Nothing To Look Forward To?
By Elizabeth Flynn Campbell
Up until a certain point in our lives, the rate of change we experience is fast and furious.
Children experience their lives as one significant event after another. Think back to your
own childhood. Remember how different, say, 3rd grade was from 6th grade. Or
compare what you were like in 8th grade with who you were a mere 4 years later in 12th
grade.
Children not only race through their development to maturity, they also encounter novel
experiences every step along the way: their first day at school, their first plane ride, their
first time performing in a play or concert, getting their driver’s license, etc. This parade
of novel experiences continues well into our adult lives, through our careers, marriages,
and especially as parents, when we vicariously experience all the changes yet again
through our children.
The relentless pace of these changes provides a kind of easy meaning and vitality to our
lives, with the first three or four decades something like a long car trip where the scenery
keeps changing.
And then, for most of us, there comes a time when the car starts to slow down. The
choices we’ve made have taken us down one road and not another, and the scenery
doesn’t change as quickly as it used to. We may feel just as busy as ever, but the
changes that come our way are more about loss and less about new, exciting experiences.
The aging process begins to take its toll, with the spectre of death becoming more a
reality as our parents age and die and the wear and tear on our bodies begins to be felt.
At this point, we may quietly (and sometimes desperately) wonder what we have to look
forward to. Seeking the answer to this question is the supreme psychological and
spiritual challenge of midlife and later. Facing this question is like reaching the 20-mile
mark in the marathon, where the runner has to dig deep to find the energy and resources
to keep going.
Digging deeper is exactly what’s required for those of us of a certain age. Digging
deeper means mining our lives and experiences for meaning and purpose. It means
acknowledging our own limited time and energy and living more intentionally. It’s hard
to see things clearly when we’re young and in a moving car. Midlife and beyond gives us
an opportunity to deepen our level of awareness as we become less distracted by the
passing scenery.
The English poet William Blake’s phrase “the holiness of the minute particular” aptly
describes the deepening of experience that only happens when our gaze becomes less
focused on the future and more penetrating into the present moment. Always needing
something to look forward to is a kind of addiction that obscures our perception of the
holiness of the minute particular, leaving us restless and unsatisfied.
All wisdom traditions teach that honing our depth of awareness requires that we step out
of the car in order to experience a deeper reality -- one that is simply not available to
most of us in our younger years when we’re racing down the road. This ability to be still
in order to experience more fully is the fruit of all spiritual disciplines and a requisite for
emotional equanimity in our later years. Desperately trying to keep the scenery changing
beyond a certain age causes us, in the words of T. S. Eliot, “to have the experience but
miss the meaning.”
Elizabeth Flynn Campbell is a licensed psychoanalyst. You contact her at her Burlington
office at (802) 860-2244 or visit her website at elizabethflynncampbell.com.