Silken Fire's Fireplace II

Midlife as we see it in this country has a bad rap, conjuring up images ofspreading hips and thinning hair--a post-peak slide into senescence. Basically a life of diminishing opportunities. While this may very well be a carry-over from the 1960s, when everybody over 30 was considered the enemy, it is also a carry-over from Freud, who popularized the notion that children grow, but adults don't.

To Mark Gerzon, however, author of Coming Into Our Own: Understanding Adult Metamorphosis (Delacorte; 1992), the term "midlife" means just that-the middle of life. Whether it hits us on our thirties, forties, or fifties, it does not mean there is no more room for change, or growth. On the contrary, at a time when he thought his development as an adult was coming to an end, Gerzon found himself embarking on totally unexpected journey of renewal-entering what Carl Jung called "the second half of life." Granted, the baby boomers are reaching midlife, so naturally a new microscope will be focused on the subject. Yet resident boomer Owen Lipstein, tail-end boomer James Mauro, and post-boomer Matthew Scanlon all found Mark's work enlightening-and encouraging.

PT: Your book takes a much more positive view of middle age than we're used to. What does that say about our culture?

MG: We love youth. In America we're all in love with staying young. That works until a certain point in life. But if you only love what's young, eventually youth start to hate yourself. I see that happening to a lot of people, including me, in our 30s and 40s when we're no longer "young.' Either our attitude has to change, or we begin to die.

PT: Why has there been relatively little written about this time of life-except in terms of "midlife crisis"?

MG: It's true that there has been very little research done on midlife. There have been human development studies of adolescence and childhood. And there are new studies of the elderly. But it turns out that there's a period of 30 to 40 years that hasn't yet been examined-mainly the middle third of the life-cycle. Why not? Aren't those years important? In fact, they are what I call the "black hole of the life-cycle": roughly from 30 to 60 years old. As a result, we don't know what the hell we're supposed to do with those years. They're the lost years of adulthood.

The truth is we just don't know what the second half of life is for. When I interview Hindus from India they say, "Of course you have a midlife crisis. When you get to be 35 or 40, the script ends. So the only sensible thing to do is have a crisis and discover what's the purpose for the rest of your life.'

PT: How did you come to terms with your own midlife? By writing this book?

MG: For me, entering midlife followed a great success. I managed to get Hollywood and Moscow to start cooperating in the entertainment industry. Suddenly I was with all these famous people, I was on the front page of the L.A. Times, I was on the evening news. On the outside everything looked good; everything should have been a success and inside there was just the opposite. There was this feeling of hollowness and the fact that none of it mattered.

The dissonance between those two things led to my coming home from Moscow one time absolutely bone tired. I turned to my wife then and I said, "I think the first half of my life has just ended and the second half of my life has just begun." As soon as the words came out of my mouth they sounded phony, because I don't talk like that. But it wasn't phony-it was the truth.

PT: Which led you to examine the components of your life and take a fresh look.

MG: Exactly. I realized that the only alternatives our culture gives us is to be stuck in a rut or to have a midlife crisis. With those alternatives, no wonder people prefer the rut! A midlife crisis can be terrifying. It means you're having a nervous breakdown, you're going bankrupt, you're getting divorced. Generally not good news. What I do in my book is reframe the crisis as a midlife quest-as the opening shot on a journey rather than the end of the line.

PT: You use this word "quest," so it's a beginning. It's really noble, actually.

MG: It's a challenge, too. I'm challenging people to go into the crisis and through it. A lot of people going into the crisis are doing one of two things: getting stuck in it or running away form it. I'm encouraging people to go into it and through it, as you would a door. The purpose is not to walk through it, go back and do it again, walk through it, go back and do it again. The purpose is to walk through it and go on to the other side- the side that's called "The Second Half Of Life."

PT: Do people recognize these challenges?

MG: I think people are scared because they don't really understand the challenges. As I discovered, the rules of the second half of life are different from the rules of the first half. The rules of the first half are by and large inherited; while the rules of the second half are ones we have to discover for ourselves, anew.

I don't like the word "rules" because it sounds too rigid, but for me I would say that the rides of the first half were "me" rather than "we"success in a kind of a ladder framework, the distancing of death, the illusion of immortality. At the beginning of the second half, I had started to feel old, I had started to feel tired. I had started to feel the imminence of death, I had started to feel that nothing made any difference, including any of my successes. One might say that's depression. But it wasn't. It was the beginning of my re-examination of the rules of the first half of life.

PT: What is it that prompts such feelings of dissatisfaction?

MG: For me it was the realization that my success was external. I appeared to have a very reflective life, but my life was lived very much in the external: How did someone respond to me? How did my wife respond to me? How did my boss respond to me? That's an external way of living life. And then around my late 30s that whole attitude fell apart. I realized that there is something going on inside, and that I'd been so busy watching the movie going on around me that I didn't pay attention to the inner story.

PT: Isn't that inevitable, though? Doesn't everybody, early on, focus on external things?

MG: I'm never going to say "everybody?" because one point I make in the first part of the book is that each life is different. But I would say that in the West, particularly among men (but also among women now as the success model becomes more prevalent), we tend to live a very externally oriented life. That's perceived as success. That's what makes our parents happy, what makes us get good grades, look successful, and make money. On the external we're doing all the fantastic things.

PT: You mean that the trappings of success define it for us?

MG: That's right. What I find is that, particularly for people who are highly successful, that wears out soon. One of the things we realize in the second half of life is how addicted we have been in the first half. I'm still dealing with that in my own life, realizing the numbers of ways in which I wasn't free. You can look at the whole recovery movement and learn some fascinating things about the life-cycle, because the median age in the recovery movement is around midlife. It's usually viewed in terms of recovery from substance abuse, or some other form of abuse. But I see it also as a forum for midlife healing.

PT: You talk about being addicted. What were you addicted to?

MG: I happened to be a writer and I found myself being recognized as a writer. And I became what I was being recognized and affirmed as. But there were other parts of me that were not being recognized and were being left in the shadows. It's that black bag that we drag behind us, full of the things we never were.

In our 20s we're very eager to be accepted and recognized as adults, so we put our strong suit forward. By midlife an the stuff we've put in the closet says, "Wait a minute. I'm part of Mark Gerzon, too. I want to be recognized. I want some of the light. I want some growth and change.' So all those parts that were forgotten reassert themselves.

I find a lot of people in midlife who say, 'Yeah, I was a musician in college, but I knew I had to make a living so I went into banking, instead and you know what? I've picked up the instrument again." That's a very simple story, but metaphorically it's what happens.

That's why Paul McCartney is still quoted as saying, back in the Sixties, "Who knows if when I'm forty I'll still be able to write music?" Well, there he was at almost 50 with two songs in the top ten and touring around the world. I think that's the hope of our generation-that we're not going to stop growing.

PT: What about marriage, and relationships? You describe the change from the ecstasy of a romantic partner being everything in your life to falling out of love. How do you resolve this?

MG: Our culture is in love with falling in love. We do not want to look at falling out of love. After 12 years, my wife and I reached that crucial point where we were falling out of love. It turned out that was the beginning of a true relationship. Because the person that we fell in love with was partly the truth, and partly the projection of our deepest needs. That's what men and women are there for. I imagined my wife to be things she wasn't and she imagined me to be things that I wasn't. So of course we became disillusioned, but to me that means we started to see the truth.

Some people wake up in bed next to somebody they've been married to for years, feel like they're with a stranger and think, "Well, this must be the time to get divorced.' Fortunately, my wife, Shelley, and I went through that crisis and found that the person we were with was far more interesting than the projection we had when we were young.

You might ask, "Well, how do you do that?" In our case we basically went into our shadows. We tried to bring in all those parts of ourselves that had been banished from the marriage. The first 15 years was almost a perpetual power struggle. We thought that was what marriage was, because we didn't know anything else. When we got through this barrier to the other side, we thought, hey, there's far more to this experience than we thought. We learned not to banish parts of ourselves for the supposed good of the marriage, which is what people in our culture often do.

PT: Such as?

MG: It could be your desire to have affairs, it could be your anger It could be that the man feels depressed, or that the woman feels that she's not supposed to be angry. I would say that major parts of my life were not part of my marriage. Then we started to bring those parts into our marriage, and it almost became like a second marriage. In fact, everyone I know who's been married for awhile s , "It feels like I've been married several times That's what we experienced, and when we did we found a new freedom in our marriage.

We often refer to marriage as being tied down ... the old ball and chain. Our culture's images of marriage are of giving up freedom. But my wife and I found after almost 20 years that we are now free to be ourselves with each other in a way that we had never been before. Unfortunately, too many people get divorced before they ever get to the point of true freedom and surrender with each other.

PT: You mentioned infidelity. How do you cope with those seemingly inevitable urges?

MG. Affairs are like dynamite. They get a couple's shadows out in the open. My opinion is that affairs are a last resort. If all your efforts don't help, then you or your mate will probably fall in love with someone else. How it resolves depends on your personal biographies, but you should recognize it for what it is-dynamite that's trying to wake you up. But you can't build a family with dynamite. You can't do a whole lot with dynamite except blow things up.

Of course Shelley and I are sometimes attracted to other people. Fortunately, we've found gentler, more effective ways to wake each other up than dynamite.

PT: Let's talk about that shadow. That's a very powerful image and a very personal one to anyone who's been in a dose personal relationship. What is the shadow and how do you face it?

MG: We spend, I would say, a major amount of our time and energy making ourselves look right. Interviews with people in the second half of life are interviews with people who are saying, "I don't give a damn anymore. I'm old enough to be myself." My experience is that one of the gifts of the second half of life is learning to stop posturing and to be ourselves. That, I think, is the good news about growing older-that it becomes harder and harder to hide the shadow, harder and harder to hide from death, harder and harder to fake it, harder and harder to pretend. So the incentives for being yourself truly increase.

A lot of illnesses in the second half of life are, again, to wake us up. When I was young, I'd get an ache or a pain or an illness and I would think, "Damn it. How can I get rid of this as fast as I can? What an irritation. For the last three or four years I've noticed in myself and the people I've interviewed that we're listening to our bodies and that our bodies are teaching us about our shadow. That's where we usually put the stuff that we don't like.

I tell a story in my book about a man whose heart was in worse shape in his early forties than when he was sixty. That runs absolutely counter to all my images of the life-cycle that I grew up with. My image was that your arteries get dogged, you go downhill, etc. But here was a guy at the bottom in his forties and he climbed up all the way through sixty. That's the story of healing and we're not telling that story in our culture.

PT: Taking that one step further, what about fears of death?

MG: In the second half, your awareness of your own mortality is increasing, that's why I call midlife a "nearer-death" experience. I became more afraid of it in the first flush of this experience, but then came a kind of peace because I was no longer running away from it. I felt it in my body, my own mortality. I didn't have to read Ernest Becker's The Denial Of Death to know I had been denying it. I could see it by the way I lived.

That's why people on their death beds don't say, "Gee, I wish Id spent more time at the office' " They say, "I wish Id spent more time with my wife, or with my kids, or exploring nature.'

PT: The paradigm in this culture is that adults don't grow. That challenges the premise of your book in some sense.

MG: I wrote this book because I had a war going on inside me between the voice that said, "You're finished growing, you're done, it's a done deal:' and another voice that said, "You've only begun to explore what life is about.' For me, writing this book was a way of strengthening and deepening and consolidating the voice that said, "You're going to grow for the rest of your life.' That other view-that grown ups are done growing-is a myth that needs to be retired.

PT: Which voices tell us that we're done growing?

MG: I once had this same conversation with my wife. She said, "What do you mean voices? I don't have any voices like that inside me that say we're done growing." I said, "Shelly, go back to being a child. Now tell me the story of some adult around you a profound transformation or growth experience.' She was silent for a moment, then said, "I can't think of anyone." I said, "That's what I mean.'

When I was growing up I cannot remember a single story of an adult whom I was aware of who had a positive transformative growth experience in adulthood. And if all the growth that happens is hidden from you, that's a pretty powerful message.

Another message is in our language. We call people "adults" from the age of 21 on. We have no other word to cover half a century, and when we do have other words like "elderly" or "aging" or "old fart," they're not positive. None of them are really seen as a recognition with any kind of integrity or achievement.

Television reflects this. Roughly 80 percent of the characters on television are between the ages of 25 and 40. That's demographically inaccurate. The message is "This is what life is about: people between the age of 25-40"

Our culture is built on the whole premise that to be young and to be consuming is to be living, and to be old is to be dying. I see it throughout our culture. I lived in Los Angeles and have worked in Hollywood. If you're between 40 and 60, as Shirley MacLaine has said, you can't find a role. That's why so many actresses start planning for cosmetic surgery at 25.

What does that say about our culture? The people that we look at on the screen are reflections of ourselves. And who do we want to look at? We want to look at people who are beautiful, whether it's Goldie Hawn or Elizabeth Taylor-people who keep on looking young, when we know that they could not possibly look that way without surgery. So we glorify them, even though we know what they've done to themselves had. They've cut themselves up in order to fit an image of what it means to be young.

I talked to a hairdresser who said to me, "I've got all these women coming in here to dye their hair, to stay young-looking.' You know the only problem with that? The young women can't find their elders. They can't find anyone to look up to because they all look like they do.

We've got a whole generation that's trying to pretend they're still kids. And then we say, "Why don't we have any leadership in America? Why don't we have any elders?' Well, nobody wants to look like an elder. That's why I recommend that we have a new stage of life called "elderhood." Adulthood, midlife, and elderhood. You say "elder" to some people and they take offense. They say, "You mean I look old?" No, you say, "You're someone I look up to and respect because of the wisdom of your experience. They can't even grasp this because it's so alien to our culture.

PT: That's a big thing for people to accept, a major societal sea change for people who don't have any respect. It's sort of a Western phenomenon.

MG: We see an old person and think, now there's a person who's fallen behind the times, who's out of date, who's an anachronism. In other cultures they see an old person and they say, there's an elder, there's someone with wisdom, someone with experience. That's because those are stable cultures. In our culture we say, "They don't know how to use a computer. They're before faxes, what do they know? They grew up in the Forties; they're Depression-era people. We look down on them, and it's a major loss, because we are looking down at our own future. Even our rock lyrics are filled with messages like, "I'd rather die before I get old'

The dangerous thing is that if you think that aging is meaningless-which is what our culture is saying-then your life is meaningless. If you accept that aging is meaningless, which I don't, then you've got to run away from you're own future. I think our generation is here to change that and to recognize that there is a positive meaning to aging, and that if we accepted that, it would be revolutionary. Positively revolutionary.

PT: In many ways the country right now has the same kind of ennui that we associate with midlife.

MG: That's absolutely true. At a time when the economic boom of the Sixties is dearly not going to continue very much longer, I think there's a very natural re-examination of what we get from material things. I think that's one of the reasons there is a renaissance of spiritual inquiry going on right now. People are realizing that one of the crutches we've had is our dependency on material goods. And, as you say, a lot of people are realizing that they are not going to get what they hoped they would, what they felt they were promised, in terms of material pursuits.

So now they are re-examining what growth and what success and what well-being means. They are trying to give other definitions for it because materially, they are not going to get the promotions they thought they were going to get, they are not going to get the salary increase or the splendid lifestyles or the vast estates. So the question becomes, where are you going? How are you changing? It has to become more internalized.

PT: Do you make a connection between this consciousness, this new sense of spirituality and recognition, and the sudden appearance of concern for the planet?

MG: It's no accident that we are living longer lives and talking about the second half of life at this particular point in the planet's history, because if we believe what all the environmentalists are saying, then we have to change the way we live on the Earth in the next 30 or 40 years. If we don't, our kids won't be able to live a healthy life.

The fact that we now realize we have to change the way we live on the planet, and that it is happening at the same time that a generation is reaching midlife-I don't see this as a coincidence. I see it as an essential reality that you and I own. If we were to now have the same values during the second half of life as we do in the first-if we see as much as we can, travel as much as we can, get as much as we can for ourselves and not serve the planet-we will do more to contribute to the destruction of the planet than any generation before us. But if we wake up and begin a real quest, we can contribute to a renaissance.

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