One of my favorite reads of this year, written 30 years ago, was Kathleen Brehony’s “Awakening at Midlife: A Guide to Reviving Your Spirit, Recreating Your Life and Returning to Your Truest Self” (thanks for the recommendation, Dawn Averitt). I’m going to excerpt some of my choice gems from the book:
Holding the tension of opposites:
“At midlife, we are deeply involved in a drama between opposites of profound proportions. Certainly, there can be no greater opposites than the face we show to the world and the dark aspects of the unconscious shadow. But it is precisely the conflict between these opposites that offers an opportunity to form a new identity, one that can incorporate aspects of ourselves that were repressed and unlived during the first half of life. We are on the threshold of a transformation and we are reaching out for greater depth and meaning. We are struggling to acknowledge parts of ourselves that have been ignored for 30, 40, 50 years or more. We are attempting to know ourselves in new and important ways. But in order to move toward who we are becoming we have to let go, if only for an instant, of who we have been.”
How the butterfly has a soulful history in our human concept of transformation:
“In ancient Greece, the word for soul, “psyche,” was often illustrated and described as a butterfly. The transformation from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly is an apt metaphor for what is happening in midlife. The striking transformation and radical changes in human beings who allow themselves to experience this psychological chrysalis are just as remarkable as those of our insect relatives. And the process of change is often experienced as a kind of melting down and dissolving of what was….The time in which we are psychologically and spiritually in the chrysalis offers an opening, a doorway, through which we can more clearly touch the Divine, transpersonal, and nonrational aspects of being.”
She quotes poet Nancy Wood which captures the beauty and wonder of solitude in midlife:
“Do not be afraid to embrace the arms of loneliness.
Do not be concerned with the thorns of solitude.
Why worry that you will miss something?
Learn to be at home with yourself without a hand to hold.
Learn to endure isolation with only the stars for friends.
Happiness comes from understanding unity.
Love arrives on the footprints of your fear.
Beauty arises from the ashes of despair.
Solitude brings the clarity of still waters.
Wisdom completes the circle of your dreams.”
This book is one of the most aligned with the MEA ethos and, it’s no wonder that PBS produced an hour-long television special based upon the book called “The Midlife Survival Guide” back in the 20th century.
-Chip