Everyone alive has experienced painful, wrenching losses. Even a newborn baby, who we like to think of as being a blank slate, has just lost the safest, happiest home he’s ever going to know in his life. He faces his forever in a hostile environment. His only advantage in this world is widely spaced eyes, which appeal to all humans. Maybe he’ll be lucky and attract one to provide the positive attention necessary to his survival.

From the moment of his birth, right up to the moment of his death, he’s going to be losing things that are important to all humans. We all started out just like him. And, until our deaths, we’ll be losing things too.

We start out by losing comfort and safety, then we go through the years of childhood losing even more important things than comfort and safety. We lose innocence, belief, trust, love, illusions, freedoms, confidence, pleasures. Still we crawl, then walk, then skip toward adulthood and autonomy, where we’re sure we’ll at last be freed from losses – because we’re sure we’ll be able to prevent loss.

But, that’s not how it works, is it? The best adults can do is to make the kind of compromises that enable us to hang on to some things by giving up others. We don’t have parents bossing us around, but we have to make our own livings and pay for our own housing and food. We give up the freedom to run and play whenever we like, but we get the freedom of making our own choices in other important areas. We don’t consider these things compromises, we consider them things to be joyfully embraced.

In time we lose other things. We compromise with fate. We buy a house, and lose our ability to walk away from our job without thought. We have children, and lose our ability to watch the evening news without our hearts clutching in fear for those who bring us such joy.

Eventually, whether sooner or later, we go for a medical check-up and lose our sense of being immortal. We lose our strong young parents, sometimes years before we lose their physical presence in our lives. We may even lose a partner or some of our friends.

We hurt. There’s no other way to describe it. We hurt when we lose something or someone we value. We reach a point where we feel that we’ve lost the ability to control our lives. We may even have a mid-life crisis.

Is this it? Years of taking two beautiful steps forward only to be tossed back a mile into the pit of loss and pain, is that what life is? And that was the strong, youthful, vital, fun part of life! What miseries does the next half hold? How will we ever be able to shuffle painfully through it?

Oh yeah, that’s what a mid-life crisis looks like. A few people get stuck there, like stubborn children crying, “I’m tired. I’m not taking another step, and you can’t make me.”

The rest of us wallow awhile in our genuine suffering, then light bulbs start turning on for us. We ponder where we’ve been, where we want to go, what we’ve lost, and what we’ve gained. If we ponder long enough, well enough, we start to see a pattern. For every loss there were mountains of gains. We think back to childhood and remember all the times we fell down, all the times we cried, all the childhood things we lost.

Yet, for all the losses of childhood, we learned so much that has served us well in adulthood. Oh, we paid for what we learned as children. We gave up a lot to grow up. But isn’t what we have now better than being small, ignorant and dependent?

At that point in our mid-life crisis ponderings, we are inevitably led to ourselves in the present. Are we better off for the losses we’ve suffered as adults? In most ways we are. In some terrible ways, we didn’t come out ahead. But are our lives nothing but scorecards? Is life more than just a game of winners and losers?

Now that we’ve asked those tough questions, we stand on the battlefield of our lives and realize that it was always a battlefield. From the battle of struggling for our first breath, to the battle of standing over the grave of someone we loved without exploding or shattering into a million tiny pieces, we were always fighting a battle against our desire to give up the fight in order to escape the hurt.

That’s when the mid-life crisis ends: when we realize that we’re already living the life we were born to live, and we’re the heroes and heroines of those lives. Loss of jobs, health, home, loved ones, these are the possibilities that all humans must face. These are the stuff of life. Nobody gets out alive, and nobody gets out unscarred.

We see that we’ve already won. We have judged ourselves and, for all that we found wanting in ourselves, we can see that we are equipped to add to our lives whatever we still think we lack. We are prepared, at last, to live. It took 40-50 years, but we see clearly that it was time well spent.

Now that we know these things, now that we accept these things, now that we’ve given up our illusory goldenness, we have become entirely grown up. NOW we can begin to live the lives we always wanted because we now have the power of the knowledge of what life is. And we don’t have to waste any more years fighting against the human condition: loss. We won’t enjoy our future losses, we’ll hurt because of them, but we’ll know that we’re capable of getting through them and taking whatever measure of good is available in them.

With the time we gain, the rest of our lives, we’ll finally be free to pursue our choice of destinies. We’ll be free to live with our child’s heart combined with our (hard won at last) adult mind. In joy and with excitement we can live or die, gain or lose. And we won’t have to be strapped into booster seats or use training wheels anymore. We can steer our own vehicle while enjoying the ride.

Because it’s life itself that is the reward of living.

December 30, 2009