Are you familiar with that old ZZ Top song: “Why get up?”
“This old world’s gone crazy, think I’ve seen enough, gonna sleep forever, why get up?”
I’ve been very sick recently, still not completely better. There were a few days last week I don’t even remember! But I do remember how depressed I got.
I’m always surprised by what a depressing experience illness can be. An old friend and I used to ask: “Who stole the bright side?”, when we couldn’t find anything positive in the present moment.
Illness offers us lots of time to think about our lives and ask ourselves questions like: Is there some justice to illness? I wonder why I got sick now? Am I glad to be alive? Probably most important is the question:
What in my life makes it worthwhile to get up everyday?
What aspects of your life make it all worthwhile, and what aspects could you do without? Midlife is a great time to put more energy into what’s working for you, and get rid of those aspects that are just weighing you down.
One of the things I have had to jettison in midlife is boundless guilt about what everybody else thinks of me. I admit it, I used to be a guilt sponge! I was always more concerned about other people’s feelings, and rarely concerned about my own needs. In other words, I was easily manipulated by every person who even tried.
I’m not saying I have this one licked! It just isn’t as easy for others to walk all over me now. I don’t feel as guilty for being me, and I even get a kick out of being my uniquely opinionated self sometimes!
Finding out who I was and how I felt about everything in my life was a very slow process! I had to spend a lot of time alone, without any outside suggestions or feedback, before my own authentic voice emerged. And then I had to learn to honor that voice and the wisdom it had to offer.
As I’ve said before, we seem to spend the first half of our life learning the rules of the game, and the second half learning how to break them.
Where are you on the path of finding your authentic self? Why not have a listen sometime to the voice within…you might learn something new about yourself, and meet a very funny and entertaining person!
