Finding Ground:

 

Mid-Life Crisis

“The ‘I’ is caught up in a field that it cannot control, whose patterns it does not recognize as ‘me.’ While the sense of ‘I-ness’ and some of its continuities remain during liminality, the prevailing feeling is one of alienation, marginality, and drift…The ego is a has been and a not yet.”

Murray Stein (In Midlife, Chiron Publications, 2014)

          This study on liminality that I have immersed myself in has come at the perfect time. Jungian Analyst, Murray Stein’s book, In Midlife, addresses the individual mid-life crisis, but it also reflects where we are right now as a world. When you begin tuning your eyes and ears to liminality, the conversations and commentaries going on at the national and international level make it quite clear that America is having a mid-life crisis and the whole world is being affected by it.

          We are all familiar with the human mid-life crisis—when everything that has come before seems somehow unbearable but what comes next is a mystery. It feels like being unable to get a deep breath, of being disoriented in a strange land, or underwater where the surface is not obvious. Basically, you flounder around and bruise yourself and a lot of other people before getting your feet squarely on the ground. It takes time, and what comes out of it is not the ‘I’ you remember.

          Watching the pull-out of American and Allied troops from Afghanistan has been exceptionally painful. We still have a view of ourselves as the cowboys with the white hats—the good guys who come to the rescue. Of course, we have never been that in our social culture, and in war, not since 1945. But that fact does not enter into our calculations. So, watching the devastation we leave behind is heartbreaking. Knowing the country will likely return to its authoritarian roots, where the suppression of women and girls is key, makes us sick to our stomachs.

          We will have to stay in this liminal place until we can pull ourselves together and agree on a way forward. We know, or at least some of us do, that there is no going back to who we thought we were before. We are not a white, Christian, kind-hearted, generous, family oriented, “little house on the prairie” culture. We don’t know what comes next. We must wait and see. It can be an adventure or a misery. And it’s all up to us. God bless us, and God bless the Afghan people.

                                                  In the Spirit,

                                                  Jane