Balancing Act, 10

"1994 On this business of being middle-aged: You no longer expend so much energy on trying to make yourself understood by others. It isn’t that you’ve given up - rather you’ve found some of your answers - but you also learn that it isn’t up to others to try to decode them for you - that is your job, no one else’s. So, accepting that it’s no longer so important to be understood, you embark upon your next great quest: learning to understand. Your relationships take on a different flavour: group, or peer identity no longer matters. You don’t need to see your dreams and angsts being mirrored in the lives of selected friends. You see rather, and begin to accept, that all of us, to some extent, are at loose ends. We’re all on our journeys, yet it is one journey. Soon you learn to accept other people’s struggles to find their answers, and in learning to be WITH others in the purest sense of being with, it becomes even easier to accept your own. You have begun to move from a self-centred perception of life into a more universal awareness, grounded in love and compassion. And often you’re going to be too busy and stressed-out with the little cares and responsibilities of life, to be even aware that it is happening to you." I wrote this sometime in 1994, or, twenty-four years ago, when I was thirty-eight. I was just coming into middle age, though I'm sure that some of you are going to tut-tut about forty being the new thirty and about thirty being the new twelve, so at thirty-eight, what would I know about middle age? Did I mention that I wrote that twenty-four years ago? A little bit before it was proclaimed that being forever immature was going to be the new normal. Now that I'm in my sixties, and verging on geezerhood, as I like to call it, I actually have some authority to confirm the truth of those words, especially the last sentence. Rereading my journals and transcribing them onto Word is quite an experience and I only appreciate how completely swallowed up I was by things: other people's lives and situations, and my own disasters, some of my making, others unavoidable. I think that humility is the most critical lesson that we have to learn and this comes with experience and age. I can't say for sure that I'm actually wiser or more humble. I am a lot more assertive and this could be misconstrued as arrogance. Perhaps there's no fool like an old fool. Another thing that develops with age, or ought to, is a sense of humour. If, more than twenty years ago I suspected that maybe I was not the centre of the universe, well, maybe I can say that I know this better, maybe just a little bit better. It's the learning curve that never seems to end. Our humanity is a mammoth task. We are soon approaching a global population of eight billion and the planet is suffering under our tread. We are definitely going to be needing leaders who are visionary, selfless, intelligent, compassionate and determined to help us find our way out of this mess. The current samplings of world leaders do not look at all promising. Maybe it's time for the people to actually lead, then the leaders will follow? Easy to write this, but when you consider the majorities or large minorities of selfish, fear-ridden reptilian brain thinkers that are electing the likes of Trump and Putin, men who clearly have only worsened through the years, then where are we going to go for hope, or help? The struggle continues.