guess what, we become more pessimistic. When we surround ourselves with positive thinkers our thinking becomes more positive…” And then Tammy ends with this most insightful of questions: “Examine who you surround yourself with and why you choose them (or did they choose you?)”
I emphasized the last few words because the question gives me chills. As a younger woman I sent out signals to manipulators and cons that I was non-judgmental, kind, and eager to help damaged people realize their potential. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, in balance, but I didn’t know when to quit. So the users lined up outside my heart, and I reeled them in on my tractor beam that said, “Pretend you love me and I will let you sleep on my couch while I go to work and earn money to feed you and pay the mortgage.” Now I know the answer to Tammy’s question: they chose me, and I was inadequately prepared to realize it or deal with them in a balanced and healthy way.
To end at the beginning: when I was young, I lacked a lot of information that would have made life safer and easier. Now that I’m older I’ve learned some important skills, and one of them is to surround myself with supportive and positive people. For the most part, I choose them, but if such people (like Tammy) happen to choose me, that’s the icing on top.
Boomer Women Part 2: Are You Slowing Down or Speeding Up?
“For a proactive woman, the response to (middle age) is to expend more energy, make more lists, go to more seminars, try to muster more will power, make more decisions. But the result, she often finds, is just spinning her wheels.” Suzanne Braun Levine, in her book Inventing the Rest of Our Lives, nails it, in my opinion. She continues:
“Even if our present circumstances require that we keep up the pace, most of us have begun to feel uncomfortable in overdrive; simple burnout can make us want to slow to a walk. And the mellowness – the decreasing willingness to sweat the small stuff – that our changing brains lead us toward can make the flowers alongside the path smell very sweet…(this time of life) is where we make the transition from that driven, overcommitted superwoman to someone whose priorities and passions are less rigidly managed and perhaps more deeply felt.”
For me, although I feel a bit smug about all the things I have learned to this point in my life, middle age is accompanied by a lack of clarity about whether I should be slowing down or, in the face of mortality, speeding up! There is a cost to either choice. What are you doing, slowing down or speeding up, and are you paying a price or are you exuberant about your choice? Let me know so we can learn from you, sistah!
“If only we’d stop trying to be happy, we’d have a pretty good time.” – Edith Wharton
Boomer Women – Our Best and Worst of Times
I’m reading “Inventing the Rest of our Lives” by Suzanne Braun Levine, and this part resonated with me:
“We know what ‘middle age’ used to be about: cutting back, scaling down, giving up. And we know that isn’t for us. At the same time, we sense that doors are closing, that a chapter is over. We are no longer fertile; we are no longer the trend-setting generation; and we are now less likely to make a major mark. So we are torn between those ‘facts of life’ and what we fear are ‘unrealistic expectations.’ Can I really learn a new language? Can I really start my own business? Can I fall in love? Get a divorce? Close up the house? Do I have what it takes to make changes in my life?
“We are restless and curious and ready to get to work. The doubts and the ‘zest’ create crosscurrents that can cancel each other out and leave us stymied by a sense of aimlessness.”
I can’t tell you how much that speaks to me. Here I am, on the verge of marketing my debut novel to agents, at a time when the publishing industry is being nuked and our society still very much values youth over maturity (and I have more to say now than ever!) – and yet, there are times when I think I am foolish for racing around with my hair on fire in pursuit of this passion, because I am 56 and my sweet husband is 63, and we are in our prime of midlife, and I should spend every vibrant moment I can enjoying his company…the actuarials are not kind. I expect I’ll have fifteen years of widowhood; time enough, solitude enough for writing. So I race, and then I stop, and wonder, and I go back and hold him and ask him to reassure me that I’m not leaving him behind, and then I hurry back to my office.
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