In the movie City Slickers, (Yesterday They Were Businessmen. Today They're Cowboys. Tomorrow They'll Be Walking Funny) Billy Crystal plays a middle aged businessman who is going through a mid-life crisis. So as to kick-start his life, he decides to take two of his friends on a cattle drive, where they rediscover purpose and passion for life.
Mitch, Before the Cattle Drive (Billy Crystal): Value this time in your life kids, because this is the time in your life when you still have your choices, and it goes by so quickly. When you're a teenager you think you can do anything, and you do. Your twenties are a blur. Your thirties, you raise your family, you make a little money and you think to yourself, "What happened to my twenties?" Your forties, you grow a little potbelly you grow another chin. The music starts to get too loud and one of your old girlfriends from high school becomes a grandmother. Your fifties you have a minor surgery. You'll call it a procedure, but it's a surgery. Your sixties you have a major surgery, the music is still loud but it doesn't matter because you can't hear it anyway. Seventies, you and the wife retire to Fort Lauderdale; you start eating dinner at two, lunch around ten, breakfast the night before. And you spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate in soft yogurt and muttering, "how come the kids don't call?" By your eighties, you've had a major stroke, and you end up babbling to some Jamaican nurse who your wife can't stand but who you call mama. Any questions?
These are the words of a jaded, borderline cynical man who is terrified that life is not all he once thought it would be. Tragically, this is where many men (and women) find themselves around the age of 40. They then either let themselves go, growing a potbelly and another chin, or they do a complete makeover (not the same thing as reinventing yourself), thinking that a change of externals will give their soul the boost it needs. It doesn’t. They then either try on another appearance or they give up altogether and spend the rest of their lives simply going through the motions, “wandering around malls looking for the ultimate in soft yogurt.” This happens with Christians as often as it does to non-Christians.
I think the key to avoiding this crisis, or of pulling one’s self out of it, is to discover your purpose in life. What is that One Thing that will pull you out of bed every morning? I say One Thing because I have learned from painful experience that many of us set about to do many things well and end up doing a few things marginally well.
I think that discovering your purpose in life begins with settling the issue regarding what sort of person you wish to become: Who Am I? Who Am I Supposed to Become? I am not him, I am not her…I am not supposed to be him or her, I am to be whomever God meant when he said, “Let there be Monte.” As Rabbi Zusya said, “In the world to come, I shall not be asked, ‘Why were you not Moses?’ I shall be asked, ‘Why were you not Zusya?’”
As you begin settling this question, you will gain clarity as to the virtues, values, and ethical standards that are important to you…attributes you wish to personify or incarnate. This in turn will lead to a clarification of those actions and deeds you find most compelling. For example, if “justice” is of critical importance to you, you may find that the “arena of your achievement” (Tom Peters) is law. Of course, justice is important to all of us, but to some of us it is the raison d’etre.
I think we also often find our purpose as we get about serving others. As we do this, we find that there are particular deeds we most always perform as a service. What does it say about us, about our intuitive sense of purpose, when we are constantly giving away books (education, teaching), or battling injustice (law), or helping someone to develop skills so as to better their financial prospects (giving, business)?
Actually, I have found that no matter how unclear someone is about their purpose in life, if they are giving themselves to others in a meaningful way, they not only avoid the midlife crisis, they actually have a sense of purpose that keeps their lives grounded. A father who has yet to discover that One Thing, will, nevertheless, find his contribution worthy of self-satisfaction as he rears children who are mentally, morally, and spiritually healthy. A man or woman who sets about serving others finds that the strength and encouragement they bring to people gives them a sense of purpose worthy of the gift of life. Thomas Merton spoke to this idea when he wrote:
“Do not depend on the hope of results. You may have to face the fact that your work will be apparently worthless and even achieve no result at all, if not perhaps results opposite to what you expect. As you get used to this idea, you start more and more to concentrate not on the results, but on the value, the rightness, the truth of the work itself. You gradually struggle less and less for an idea and more and more for specific people. In the end, it is the reality of personal relationship that saves everything.”
The sooner we discover our purpose in life, that One Thing for which we were created to do, the sooner we can get forget about all of the good and interesting things we might do and begin focusing on, in religious terms, our calling. In the movie, Curly (Jack Palance) speaks to this when he asks Mitch:
Curly: Do you know what the secret of life is?
Curly: [holding up one finger] This.
Mitch: Your finger?
Curly: One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don't mean shit.
Mitch: But, what is the "one thing?"
Curly: [smiles] That's what you have to find out.
Copyright Monte E Wilson, 2007
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