Mid-Life Crisis: A Matter of Perspective

There is randomness to life, like a crap shoot.  Just when you think you can relax because all the game pieces are now on the table, suddenly – the game has changed, the other player left, or changed the rules, (without telling you the new ones) and you have to start over again.  Hopefully, your strategy will be to come out a winner, even though you fell through a trap door, like divorce.  Maybe it was a severe blow to your career or it could have been something much more personal, like re-evaluating how you have spent years of your life on the wrong bus, in endeavors that have left you flat.

John Lennon said “Life is what happens to you, when you’re busy making other plans.” And sometimes this realization can create what is called a mid-life crisis.  In this great instant gratification country of ours, in our effort to become successful, we struggle for the best education, careers, status symbols or lifestyle, and of course relationships.  The accomplishment of these things, collectively or individually is often the way we measure our own worth and value as people.  The problem with instant gratification is, that it takes so long to get.  If it exists at all.  

Decades after we went steady in the ninth grade, I tracked down my long lost boyfriend on the Internet.  Describing what had gone on since we last saw each other, he said, “After a fourteen year argument, my wife and I got a divorce.  She got the house and cars, and I got the major depression and sizeable drinking problem.”  He was always the comedian, but his humor pointed out to me how we struggle to keep the status quo, even staying in a bad relationship, (at least until the kids are grown) because it  represents failure if the marriage doesn’t work out. 

  

Now, that you’ve survived your separation / abandonment issues, reconciled yourself about getting laid off, or stepped up to the plate  and admitted that you could never have been self-actualized without attempting to accomplish your life’s dream,  don’t be shy, go ahead and take a run at it!  From the first generation that refused to get old, it’s never too late to go for it!

 

Life is really all about change. When unexpected events change your course you may feel great despair or sometimes, anger.  As “The Borg” stated on Startrek, the Next Generation, “Resistance is Futile.”  Ultimately you are going to have to adjust to these changes anyway or you’ll end up getting beat down on the playing field, exhausted and unfulfilled.  The expression, when God closes a door, He opens a window…might mean He opens a government grant that enables you to go back to school, and explore new goals in your life.  Being on your own liberates you from the limiting expectations of others, and lets you discover good things about yourself that you might never have known.    It is all a matter of perspective.  Go ahead and decide to be happy.