I don't like the word "rules" because it sounds too rigid, but for me I would say that the rides of the first half were "me" rather than "we"success in a kind of a ladder framework, the distancing of death, the illusion of immortality. At the beginning of the second half, I had started to feel old, I had started to feel tired. I had started to feel the imminence of death, I had started to feel that nothing made any difference, including any of my successes. One might say that's depression. But it wasn't. It was the beginning of my re-examination of the rules of the first half of life.
PT: What is it that prompts such feelings of dissatisfaction?
MG: For me it was the realization that my success was external. I appeared to have a very reflective life, but my life was lived very much in the external: How did someone respond to me? How did my wife respond to me? How did my boss respond to me? That's an external way of living life. And then around my late 30s that whole attitude fell apart. I realized that there is something going on inside, and that I'd been so busy watching the movie going on around me that I didn't pay attention to the inner story.
PT: Isn't that inevitable, though? Doesn't everybody, early on, focus on external things?
MG: I'm never going to say "everybody?" because one point I make in the first part of the book is that each fife is different. But I would say that in the West, particularly among men (but also among women now as the success model becomes more prevalent), we tend to live a very externally oriented life. That's perceived as success. That's what makes our parents happy, what makes us get good grades, look successful, and make money. On the external we're doing all the fantastic things.
PT: You mean that the trappings of success define it for us?
MG: That's right. What I find is that, particularly for people who are highly successful, that wears out soon. One of the things we realize in the second half of life is how addicted we have been in the first half. I'm still dealing with that in my own life, realizing the numbers of ways in which I wasn't free. You can look at the whole recovery movement and learn some fascinating things about the life-cycle, because the median age in the recovery movement is around midlife. It's usually viewed in terms of recovery from substance abuse, or some other form of abuse. But I see it also as a forum for midlife healing.
PT: You talk about being addicted. What were you addicted to?
MG: I happened to be a writer and I found myself being recognized as a writer. And I became what I was being recognized and affirmed as. But there were other parts of me that were not being recognized and were being left in the shadows. It's that black bag that we drag behind us, full of the things we never were.
In our 20s we're very eager to be accepted and recognized as adults, so we put our strong suit forward. By midlife an the stuff we've put in the closet says, "Wait a minute. I'm part of Mark Gerzon, too. I want to be recognized. I want some of the light. I want some growth and change.' So all those parts that were forgotten reassert themselves.
I find a lot of people in midlife who say, 'Yeah, I was a musician in college, but I knew I had to make a living so I went into banking, instead and you know what? I've picked up the instrument again." That's a very simple story, but metaphorically it's what happens.
That's why Paul McCartney is still quoted as saying, back in the Sixties, "Who knows if when I'm forty I'll still be able to write music?" Well, there he was at almost 50 with two songs in the top ten and touring around the world. I think that's the hope of our generation-that we're not going to stop growing.
PT: What about marriage, and relationships? You describe the change from the ecstasy of a romantic partner being everything in your life to falling out of love. How do you resolve this?
MG: Our culture is in love with falling in love. We do not want to look at falling out of love. After 12 years, my wife and I reached that crucial point where we were falling out of love. It turned out that was the beginning of a true relationship. Because the person that we fell in love with was partly the truth, and partly the projection of our deepest needs. That's what men and women are there for. I imagined my wife to be things she wasn't and she imagined me to be things that I wasn't. So of course we became disillusioned, but to me that means we started to see the truth.
Some people wake up in bed next to somebody they've been married to for years, feel like they're with a stranger and think, "Well, this must be the time to get divorced.' Fortunately, my wife, Shelley, and I went through that crisis and found that the person we were with was far more interesting than the projection we had when we were young.
You might ask, "Well, how do you do that?" In our case we basically went into our shadows. We tried to bring in all those parts of ourselves that had been banished from the marriage. The first 15 years was almost a perpetual power struggle. We thought that was what marriage was, because we didn't know anything else. When we got through this barrier to the other side, we thought, hey, there's far more to this experience than we thought. We learned not to banish parts of ourselves for the supposed good of the marriage, which is what people in our culture often do.
PT: Such as?
Tags:
40s,
bad rap,
Carl Jung,
fifties,
forties,
hips,
mauro,
metamorphosis,
microscope,
post peak,
s young,
scanlon,
senescence,
thinning hair,
thirties,
time of life,
unexpected journey
