Midlife is that time when your ego is strong enough to handle the dark side.  Like, when Luke Skywalker goes into that cave and cuts off Vader’s head only to realize it was his face in the mask.  That is it, midlife.  We are strong, we have been training and we start to feel another kind of Jedi power, we also know we must follow it even though we don’t know why.

We are ready to handle the darkness- or at least step into it – another threshold.  Not because we are less scared or more brave, but because we know we cannot turn back and there is no other way to go.  There is a call deep within us – another hero waiting to emerge and we must listen to it or we will start a cycle of learning that will continue to bring the same things back to us again and again, leaving us wondering why the same things keep happening to us.

It is such a confusing time though, life goes forward, kids grow up, parents age, or worse, die and we are left to search – search for meaning in a world that seems meaningless and yet absolutely brilliantly perfect at the same time.  Maybe for the first time we can see it as it is.  It does not need us to change it.  We need to change ourselves.  It is our thinking, the ego,  that has gotten us thus far.  We must challenge the demands it has placed on us and let go – reach for more.  When we let go though, we often feel the rush of a current that sweeps us downstream – turmoil.  But really, we are just in the middle of things.  We are no longer being strapped into the ride and have the excitement of the tick-tick up the track, we have dropped and are twisting and twirling and screaming.  If we let go and trust that our journey is deeper than the external world we have worked so hard in, we will find ourselves reaping the harvest of this.  Not in the way that our culture tells us: a nice condo in the new grey haired Margaritaville community with a too-big car and trips with the grandkids – although nice, that is not enough to sustain us in the evening of life.  If we have done our work, perhaps we will find authenticity, integrity and wholeness.

We become who we were meant to be all along.

But what do I know?  I am still in the mud.