Foreign Territory (over 40)

Remember that queasy feeling of not knowing what the hell you are doing, where you are going, why you are where you are at a particular juncture in one's life?  It is a familiar feeling from age 15 to 40.  That extended age group is in a chronic developmental and maturation learning curve.  But by the time  middle age has hit, most of us have secured ways, gotten most usual life learning experiences under our belts making us more knowledgeable and experienced.  We have guaranteed for ourselves an obliteration of that queasy feeling of not knowing by getting a lot of knowns down pat.  But then life has a way of throwing us back into that "what the hell" territory when we're given unexpected illnesses, unforeseen change in life shocks, a turned-on-its-head event one didn't see coming  and the queasies re-enter.  And unlike those earlier years, there sometimes isn't a lot of others in our peer groups to commiserate with or exchange notes about these life dilemmas.  All our well-worn decades of experience seems not about fending off the new, exciting, traumatic, terrifying process of never-had-unknowns.  Change is a bitch, and we are hard-wired to resist that inevitability at all costs.

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What about foreign territory, one willingly submits to?  The place you've never been to before but are being organically pulled, even when the very notion is almost paralyzing?  No avoidance.  No turning away.  Once assumed, fear does not surrender herself; she and Intention walk side by side.  The submission of Intention takes on parental qualities. The gnashing teeth of Fear wears on the intended. The parent embraces, reassures all that the fear drags with her.  The odyssey continues with a few blips and pauses. Until the day the foreign territory is reached.  Fear recognizes she has been a carriage without wheels, Intention has been dragging along. Intention recognizes the willingness to have Fear accompany (that she even belongs on the journey), even providing the wheels and brake-release for Fear.  What is created are conditions for an unlikely partnership.

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For, despite Fear's childish railings, her negative and resistant faculty is an important and necessary aspect of the Whole. And the maturation process the Intention has had to acquire to amble willingly the unknown odyssey has created a tolerance and allowance for the Fear.  There is no contemptuous annoyance, wish to obliterate, blaming finger for Fear any longer.  Some kind of understanding and forbearance has evolved.

Traversing foreign territory means embracing these two aspects of one's humanness.  Our hard-wired 'avoid at all costs inconvenience and discomfort' and the innate adventurer who has questions about what is beyond what is already known.  Nature prepares us under 40 by making most experiences new, having us experience what we don't already know out of necessity.  After 40, we have choices.  We can trust these past lessons of trial and error or we can hunker down in the acquired comforts.  We can bury the adventurer in the norm of human resistance, or rekindle the young person's open inquiry, striking out into foreign territory.

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