A MID-LIFE 'CRISIS'

           A 48 year old client, Phillip, (he asked that his real name not be used and I am HIPPA compliant) has been struggling with 'mid-life transitions'.  Recently he has been doing a lot of 'soul searching', attempting to sort through the rubble . . . professional as well as personal . . . in his life. Being something of an introspective, poetic bent, he recently attempted (to use his words) "to get a handle on where I am and where I am going".  He showed me the following 'essay' and consented to my request to use it in a blog. Without editing, here are his 'ponderings' :

    " 'Once upon a time . . .'
         'once upon a time . . .'
            'once upon a time . . .'
  Good Lord, how many times had he heard 'once upon a time' ?!  Well, 'once upon a time' was here.  And there was no Fairy God Mother anywhere around. Plenty of toads though. 'So much for ^Happy Ever After^', he complained to himself. 'It's more like 
^Huff and puff and blow your house down^.'

    And what made the situation more galling was the recollection of how he had (he thought) been so precise in putting that dream house into position.  Sitting amid the rubble now, it felt more like a jerry-built lean-to. Wrong floor plan? Probably. Faulty materials? Maybe. Better yet, improperly chosen, arid location? Even more likely.

    The metaphors kept rolling even after he had scolded  himself that 'enough of this tripe is just enough'.  Then the zinger came slipping into his consciousness, 'When had the fault-line in the foundation become apparent?  What caused the shift and why had he not spotted and corrected it earlier?'
Over-confident early adulthood?  More likely it was seeing the turkies get the raises, recognition and promotions and realizing that competence wasn't its own best defense after all.

    'Some gonna win, some gonna lose . . .' came from the softly playing radio.  Even the appliances seemed to remind him. A quarter turn of the wrist choked the old Zenith radio in mid-syllable.  He wishfully thought how perfect it would be if all the problems and confusions could be solved that summarily.  Feeling the irresponsibility wrapped in that impulse, he backed off pdq.

    Then here came 'Once upon a time' again.  Unlike in the fairy tale, the shoe did not fit Cinderella and too many years of short-sightedness and wrong-turns and bad calls reminded him that he wasn't exactly the handsome prince either.  More like Grumpy or Dopey all too often.

    Stirring the  stuff of the past and a looking for the 'might have beens' held all the promise and allure of a one-way ticket to the boonies on a World War II vintage Greyhound.  Maybe the better route lay in the implications of what his just graduated 18 year old child told a mutual friend when he had cooly met a challenging crisis: 'Welcome to the grown-up world!'  Then he felt the defenses to up almost on their own and the immediate rejoinder, 'Back off; nobody's implying you've acted less than as a responsible adult.'

    'Grin and bear it'; 'This, too, shall pass'; 'every cloud has its silver lining'; 'where there's a will, there's a way' . . . now the cliches started.  Who turned those on? Where did they come from?  He recalled once hearing someone say that there had to be some truth in all these aphorisms for them to have endured.  Shallow-thinking band-aids when he had just been through major  emotional surgery was closer to his own evaluation.

    Look ahead, set goals, lay out game plans . . . that was what the self-appointed  gurus of positive thinking and get control of your rainbow 'experts' were always hyping.  And he had tried it . . . more than once.  Even bought a book about beating procrastination. 'Never got around to reading it,' he joked, feeling somehow that the joke was on him.

    Maybe the experience was still too fresh. 'Naw', he decided. He'd made his peace with all that. What he couldn't seem to get the handle on  was 'What comes next ?'
   'Tomorrow', he decided. "

Any wise words of counsel that I can pass on in our next session ?
    
              Satchel