First of all, a huge birthday hug to MEA alum Jim Flaherty who turns 90 today and is such an inspiration for how life gets better with age.
Words shape the way we experience life. Sometimes, though, the words we’ve inherited feel a little frayed, like clothes that no longer fit the body we’ve grown into. At MEA, we’ve been playing with language—not to discard the wisdom of the past, but to refresh it so it resonates more deeply with our lives today.
Take the famous “dark night of the soul.” It’s a beautiful phrase, but often misunderstood as a spiritual emptiness. What if we reframed it as the “dark night of the ego”? Suddenly, it’s less about losing spirit and more about shedding illusions that no longer serve us. When I was struggling in my late 40s, yes, I felt rocked to my soul, but it was because my ego was struggling with the death of certain identities I’d clung to.
Or consider the well-loved “Serenity Prayer.” I prefer to think of it as the “Wisdom Prayer”—a call not only for peace, but for discernment in choosing what to accept, what to change, and how to tell the difference. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote this prayer showing the value of two competing qualities, serenity and courage, and amplifying the value of wisdom as the determinant of when to use one versus the other. So, I’m going to start calling this the “Wisdom Prayer.”
And one more that won’t be surprising to you: “midlife crisis.” What if we renamed it the “midlife chrysalis”? Instead of a collapse, it becomes a transformation, a cocoon that makes possible a new way of being. It is the metamorphosis of midlife that allows humans to experience greater happiness in the second half of their adult lives, as evidenced by the U-curve of Happiness.
Sometimes all it takes is a change of words to reveal a change of worlds.
-Chip