The Middle Way at Midlife

I started to write an essay on body image in middle-aged women. About mine in particular – the ups and downs, the acceptance one day and despair the next about the gains and losses of aging. I wanted to write about cultural transgressions against our humanity, the inundation of mixed messages and outright lies we must sort through daily about health, youth and beauty. Downhearted about my 49 year old frumpiness, the sex goddess inside of me wanted to rage about her invisibility. It's painful and it's real, no matter how much I "know better" and can slough off the negativity on the good days. I planned to wrap up with considered, articulate arguments for self-acceptance and a balanced attitude toward mental and physical health.

Then a few things happened over the weekend.

A friend took me to a play about Alzheimer's disease, in which the main character changed from a bright, energetic woman to a slobbering, incoherent mess. My husband and I watched an episode of The Sopranos, the one with Tony at death's door and a plate-sized hole in his stomach, life support clicking away while his family watches helplessly. This led to Googling "coma, memories" and reading about people's experiences with that. To top it off, I hopped into the tub with my Sun magazine and came across a moving essay about a girl in upside-down traction about to have spinal surgery.

I went to sleep with an appreciation of my moving legs, my overweight but healthy body, and my (so far) sound mind. My ability to see, hear, and walk without pain. My freedom. Whenever I'm in that state I promise to appreciate those blessings always, and on one level I do. But it's never too long before the dissatisfactions creep back, demanding equal time. This is the see saw, the yin and yang, dark and light. It's always in flux, and by now I know that the wheel will turn. It doesn't make the hard parts painless, just a little less intense.

Buddhism says our suffering in this life is about attachment. Put another way, we can't deal with loss of control. If we are observant we know the impossibility of controlling others and the world around us. The closest and easiest thing we have any direct power over is ourselves. When we learn from birth that the problem is us – how we look, act and think – we buy into it to gain acceptance and the illusion of safety and security.

It is with this mind-set that we approach our unsocialized impulses and our uncooperative bodies. But how do we usually choose to do it? Certainly not through gentleness or love. We tend to go at ourselves like a drill sergeant in boot camp. We go at it with something akin to hatred and fear of our humanness, a terror of our limitations, of decay and death. This may well be a curse of consciousness, for as Ernest Becker asserts in The Denial of Death,

Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.

Additionally, our culture holds little to look forward to for the aged and the marginal. You can see why so many of us don't want to go down without a fight.

The problem is, we are trained to fight ourselves instead of the system that dismisses, judges or minimizes us. Ideally the "system" would care for the humanity of its members by creating a container of rituals, myths, stories and vehicles from which we took comfort and meaning in the face of our eventual annihilation. That it doesn't adds yet another layer of terror we must push away in order to get on with life.

Becker, whose work expands on that of Kirkegaard, Freud and Otto Rank, says mankind's invention of civilization – a symbolic system - helps us transcend the dilemma of our mortality. He calls this our "heroism project" – engaging in something that we feel will outlast us. This gives us the feeling that life has purpose, meaning and significance.

Enter one of the great blessings of the second half of life. About this phase, Jung pointed out that

“At the stroke of noon the descent begins. And the descent means the reversal of all the ideals and values that were cherished in the morning…. we can not live the afternoon of life according to the programme of life’s morning; for what was great in the morning will be little at evening and what in the morning was true will at evening have become a lie.”

This means that the values and goals of our first thirty or forty years begin to chafe. They no longer feel meaningful or appropriate. Instead of focusing our efforts to live forever by accumulating - wealth, children, toys (all tasks of youth) - it eventually becomes our impulse and our task to give, in the form of wisdom, knowledge, and the little time we have left.

A friend who is facing a real possibility of future illness is struggling with a body and will that won't oblige her vision of health and fitness. This is doubly painful in light of other losses she has recently faced. She is angry for not having the control she hopes will minimize future suffering. I would never presume to tell her how to feel; her frustration is understandable. But I encourage her to minimize her current suffering with kindness and compassion for her mortal dilemma. By her own admission, she has not fully grieved her many losses. She would like to get herself and her life back on a track that feels and looks better to her - now. But spirit and psyche may be dragging their feet, implying that she needs to finish the work of this passage.

When the timing is right - timing that mocks our laughable human "schedules" – she might find comfort and progress in the Buddhist concept of the Middle Way – the antidote to the polarities our minds torture us with. As one psychotherapist put it, "I have found a middle way approach most useful when people swing between two unsatisfactory or unsustainable extremes . . . trust vs. distrust; optimism vs. pessimism; positivity vs. negativity; idealized happy self vs. depression; over-indulgence vs. self hatred; perfection vs. imperfection; total control vs. no control . . . "

I must constantly remind myself to walk this middle path. It's true, my "meno-pot" and double chin may belie the sex goddess inside, but she is there nonetheless, expressing her lust for the world in every encounter and intention. The life force may be shapeless, but she is eternal.