Same as It Ever Was, Or Not

“And you may ask yourself-Well...How did I get here?” - Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime


I’ve been looking at my life lately, asking how the hell I got here. I’ve always sort of known what to do, where to go, what the next step would be. Until recently. Now I look around now and feel completely lost. How did I get here?

I’m a pretty talented person. Not a genius, by any stretch of the imagination, yet someone who most would choose to have on their team. I have common sense, an ability to think through problems, to distill the essence of things, notice the details, follow through, keep hold of the big picture, relate to others with compassion… not a bad resume of skill. And yet I feel as though I have no idea what to do with myself. And I think, how did this happen? How did I find myself in this place of lack? Lack of motivation, passion, desire, and knowledge about what I want from life or what it wants from me?

It seemingly happened all at once, outside of my awareness, and I think it has something to do with that midlife shift in perspective that most of us experience. For me, this has been a shift from my emphasis on a professional life to that of a more personal one. The shift itself has been a mandate; and not one that I dreamed up. Rather, it came from some OTHER place, not of me. As though I woke up one day with a gun to my head, whose trigger said- Shift perspective or else. Needless to say, this has been difficult to do. Although I could list many talents and skills that serve me well in professional roles, when it comes to my personal life, to my relationship with myself, I am lost. So I remind myself that there is water on the bottom of the ocean, and that there will always be. I can still count on some things, even as everything else disappears.

This midlife shift is what most think of as a midlife crisis. Unfortunately, the midlife crisis has been overly associated with the guy who buys the red sports car and the woman who starts dressing like her teenage daughter. Like much else in the world, we stick to a rather superficial explanation. I understand midlife crisis to be that moment in life when the Soul breaks through and demands something of us that often looks nothing like the life we’ve been living to date. The sports car is one way of answering this call, and it is a specific, often superficial, manifestation. For a long time, men in our culture have been asked to sacrifice themselves for the sake of family. Go to work, earn a living, know that you are ultimately responsible for taking financial care of others, bring the kids to baseball practice, walk the dog, and then take the garbage out before going to bed and waking up to do it all over again. The Soul of such a man may one day hold a gun to his head telling him to put himself first for a change—so he goes out and buys his new red vehicle. The sports car isn’t a great long term solution, but the attitude underneath may be the beginning of a much needed change.

Don’t get me wrong- a Soul Awakening or midlife crisis isn’t always about putting oneself first. In fact, I believe it is about finding our place within something much larger than ourselves. But the path to that something first winds along a connection with one’s own true desires, and therefore, one’s own true nature. The question Who Am I? becomes important again, on a whole new level than it was in adolescence. So when David Byrne warns that “you may tell yourself, ‘This is not my beautiful house!’ And [that] you may tell yourself ‘This is not my beautiful wife,’” he is in fact helping us to see that sometimes we wake-up, look around, and realize that the life we’re living is no longer our own. “My God, what have I done?” is a fairly common response. The midlife crisis starts, the Soul speaks, and we can consider ourselves on a path toward authenticity, if we’re brave enough to heed the call.