Mid Life Celebration

May 5th & May 6th, 2010

“The older you get the faster it goes.”

Wednesday, while in Philadelphia to give a keynote speech, there was a rare moment with the television on in my hotel room.  A local couple were celebrating their 70th wedding anniversary. Four children, eight grandchildren and three great grandchildren.

Have you heard older people say the older you get, the faster time goes?

Does this notion have any truth for you?

I guess the big question is, “Do you ignore or embrace this truth?”

Back Then, You Could Die Flying

Are you ready to die? Most don’t like to think about it. Ever wonder why this is so?

Two weeks ago on a flight to Allentown, Pennsylvania, I asked the woman (70-ish) next to me about death and dying. Long story, but it was neither awkward nor inappropriate.

The woman said she was not afraid of death. She told me “her life story” but added at the end, she was afraid of two things:

1. Having no control over things
2. Becoming a burden

While visiting Family in Allentown, I asked some direct questions.  The answers were fuzzy, meaning I left with no more insight than when I arrived.

“The interesting thing about greed is that although the underlying motive is to seek satisfaction, even after obtaining the object of one’s desire, one is still not satisfied, it becomes limitless or boundless and that leads to trouble. On the other hand, if one has a strong sense of contentment, it doesn’t matter whether one obtains the object or not; either way, one is still content.” — Dalai Lama

Midlife Enables Us To See Clearly

“Have you ever had a midlife crisis?”, I asked the US Airlines flight attendant yesterday as we were waiting to disembark in Orlando. We sat across from one another, face to face – me in the exit row aisle seat, her in the “jump seat”.

The middle seat next to me was empty, and in the window seat was Mark, another US Air employee. Mark and I spoke at length, and he spoke with the flight attendant across from us, but I did not. Not until that question.

With an unanticipated wisdom, she replied, “Not really. I think it’s a guy thing.”

Clarifying, I added, “I’m not talking about the stereotypical convertible sports car, younger woman thing, I mean when you journey through life and arrive at the place you worked your whole life for, and suddenly realize it’s not where you want to be?”

What she said next really surprised me, “That’s because we don’t know who we are.”

Bingo!

Lehigh Valley International Airport

The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow?

Finding the buried treasure?

How exciting is it when the secret is revealed to you?

Ever have unexpected moments when important things become surprisingly clearer to you?

How does that make you feel?

Sunday night listening to Miranda Lambert sing, The House That Built Me, on the CMA’s, when she sang, the brokenness is healing, things became surprising clearer.

Of course, being back in Pennsylvania also facilitated this.

There are many of us dealing with suppressed brokenness, which starts to resurface when we return to the place we grew up.

Parrotheads

There’s a hidden, subtle message in this Mid Life blog post. Most likely, you will struggle to understand it.  It’s crazy that I even ask you to try, isn’t it?

Life is crazy.

Work is crazy.

The economy is crazy.

Health Care is crazy.

People are crazy.

And I’m one of them, and so are you.

Jimmy Buffett, who’s released over 40 CD’s in his lifetime and has a cult following of “Parrotheads“, once said:

“If we weren’t all crazy, we’d all go insane.”

Writing five daily blogs is crazy.

Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary.

It began as a simple 100-day challenge.

The rest, as they say, is history.

PS. I have all 40 of Jimmy Buffett’s Cd’s and consider myself an original Parrothead. (I know, who cares?)

Inspired Living

Do you celebrate meaningful milestones in your life? Or, do they come and go like the seasons – here and gone before you know it.

In two days, I’m celebrating one year of writing five daily blogs.

The learning curve has been amazing. Sometimes steep and challenging.  Sometimes flat and easy.

At jeff noel.com, I wrote a Mid Life Celebration summary.  Wanted to share it here, one last time, before it’s removed:

“Mid Life Celebration is where I challenge myself to: Rethink.  Reprioritize.  Recommit.

There are four key areas to my life, every life actually, and I share thoughts, tips and on a good day, a decent dose of motivation.

I’m challenging myself, because I’m crystal clear on the fact that none of us is going to live forever.

I am very thankful for the wake up calls in my life.   I no longer ignore the clock.  I embrace it and am inspired by it. What about you? What have you got to lose, seriously?”

Our Honeymoon Was Amazing

Do you have amazing midlife days?

And if you’re not at midlife, or past midlife, do you still have amazing days?

What does it take to have an amazing day?

Who gets to decide if it was amazing, or not?

What criteria should a person use to judge amazing, in a single day?

Is amazing replicable?

Do you inspire yourself?

Gary Sheffer, Indomitable Will

Mid Life Celebration is excited to have Guest Blogger, Lorie Sheffer return for the second in a three part series.  Lorie and her husband Gary, have an amazing and challenging story to share.  We can all benefit from this inspiration. Take it away Lorie:

Imagine if your dream changed from “skiing the Swiss Alps” to “being able to use the toilet without any help”, or “learning to count to 10 without making a mistake”. That is what happened to my husband after suffering his stroke.

On day one of getting his life back, Gary’s physical therapist let out a yelp of pure joy. “Feel these quads! WOW! I have something to work with!” In Gary’s case, no matter how he had taken care if himself, the bleed in his brain was inevitable. The tangle of blood vessels that made up the AVM had been there most likely since before he was born. AVMs happen in fetal development, and usually make their appearance known sometime between the twentieth and fiftieth year of life.

Because he had quit smoking over 10 years before, had skied, ridden his bike and ran, and was at a healthy weight, Gary stood a chance of recovery. The music lessons that his father refused to pay for are another protection. It seems that anything we do to strengthen our brain, learning new things, playing music, and speaking a second language all contribute to the strength and overall plasticity of our brain.

Still, Gary was in for the fight of his life, and statistically things were not in his favor.

He had trouble understanding what he was supposed to do. The therapists would show him, and then he would imitate their movements.  I stayed with him till late at night, helping him with daily self-care. He had to be held on the toilet by me, or he would have fallen off onto the floor. I had to sweep my finger into his mouth and remove the chunks of food that he couldn’t feel, something known as “pouching” food. I flossed his teeth and helped him into the shower. I learned to transfer him from wheelchair to toilet to shower chair to bed. It was humiliating for him to have me do those things, but I wanted to be comfortable assisting him so as not to be panicked when we got home.

He slowly went from wheelchair to wide based cane, from wide based cane to straight cane. His speech was slow to return. When a doctor asked him to draw the numbers as they appear on the face of a clock, Gary drew a smile face. Because of his paralysis, he was unable to feel the drool, which often ran from his slack mouth. In addition to his own trauma, we witnessed the sudden death of his roommate. We made friends with an 18 year old who had been in contention for being named high school valedictorian before a traffic accident left him in a 3 month long coma, part of his brain missing from the impact. Sometimes I would stop by a friend’s room to offer support, only to be told they had passed away. It seemed that Gary was determined to do it not just for himself, but for all of them. Six weeks after being admitted to full time inpatient rehabilitation, Gary was discharged to day rehab. He was going home. His one wish, to walk out the same door he had been wheeled into.

I was told that as the brain heals, strange emotional things could happen. And they most certainly did.

Gary would burst into tears at the oddest times. He would explode into fits of rage, most often directed at me. And yet we kept going. Recovery is so excruciatingly slow that it is easy to see why some people just give up. There are no guarantees how much recovery will be made, if any. It’s not like rehab on a knee replacement or a broken hip or a torn rotator cuff. Strokes can cause disability to so many different areas that it’s hard to even know where to start. What is fascinating about a brain injury is that all the parts are in perfect working order, but you can’t get them to move. The electrical system isn’t working. Now Gary’s dream was to figure out how to make his brain work again. Everyone was anxious to see how far he could go.

Life Goes Round And Round

How challenging was it to keep in touch with people before the telephone was invented?  You know, back before electricity and the pony express.

Nearly impossible, right?  And for decades following the advent of electricity, the phone was attached by a cord to some contraption on a desk or a wall.

Yesterday, the phone in my pocket rang, so I walked outside and had a nice conversation with a college buddy, Skip.

Looking back to 24 hours ago, it hit me.  Time marches on.  People do amazing things, and we lose track.

He was very interested, and asked about my goals. And it made me reflect on what they actually are.  It’s easy to get distracted from the most important goals in our life.

Terribly easy.

Tomorrow would be a great day to remind everyone, including myself, why I started Mid Life Celebration.

People forget.

Knowing Isn't Enough

“To know is to do.

To know and not do, is to not yet know.” -- Dennis F.

Common sense at midlife should come easy.

And it usually does.

However, most people don’t practice common sense.

So in reality, they really don’t have any.

Time Magazine: This Is Headline News

Do you scan headlines for interesting, funny or important news?  I do.

Yesterday, while scanning my Earthlink homepage, saw an article that caught my attention.  Was on the run and didn’t have time to read it, but wanted to save it, because these headlines constantly change.

The article, Older Women Need One-Hour Workouts To Fend Off Flab, provided a button to post to Facebook, but not Twitter.

I sent it to Facebook to “save” it, to read later

Apparently, it caused a minor stir amongst some midlife folks.

It was no consolation when I suggested that older men have the same challenge.

What Do You See?

“If we could only see the miracle of a single flower clearly, our whole life would change.” — Buddha

Not sure about you, but my days are a flurry of activity.  And I am fully aware that this busy pace can lead to many negative consequences.

And even in knowing and having awareness, it is still difficult to stop.

Gary And Lorie 1996

Lorie Sheffer returns for more of her midlife wisdom.  Take it away Lorie:

When people meet my husband, they think he is polite, friendly and rather quiet. While he is all of those things, he is also the single most driven person I have ever known. Never one to announce his dreams or his goals, he just goes about quietly and methodically checking them off of his “to do” list. In the 1960s, he was one of millions of teenagers who were struck with Beatle mania. He wanted to learn to play electric bass guitar, but his father saw music lessons as a waste of money. Gary found a cheap bass and taught himself to play by ear. He got so good that he was able to supplement this income through high school and college, and even into his adult years, by playing in local bands. In high school, he played football and his team became county champions. When he decided he wanted to become an engineer, he was told by guidance counselors that his math skills were too weak, and to consider another career. Five years later he graduated from Penn State with a degree in mechanical engineering. He skied for the first time at age 21, and by the time he was 26 he was a member of the National Ski Patrol. It seemed that nothing was out of his reach if he set his mind to it. And then, at the age of 44, the unimaginable happened. Everything was taken away in a matter of minutes.

February 11, 1996 was a glorious winter day in York County, Pennsylvania. Gary had recently mastered snowboarding, and was taking a few runs while his 11-year-old son was practicing with the ski-racing club on another ski slope. While boarding on a steep but otherwise unremarkable slope, Gary fell. For him, this was unusual but not cause for alarm. What did interest him, however, was his seeming inability to hold his right glove in his hand when he removed it. He boarded to the bottom of the slope and rode the lift back to the top, only to find that it was now difficult to push his boot into his binding. Clearly something was wrong, so he headed to the ski patrol building, where it soon became obvious to his fellow patrollers that something very serious was happening. That something turned out to be a massive hemorrhagic stroke, caused by a congenital arteriovenous malformation, or AVM. Over the course of the next few hours, Gary lost all sensation in the entire right half of his body, lost the ability to speak and understand language, was partially blind in his right eye, and suffered from complete right side paralysis. I was in the shock trauma unit of the hospital when I was told by his neurosurgeon that he was “probably going to live” but would be left with “significant, permanent disability”. My first reaction? “You don’t know my husband. He won’t finish this ski season, obviously, but I’ll dust off my skis and have him back on the slopes when they open next season.”  Ignorance is bliss, and I had no idea what we were in for. Had I known then what I know now about traumatic brain injury, I would have fallen apart for sure. I had no idea at that time that his chances of ever even walking again were about 10% at best. After a week in the intensive care unit, Gary was moved to a rehabilitation facility. He was one of the worst cases they had ever seen for a person his age. When I was asked by a group of his therapists about his interests and goals, one of them laughed and said, “Doesn’t this man ever do anything easy?” At that point, they knew they were working with a fighter. They considered it “game on!”

This story is one that can’t be told in one single blog.  Patience is something I never had. Patience is something that every survivor of traumatic brain injury has to learn. Patience is what it will take for you to find out how this story ends, or if it has indeed ended. I promise I will let you know what happened, and how it happened. Have patience.

Time Waits For No One

Wow.

Life has a way of rewarding us when we least expect it.

Life has a way of punishing us when we least expect it.

By midlife (which is relative), we should be fully aware that we will get our fair share of both. And that in either case, the timing can not be predicted.

Do you understand this?

Do you prepare for this?

Do you react to it?

Or do you celebrate because of it?

If you are seriously looking for more peace at midlife, or any life stage, being prepared for the unexpected is key.

Common sense, but not common practice.

Why?