life

Where We Are, revisited

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / Leave a comment

Mid Life. Crisis?

Written originally a year ago, this post seemed worth revisiting after a weekend away with old friends……..

Lots of my peers are wrestling with relocating their lives. There is frequent talk of “making a change,” and often this manifests itself in a laundry list of other places they and their families could live.

Looking for better schools for children; more variety in dining; more diversity in neighborhood; a change in commute; a change in climate; a new house; a more challenging job. The list is familiar and endless.

Pawing the ground at middle age is hardly new territory. The stereotype of the midlife crisis is not positive to say the least; but there is a strange degree of beauty in the moment. I like to believe that change is always available, that what we lose little by little is the will to make it. Midlife wrestling with where we are and where we want to go has an air of Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night.”

Where it can go wrong is usually two-fold. One, we repress our real feelings and needs for so long that when our conscience can’t manage anymore the backlash is a destructive taking of all our unmet needs we’ve left untended for years. Two, there is a lack of clarity about what it is that is really unsatisfactory.

Is it REALLY that we don’t have enough of this, that, or the other thing in the place where we are, physically? Or is it that we don’t have enough in other places where we are, like our relationships or our careers?  Here’s wishing all of us a good place to be today.

Summoning Your Life

/ Elizabeth Gaucher / 2 Comments

David Brooks writes this week in his op-ed The Summoned Self:

Life isn’t a project to be completed; it is an unknowable landscape to be explored. A 24-year-old can’t sit down and define the purpose of life in the manner of a school exercise because she is not yet deep enough into the landscape to know herself or her purpose. That young person — or any person — can’t see into the future to know what wars, loves, diseases and chances may loom. She may know concepts, like parenthood or old age, but she doesn’t really understand their meanings until she is engaged in them.

The Burt's Bees Business Model - look anything like your life?

People who think this way are very skeptical of using a business model to manage their lives, as if life is a project to be mapped out and boxes to be checked off.  In fairness, Brooks allows that there is more than one valid and meaningful way to manage one’s life.  But seeing the different perspectives in black and white, there was no question in my mind I am living a “summoned life” and have been for many years.

I have tremendous admiration for people who have earned their MBA degrees.  Some of my best friends have achieved this, and I even considered going for it myself once.  It’s a very practical degree and can make one quite wealthy if you know what to do with it.  The trouble is, I’ve seen too many people confuse their degree with their lives.  I seriously had one friend drawing diagrams of his relationship with his wife and calculating how to get the highest ROI (return on investment) out of their marriage.  This was shortly after attaining an MBA from one of the most prestigious business schools in the country.  And you would be correct: They are no longer married.  Business model FAIL#.

There are parts of life that respond well to planning.  And there are parts that don’t.  If you saw George Clooney in Up in the Air, you know what a brilliant job his character’s young protege Natalie Keener does of illustrating to a T the bloody collide of the Well-Planned Life with things she can’t control.  George has a couple of crashes himself. 

There is a balance to be had between trying to uber-manage our lives and being open to what unfolds, as it unfolds.  Sometimes I think it doesn’t matter very much which you prefer, it just is what it is.