Isn’t it funny how we applaud our friends who have the self-assurance to undertake a spiritual quest at an age when most of us finding our greatest gratification in life by subscribing to AARP and renewing our satellite TV contracts, and then question their spiritual findings because they don’t fit with our own ideas of what a person “our age” should be doing?
A couple of months ago I wrote about my friend Sue (For the Love of Sue) who took a five-week sabbatical from her husband and traveled out West to find herself. We all applauded her courage, wished her well and expected her to come crawling back, having discovered that life “out there” was far less intriguing at 54 than it was at 25.
Well, Sue surprised us. She drove through eight states, spent over a week in three of them, and realized that at least one of those destinations had more appeal than the place she’s living now. As hard as she tried to breathe some life into her marriage, the sad fact was…it simply wasn’t working for her. She will be moving to one of those cities this summer.
And wouldn’t you know – the same friends who applauded her courage when she left, are whispering behind her back now? How could she do this to her husband? Doesn’t she know that women who get divorced at her age end up lonely and remorseful? Is she absolutely crazy to start something new – ALONE – at this stage in life?
The end of a marriage is always tragic. The two partners almost never feel the same about whether the marriage should end. Kids are traumatized whether they are 6 or 30. And, I can tell you from experience, friends are always devastated to lose the “couple” that has meant so much in their lives.
Yet new beginnings are always exciting. Remember when you started a new job or met that really WOW guy that made you feel slightly dizzy when he looked at you? Maybe not. Because most of us stopped having those experiences when we passed 30 or 40. We may have forgotten the jolt of adrenalin you get from starting something really scary. But what gets your creative juices flowing more than adrenalin?
I’m afraid for Sue. I worry that she could make this move and realize that even though it wasn’t passionate and exciting, her life was pretty darned comfortable just as it was, and it really is more important to have someone who knows you well, sees you for who you are and loves you anyway, than to have strangers who don’t know the real you. I worry that she won’t find the right job or the right mate. I worry that, if all that happens and she wants to come home, her husband won’t want her back.
I wouldn’t have worried about these things if she were 25. I would have hugged her goodbye and told her to let me know every detail about who she’s meeting, whether she can afford groceries, and what she plans to do with the rest of her life. Maybe that’s the problem. It seems like the rest of her life now isn’t long enough to start again – to know people long enough to really know them the way her husband of 20 years knows her.
I am no different than the naysayers. I look at Sue and I’m forced to face the fear I have in myself – that it’s too late to take a chance, to start something new, that maybe it’s better to settle for something that doesn’t really make you happy than to work hard enough at this late date to find what really does make you happy. I’m holding my breath, crossing my fingers, saying a prayer, and hoping once again that Sue’s experience will teach the rest of us something about courage and hope, and, yes…finding one’s self, even at “our age."
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