The Age of Miracles (6 page)

The part of your life that’s over, with all its joy and tears, was spiritual boot camp. It was gestation time for the life that lies ahead of you now. The secret dream you’ve carried forever, denying its reality even to yourself, has refused to go away and is ready to be born at last.

A few times in my life I’ve heard a voice in my head as clearly as if a person standing next to me were talking. Once, during a period that I thought was so dark I’d never get over it, I heard these words: “This is not the end. It’s the beginning.”

And it was.

N
EW LIFE EMERGES NOT FROM STRATEGY
but from character. Before realizing this, you might think that making plans, devising blueprints for your future or whatever, are the keys to the path ahead. But our real keys to victory are internal. Your state of doing must be matched by the state of your being, or the incongruity will sabotage even your most brilliant plans.

It’s been fascinating over the last few years towatch the high and mighty in business and politics fall precipitously—not because their plans didn’t work, but because their character flaws undercut those plans. Whether the microphone caught them making racist comments or their greed overcame their common sense, who they were as people made all the difference—more than their résumés, their degrees, or even their past successes. If you fail at the art of being human and staying human, you recklessly court disaster. Yet how do we cultivate the betterment of our humanity? What is the how-to of personal transformation?

What I’ve learned, to the extent to which I’ve been successful at any of this, is that the path of right living is walked one moment at a time. Whether you show up for life as a jerk or a saint has little to do with belief or theology; it has to do with personal integrity. We aren’t transformed in our hearts by mere belief, because belief isn’t
of
the heart. The heart’s transformation is not attained through the mind—it’s attained through surrender, authenticity, forgiveness, faith, honesty, acceptance, vulnerability, humility, willingness, nonjudgment, and other characterological values that have to be learned and relearned continuously.

We might skip some lessons at school, but we can’t skip any of the lessons of life. They will find us. If a lesson is up for us and we don’t learn it now, then it’s programmed into the universe that we will just have to learn it later. It’s said in
A Course in Miracles
that it’s not up to us what we learn, but merely whether we learn through joy or through pain.

But by midlife, we’re destined to learn. Whatever parts of you are blocking the emergence of the highest, best you, have simply got to go now. And one way or the other, they will.

Allowing the pain of personal growth to be a crucible of your spirit—the alchemical grail through which the metal of your former self turns into gold—is one of the highest callings of life. Pain can burn you up and destroy you, or burn you up and redeem you. It can deliver you to an entrenched despair, or deliver you to your higher self. At midlife we decide, consciously or unconsciously, the path of the victim or the path of the phoenix when it is rising up at last.

Growth can be hard, and laboring a new self very difficult. Growing older just happens; growing wise is something else again. And by a certain point in life, most of us
have
been hurt. We
have
been disappointed. We
have
had dreams die, and find it hard to forgive ourselves or others. The challenge of age is not to skip life’s disappointments but to transcend them. We transcend them by learning the lessons they taught us, however painful, and coming out on the other side prepared to create, with God’s help, a new life.

Dear God,

May my spirit be reborn,

that I might be a better person.

I give You my shame

over whom I have sometimes been,

and my hopes for whom I wish to be.

Please receive them both.

Amen

N
OT THAT ANY OF THIS IS EASY.

The ego has no intention of allowing us to grow more radiant and spirited as the years go by. It has no intention of allowing us to experience ourselves as fully empowered, joyful, spiritual beings—not if it can help it. Its plan is to destroy that dream—not just by breaking our bodies but by breaking our hearts.

From its headquarters deep in our subconscious minds, the ego magnetizes and manifests our nightmares. It fabricates false testimony to our guilt and guile, finding ways to shame and humiliate us, shape-shifting into insidious forms to taunt and ridicule us at every turn. We’re lured into the black hole of self-doubt and self-loathing, as problems both secret and not-so-secret began to loom on our horizon. With every passing year, we lose courage along with muscle tone.

Yet this is nothing more than the game of life as it must be played by everyone. None of us get to avoid the night, however hard we seek to prolong the day. And the night has its own set of lessons. At a certain point in life, it’s simply our destiny to have to face ourselves: to be shown everything not healed within us, challenged to either transform our wounds or to begin to die from them.

If you feel, when looking back on your life so far, that you’ve wrestled with primal forces and not always won, be assured that you’re pretty much like everyone else. It is a rare individual who reaches midlife without a lot to grieve. And whether or not your tears are acknowledged—whether or not you give them the chance to actually fall down your cheeks—there’s no question that they’re there.

Arrogant in our modernity, our generation thought we were invulnerable to ancient myths and archetypes. We thought we could avoid the descent into the psychic underworld … until we realized that no one can and no one ever does. And there is a reason for that. The underworld of personal pain and crisis, while difficult, is the inevitable breeding ground for the strengths and talents we were born to embody. Our problems transform themselves into our medicine when we learn to face how we created them to begin with. This spiritual medicine—often so bitter tasting when it is going down—will one day be seen to have been that which saved your life. From divorce to illness to bankruptcy to whatever other form of loss, you finally come to realize that your crisis was in fact your initiation into the fullness of your self.

Having faced the fire of your initiation and survived its heat, you can now serve others in a whole new way. By being a living testimony to life transformed, you carry in your cells a sacred knowledge, and in your mind and heart a sacred fire. It’s not the fire of youth but the fire of Prometheus, who emerged with the light that would light the world. It’s a light that you could
only
have gotten from having faced some version of your personal hell, and now you are inoculated to the fires that rage around you. Sometimes only fire can put out fire, and such is the fire that now burns in you. This is not the fire of your destruction but of your victory. It is the fire of your middle years.

G
OD
O
NLY
K
NOWS

A
t a certain point in life, almost everyone is haunted by the ghosts of his or her regrets. There are things we did that we wish we hadn’t, and things we didn’t do that we wish we had. From family we neglected to friends we abandoned, from ways we acted irresponsibly to opportunities we wasted, situations that seemed unclear to us while we were going through them seem very clear in retrospect.

And during the years when we were carelessly dismissing what we later came to see as the most important things in life, we kept crying out woefully that we were looking for
meaning.
All that time we were starved for meaning, we were lacking it for no other reason than that we weren’t
ascribing
meaning to the situations right in front of us! Meaning isn’t what a situation gives us; it’s what we give to a situation. But who knew?

It’s horrifying to recognize that you didn’t always treat life with the respect it deserved. And for the ’60s generation now settling into midlife, that’s a common realization. In shattering some outworn notions of morality, we frequently shattered some eternal ones as well. This is not to repudiate the outrageousness of that era; in many ways, it was a creative explosion in us and in the world. Yet there was a shadow, as there’s a shadow to most anything. And at a certain point, facing your shadows is the only way to dispel them.

That particular dark night of the soul—facing our self-loathing for the mistakes of our past—is like an entry ticket into a revitalized midlife. Sometimes decades of experience have to be forgiven before we can feel free to move on. Many of us have sent or received letters or made calls expressing things like, “I’m so sorry I hurt you; I was such an idiot in 1985.” Regardless of how much discomfort we have to go through to get there, it’s gratifying to feel we’ve released enough of our past to make room for new growth.

Some people wonder why the energy in their life seems not to be moving forward—when in fact the only thing holding them back is their own unwillingness to face the issues that still need to be faced, the shadows that still need to be owned, and the amends that still need to be made in order to free their energy and restart their engines. As long as we’re stuck internally, our lives will be stuck externally; the only way to go wide in life is if we are willing to go deep. It doesn’t matter if the problem happened decades ago; the challenge is to face it and deal with it now, so in the decades ahead you’ll be released from the karmic trap of having always to reenact past disasters.

Once again, what might appear as a slowing down of our jets is often anything but. Internal work is sometimes done more easily while sitting there thinking than while busily running around. A frantic schedule helps us avoid taking a deeper look at ourselves, but by midlife such avoidance simply does not and cannot work anymore. Slower lifestyles, candles and soft music in the house, yoga, meditation, and the like are often signs of an internal regreening. We are focusing on changes that support our deepening. I know a woman who started therapy in her 80s. Her coming to understand so much about her life until this point served more than just herself. It affected conversations with her children that affected their relationships with
their
children, on and on in a never-ending pattern of miracles unleashed by a deeper understanding of self.

B
Y MIDLIFE, MOST OF US HAVE A LOT OF IMPACTED EMOTIONAL PAIN.
That pain can poison our system or leave it. Those are pretty much our only two choices.

Sometimes depression is to the soul what fever is to the body: a way to burn up what needs to be burned up so that health can return. Some dark nights of the soul last months or years, while others just last a night or two. Either way, they’re part of a mystical detox of our accumulated fear and despair. Any thought not reconciled with truth remains in our psychic
“in-box,” put in the trash but not yet deleted from the computer. Whatever energy isn’t brought to light, surrendered and transformed, stays in the dark—an insidious force of constant, active attack on both body and soul.

Even if you’ve lived a pretty good life, unless you’ve lived it in some isolated mountain village where everyone around you was nice all the time, then you’re probably carrying some pain around. In your 30s and 40s you were so busy that you were able to keep distracted, but sometime around your 50s or so, that pain demands to be heard. It
will
be heard. And it’s far, far better to hear it in your head and in your soul, than from your doctor when the test results come back and unfortunately they do not look good.

Turning on the TV these days, one feels bombarded by advertisements for sleep medications. It’s understandable, of course, that people who have to get up for work the next morning will do anything necessary to get a good night’s sleep. But there’s a deeper story here, of people seeking help in their efforts to handle the monsters that often emerge from their psyches very late at night. Some of those monsters
need
to be let out. They need to be freed from the caves they live in. They bring messages of pain, it’s true, and yet the pain they bring is often important pain. If you don’t feel the guilt, how will you ever reach your motivation to make amends? If you don’t feel the self-loathing, how will you ever reach the motivation to act more responsibly next time? If you avoid the pain, you’ll miss the gain. Just suppressing the monsters only makes them larger. Allowing them out—and allowing yourself to finally face them—is the only way to make sure that they will ever go away.

It’s not always fun to face your past—not the whitewashed, historically revised version, but the real backstory you don’t look at daily because it would make you cringe so much if you did. It’s not really about what you don’t want others to know; the actual events probably weren’t any worse than what others have been through in their lives. Compared to others, you might not have even done so badly. But wherever you didn’t live up to your personal best, shame remains like an underground toxin. You live with regrets that haunt you, perhaps rarely during the day when the ego’s illusionist worldview holds sway, but during those nights when no pill or drink or amount of sex can keep them from you. They move through locked doors in your mind as though they’re ghosts, which they are. And no amount of “Go on now, go!” can shoo them away.

Only the rigorous work of taking a fearless moral inventory will do that—the bravery to respect your conscience, to know that if something’s up for review, then it’s best to review it. And that can be difficult. In the words of the ancient Greek playwright Aeschylus, “He who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” Numbing yourself—while sleeping or waking—will not erase the pain; only forgiveness and love can do that. Then, through the alchemy of atonement and grace, the ghosts will go back to the nothingness from whence they came. And they will be no more. The past is over, and you are free.

Dear God,

Please forgive me the

mistakes in my past.

May neither I

nor anyone else

be bound by them.

Please God,

may I begin again.

Amen

O
NE OF THE MOST PERNICIOUS OF THE EGO’S TAUNTS
at midlife is the nagging fear that we’re “running out of time.” Yet time expands when our consciousness does. Our enemy is not really time, but our
false thinking
about time.

In the Bible it states: “And time shall be no more,” but rather than foreshadowing the end of the world, perhaps this indicates the end of our experiencing time the way that we do now. The years after 50, if lived well, are
longer
than those between 20 and 50. In fact, we have more time than we thought. The key to stretching time is to go deeper into the present. When we do, we find something wonderful there: choices we didn’t realize we had in the days when we were moving too fast to see them.

By a certain point, most of us have experienced enough of the world to no longer be naïve about it. We know what it gives and we know what it takes away. We have memories of joy and we have memories of sorrow. Our challenge, in both cases, is to not dwell in the memories.

As long as there’s life, there’s the possibility of love. And where there is love, there is always hope. No matter what the mirror says, no matter what your doctor says, no matter what the establishment says—there is hope. It’s tempting to feel at times that you blew it in the past and there’s nothing you can do to redeem yourself. Or that the cruelty of the world defeated you and you can’t rise back up. But the miracle of midlife is that nothing that happened before this moment has any bearing on what’s possible now, except that what you learned from it can be fuel for a magnificent future.

Miracles are available in any moment when we bring the best of ourselves forward. It isn’t the amount of our years that will determine the life we live now, but the amount of our love. Our future isn’t determined by anything that happened 20 years ago, 30 years ago, or even 10 minutes ago. It’s determined by who we are and what we think, right here, right now, in this moment. Almost every hour of every day, we’ll find ourselves in a situation where we can be now who we weren’t before, because we
know
now what we didn’t know before. And from this newness in our being springs fresh opportunities we could never have imagined. God specializes in new beginnings.

I had an experience once that depressed me greatly. I felt wounded by something in my past and fairly hopeless about my future. Around that time, I moved into a house on the water, where I had a view of the sunrise each day that was more gorgeous than anything I had ever seen. Every morning’s sky looked like a Japanese woodcut that had come to life, with black branches slowly turning deep green, ebony sky turning hot pink on top of the branches, and a beautiful bright turquoise below. I had never experienced nature as such a deeply spiritual thing before. It was so extraordinary. I felt for sure that I’d been led to that house, and to that bedroom view, as part of my healing.

Every day my eyes would automatically open as the sun began to rise. I’d lie there and not just look at the dawn; the dawn would
enter
me. The imprint of sunrise—of a new day following the darkness of night—made its way into my cells. And one morning it was as though I heard the voice of God, telling me as I witnessed the dawn that “Such is the work I will do within you.” I too would experience a new dawn after the dark night of my soul. God would give me a new beginning. I knew it then. And as I closed my eyes and drifted back to sleep, I thanked Him with all my heart. And my heart was healed.

I
’M OFTEN AMAZED WHEN WATCHING
Olympic ice-skaters.Someone who has practiced something thousands, literally thousands, of times, gets in front of a worldwide TV audience in the most important competition of their lives, and makes a fall that could ruin all their dreams in one split second. How many of us would just completely fall apart at that point? But not them. They keep going. They’ve got another triple axel to do 1.2 seconds later. They simply cannot allow their future to be determined by the past. And that’s not just a physical skill. It’s an emotional skill, a psychological skill. It’s a skill that anyone who wants to make a passage into a prosperous, creative, and exciting second half of life needs to develop.

It’s not simply that “what’s past is past.” It’s bigger, somehow holier than that. It’s that what has happened until now was a set of lessons—often extraordinary, often painful. Yet all that was ever going on was that you were being given the chance to become the person you’re capable of being. Some lessons you passed, and some you failed and will have to take again. Some you enjoyed, and some you resisted and might have hated. But they’ve left you—if you choose—a better person, a more humble person, a more available person, a more vulnerable person, a wiser person, a more noble person. And from that, all things are possible. A youthful body is wonderful, but it’s not all it’s cracked up to be when you’re not who you should be. And once you are, the cracks in your body can have a beauty of their own. You don’t have to be young to be fabulous.

Yet how do we do emotionally what those ice-skaters do physically? How do we get up again when life has thrown us down? How do we get over the past?

Without forgiveness, it cannot be done.

O
NE NIGHT
I
WAS LYING IN BED, NEARING SLEEP,
and I realized that I’d been taken to some dimension I’d never experienced before. I say “taken” because it just seemed to happen. In this place I knew I was older, and I couldn’t have entered if I were not. But there was a light, a luminescence that was clearly something I couldn’t have known until this point. I knew then that if I could live in this place on a consistent basis, I would never see it as a lesser world. It wasn’t a booby prize; it was clearly a reward. It wasn’t as though I was carrying baggage; it was as though I had received a gift.

“Oh, this is what age is!” I said to myself, relieved that it was so wonderful. But a response came clearly: “Well, not for everyone.” I was visiting an inner domain that was not a given. It had to be chosen. It was revealed to me in one of those momentary gifts of grace, perhaps, but only as an enticement, a demonstration of what was mine to earn. Before the present could start to shine like that, I would have to learn to forgive.

It’s fairly easy to stay loving and serene when others always act the way you want them to, but that’s not a realistic picture of life. Everyone’s imperfect, everyone’s wounded, and most of us have been somewhat scathed at one time or another by the casual cruelty of others.

Forgiveness involves faith in a love that’s greater than hatred, and a willingness to see the light in someone’s soul even when their personality has harbored darkness. Forgiveness doesn’t mean that someone didn’t act horribly; it simply means that we choose not to focus on their guilt. In focusing on it, we make it real to us, and in making it real to us, we make it real
for
us. The only way to deliver ourselves from vulnerability to other people’s behavior is by identifying with the part of them that lies beyond their bodies. We can look beyond others’ behavior to the innocence in their souls. In doing so, we not only free
them
from the weight of our condemnation, but we free ourselves as well.