At the end of the day, and in realty at the beginning of the day, the most important aspect of life is finding a level of acceptance and satisfaction – in how you live, with whom you live, and with what you achieve that is important to you.
The Chinese know perhaps better than anyone, that relationships are the key to success and achievement. You can’t accomplish much in China on your own, but you can accomplish much with the help of others, leveraging off of your own accomplishments, abilities and personality. One can accomplish a great deal on his or her own, but most often the success will be greater and the enjoyment of that success will be richer, if you share it with others. After all, in a vacuum we are nothing. If a tree falls in the forest, and there is no person or cognitive being there to hear it, whether or not it makes a sound is irrelevant.
It does not matter what other people think about your successes or failures. But for them to be meaningful to you, you have to be aware of them. For them to count as a part of who you are, part of the sum you are, someone else has to be there to experience them, to see you achieve them and share them with you. Yes, one can be successful anonymously, but one’s success has a far greater impact if it can be witnessed by others who can see the context in which you achieve the success. Richness is only richness when compared to something else. Having million or a billion or a thousand dollars in your bank account, only has real value when you know what it can buy.
Despite that truth, success is not measured primarily by how much money you have in the bank, how many properties you own, how many trials or races you have won or how many people you have saved, government positions you have held, editorials you have written, ideas you have launched or minds you have changed. Success is measured by your own level of satisfaction in what you have done with your life, in the context of who you are, who you have become in the course of your life, the choices you have made and the reasons you have made them.
As children, we have little idea of who we are or where we are going or what is important to us. Childhood is about acquiring the basic tools to function in life: to eat, sleep, play, work, cope with happiness and sorrow, with wealth and poverty, with illness and health, with success and failure, with falling down and getting back up.
Adolescence through college is like life 2.0: relearning how things work when you go through the complexities of getting good grades to get ahead, to get into the right school or beat out several talented competitors to get the right job, all in the context of hormonal changes and intensified experiences involving emotions and thoughts and relationships with actual and fictional superiors, and the unknown and sometime unfathomable thoughts and emotions trying to find a life partner and trying to find out even if you want one or can be one yourself to someone else.
Young adulthood is about building character. In young adulthood we really start to be responsible for ourselves, to make our own choices and live with the consequences, and to pay for the consequences from our own pocket. Young adulthood and the early part of work and careers provide opportunities for us to see how each of us responds to life’s ups and downs, life’s euphoric highs and depressing, agonizing lows, and with the mesmerizing and perhaps stultifying routines in which we find ourselves and often feel trapped. We find ourselves faced with choices and decisions that can be hard to make, hard to know the consequences, with intended and unintended consequences that test and affect our mettle – with who we are and who we behave like and who we become when tested by life or death consequences.
Middle adulthood – 30 to 55 – is generally about living the life we have created and perhaps burnishing certain parts of it, adding experiences and accomplishments and perhaps a few failures and detours, and using the skills and intuition we have acquired and developed in the earlier years to navigate this period. Middle adulthood is the time when we have confidence in our abilities to function largely on our own or with a partner, in a career and in family and community life. It is a time when hopefully we consolidate and refine our learning, expertise and finesse.
Middle adulthood, or mid-life, can also be a time of mid-life crisis, when we confront the results of prior decisions and actions or perhaps see more clearly the errors and successes of our ways and question both from a new and deeper perspective. It can be a time to double-down on our prior decisions, values and beliefs, or a time to re-evaluate and redirect our energies and priorities by changing horses in the middle of the stream – a fraught prospect at best.
Middle adulthood can be invigorating and exciting and frightening as well, as we realize that our time to live is running out, that our “prime” may be behind us, that our options are narrowing and our chances to make up for lost time and lost opportunities are becoming more limited. It is a time when some of us decide to switch careers or partners or both in an effort to live a life that we think will be more rewarding or more true to our character and desires than what we have done before. In our striving to find greater happiness and fulfillment, and facing the new pressure of the sense that time is running out, we need in this phase to be deeply thoughtful and careful about the decisions we make and actions we take, because indeed, time is beginning to run out, and the older we become, the costlier our mistakes can be.
The prospect of changing horses mid-stream may seem exciting and liberating, but often it is only a chimera. After all, if the personality, values, goals and dreams of the rider remain unaltered, it is unlikely that changing the ride will result in a long-term change in one’s life course or trajectory.
Having only recently reached the so-called “Golden Years” it is too early to know for sure what they are about. All I can say is that my chief effort these days is to further my understanding of how we make decisions in life in order to offer some insight to my son and perhaps to his peers of one man’s effort to understand life and put it into perspective. I have always felt that despite whatever education I received and experiences I had, most of us have little understanding of what truly motivates our decision making and the course of our lives. I wish I had received more guidance on how to build a life, the meaning and importance of family and friends, the importance of profession and career, and the significance of choosing and sticking with the right mate or partner in life. I wish I had received more guidance on how to navigate through the shoals of responsibility and desire, and how to communicate more effectively as both a speaker and a listener.
The two firm conclusions I have reached so far are first, that the origin of most disagreements in life is a failure to communicate effectively, such that we don’t hear or project accurately what we are saying to each other. And second, that we too frequently decline to do the work necessary to remedy that failure of communication with the expectation that if we change jobs or partners that our new colleagues and partners will understand us better. But the problem with that approach is that we bring our same ineffective or dishonest communication methodology to the new relationship, dooming it to the same danger of failure as the prior one. Unless we become more self-aware and more honest with ourselves, and more effective at communication our thoughts, reflections and desires and unless we work harder to avoid repeating the mistakes of our past the likelihood is that we will only re-create the failure of the past into whatever new future we think we have created. We will only have escaped from the frying pan into the fire, which is no escape at all.
So at this point, the only goal of value is to become more honest with ourselves and more honest with our partners and friends, in an effort to find some comfort and satisfaction that at least we can honestly say to ourselves that we are – and hopefully people will remember us as – someone who tried his/her best to live a good life, who utilized as best as possible the talents we were given and the opportunities we received, and that we created memories that were shared in their creation and in their remembrance, that made a difference for the better in our small corner of the world during our short journey upon the earth.