Mid-Life Skills

“Much of the work of mid-life is learning to tell the difference between people who are still dealing with their issues through you, and those who are really dealing with you as you really are.” (Falling Upward—by Richard Rohr)

Most relationships act as a magnifying lens, bringing the good and the bad into focus. Certain relationships bring out the best, while others expose weaknesses. By mid-life, we should be able to distinguish between a magnified image and a real image.

We gauge our own personas through the eyes of our friends and family. Often, the unverbalized question that underlies many relationships is: What does this say about me? If I have good friendships, it makes me feel like a valuable, kind person. When I have strained relationships, it makes me feel yucky. When others are disappointed in me, I feel like I must be a disappointment. I rarely pause to consider that maybe they are just disappointed in themselves, maybe they are merely using me as a magnifying lens to work out their own issues, or maybe their ideas about me are just distorted images of themselves.

I hope to learn this mid-life skill of differentiating between perception and reality. I want to learn to see others for who they are—not based on images that are filtered through my own unresolved issues. And, I want to have a clearer understanding of myself—not based on reflections of others—but an undistorted image of who I really am.