As kids we are told and sold stories of adventure, love and romance with the same ending: they lived happily ever after. So we rush through our own stories with no doubt in our minds that we too will live happily ever after. Then we don’t and we are crushed. Or we do actually get it but our expectation of it was so high that the real happy ever after is dull and matte in comparison to the constant joy and songbird serenade we were promised. We feel like we were cheated and sold some knockoff version of the real deal.
In midlife, many of us find ourselves smack dab in the middle of happily and ever. Life has tossed us around like a county fair carnival ride and we find ourselves standing next to the fried butter stand feeling queasy.
Happily Ever After has, for many of us, included divorce, financial worries, sullen teenagers, chronic illnesses, sudden illnesses and deaths. For sure it has thrown in weddings, births, graduations and celebrations along the way, but we seem to always still be anxiously waiting and hoping for that childhood promise to still be possible between the ever and after. We are sure it is still coming; it told us so, it promised it would be back to get us. It becomes so tempting to stay sitting on the curb of life waiting.
After a while, however, when our yesterdays start to outnumber our tomorrows, we start to realize that perhaps ever and after are not coming for us after all. Perhaps it was all something invented by the grown-ups who knew what was coming and just decided it was best not to scare us kids. It is here we have a few choices: we can stay on that curb stubbornly and stare at the corner, willing ever after happiness to whip around any moment now or we can get up, dust ourselves off, grab our suitcase and head back inside.
The letdown of happily ever after is one that we will all touch in our own unique way but the beauty of it is that the experience comes with a wonderful piece of wisdom like the toy in the cracker jack box. It can help us shift from seeking our needs being met from the external world to finding that both happily and ever after have always held residence in our internal world, we just had to turn inwards and look for it. Through the heartache and disappointment we can find that we were the ones we have been waiting for and we can learn that happiness has always been an inside job. We are the ones that have our own formula for it and like a chemist know how to create it again and again. In Stages of Life, Carl Jung states that while being too pre-occupied by our own selves is dangerous in our youth, this type of focused attention becomes a “duty and necessity” as we age in order to “illuminate” the transformation – the happily ever after – occurring in our inner world.
Today, where are you finding your happily ever after? Is it daily meditation or yoga practice? Is it clean eating or practicing gratitude? Is it in setting healthy boundaries or expressing your needs, even when it might risk rejection or conflict? Within each one of these are threads of the real Happily Ever After. When we can realize that our choices, our energetical focus, our capacity for empathy and for giving love and compassion are all within our own power to create, recreate and sustain happiness, we see we are more than a helpless kid on the side of the road, desperately waiting to be given what we were promised, we are powerful alchemist with the power to transform, regardless of what is happening around us.
How’s that for a magical story?