Spiritual Awakening at an Economic Crossroads

The day before Thanksgiving I ran into a former colleague in the lobby of our local movie theater.  My mother and I were coming out of a matinee and he and his son were going into the latest Harry Potter film.  Not known for our congeniality when we worked together, our unexpected encounter was friendly and in an odd way comforting.  He asked me what I was doing now and after saying “nothing,” I quickly added, “Well, that’s not true. I’m writing for a local magazine, blogging, doing freelance stuff.”  He looked impressed, but more likely was being polite.  I hoped my cheery offering that I was publishing would banish the self-consciousness I felt for being without a job after more than a year.

A late bloomer when I entered the corporate world at 40, some part of me had felt that I’d at last arrived at the place of long sought-after security and stability.  Overnight, I’d gone from a college adjunct living one paycheck to the next to Consultant, then Regional Account Manager, and finally Client Service Manager.  I had my own laptop, expense account and corporate credit card.  Employer-paid medical and a 401K (which I’d never had to that point) were the icing on the cake.  It was a huge move professionally and financially from where I had been the previous ten years.  With this increase in income I had bought my first new car, was able to take real vacations and when my husband and I married, to move into an ‘upscale’ neighborhood surrounded by a golf course.  On the surface, everything looked right.

For the first several years the work was exciting and I enjoyed the travel, compensation and perks that came with a corporate career.  But when I married for the first time at 43 and two of my husband’s three teenagers came to live with us, I found the once stimulating work and the non-stop travel exhausting when combined with my new family responsibilities.  I had soldiered on for another two years, subsequently receiving a promotion to management that put me back in the office full time, but something important was missing and I knew it.  When layoffs hit the office where I worked and I was demoted back to traveling Consultant, the writing was on the wall.  In September 2009 a work day seemingly like any other turned out to be my last.

There’s something about long-term unemployment at midlife that makes you question your values.  Not just the material ones, but the spiritual ones too. However, since they were closer to consciousness I started with the material ones.  Newly unemployed and concerned about our sudden financial decline, I called every creditor that offered programs for ‘low income’ customers.  My husband and I weather-stripped doors and curtained previously uncovered windows.  We received a supply of wood from a family member that took us through the cold winter months.  We re-calculated our food budget and bought a seal-o-meal so we could stretch each meal as far as it would go.  We juggled bills and combined trips to town to save gas.  In short, we responded creatively to unexpected and challenging circumstances and I wondered why we hadn’t employed some of these methods even when times weren’t so lean.

Although our resources were fewer, they weren’t altogether absent and I saw, perhaps for the first time, that my ability to live should not—must not—be dependent upon my employment status.  This came to me most powerfully one day when I was standing in the backyard, hanging clothes on the line and my husband said that we needed to buy “such and such.”  In that moment I realized that consumption, like life itself, would continue with or without that job.  It was a profound insight and the beginning of a spiritual awakening.

Looking back I saw how subtly and powerfully my career had come to define me.  When it was suddenly gone, I had the painstaking work of rediscovering who I was apart from it. I’d grown accustomed to being in the driver’s seat, navigating my life mostly by wit and will and believing I had more control than I did. Being bumped to passenger was humbling and I started writing again to gain some perspective on my circumstances.

As I wrote, I discovered that my pursuit of what I thought was a “successful life” had left me depleted and depressed.  Certainly not in the beginning, but definitely as time wore on. All my achievement, my contributions were outside myself.  Until I stopped working, I hadn’t seen this nor had I known how much I’d needed some down time to rest, read, or knit; to go to a movie, walk or bike; to sleep in, meet a friend for lunch, or simply do nothing for a few hours.  It was in these quieter moments that I began to nurture my creative self, at the heart of which was a blocked writer.

I’d written since I could hold a pencil.  For me writing had always been my way of making sense of the world but in the past few years my journal entries had stopped. I was too busy and felt ‘dry’ creatively.  The funny thing was that as soon as I ceased my frenetic work pace and started writing again, my creativity flowed forth.  With nothing to lose, I started the blog in March.  I wrote about my regret for having turned away from the writing life in Six Degrees of Separation, figuring that many people could relate to their own road not taken; about my dying friend George in Passages, knowing that loss and grief come to all of us sooner or later; about my quest for a healthy body in Midlife Midriff and a healthy diet in What’s Really For Dinner?, believing that men as well as women might laugh as they identified with my predicaments.

Having aspired to be a writer since I was a young girl, and now feeling emboldened, I queried a regional magazine about freelance opportunities.  It had been years since I’d written anything of publishable quality and although I knew I had it in me, my confidence hadn’t yet been fully restored.  (Anyone who has lost a job will know the feeling.)  Nonetheless, I took a deep breath and followed the inner edict to ‘just do it anyway’ and that leap of faith led to becoming a contributing writer for enjoy magazine, a Northern California lifestyle monthly.

Around the same time, I joined a local writer’s forum and started a critique group with another writer I met at the Member’s Read event.  As our bi-monthly meetings progressed, the discipline to write deepened; I had someone waiting to read what I was producing.  I started sending my poetry to literary magazines and began a second blog for the women’s site, skirt.com.  More recently, I’ve been in negotiations to write a column for the local newspaper which I hope to syndicate to other dailies in the newspaper chain. The college where I taught before I entered the corporate world?  They called last week offering me three sections for Spring semester.  Officially, I’m not “unemployed” anymore.

This journey to a new livelihood has brought many insights. First and foremost, that although I was living a materially successful life, I was not living a spiritually meaningful one.  I don’t know that the two are mutually exclusive—who’s to say that one can’t have both? But for me it took a significant reorganization of my finances to prompt a reorganization of my values. The spiritual awakening that followed was the necessary ingredient for my creative life to take form and set me upon my current path.

The ability to translate the raw material for every article, for every blog, for anything that I write into inspiration, comes from within.  It's nurtured by a connection with Spirit, which points up the most important lesson of the past 15 months: I can make do with less materially but I cannot make do without creative purpose in my life. 

Midlife Midriff

"Oooh," my husband cooed, with eyes wide and an impish grin, his hands on my waist as he pulled me close, "I can pinch a bunch!" His playful exclamation had us both laughing, but I felt a twinge. It'd been quite a while since I'd been able to pinch that elusive inch.

The next day I was back at the gym. My husband's humorous advisory wasn't the real reason (he’s more accepting than I that a woman’s body at 46 isn’t the same as it was at 26), but his comment was a comical reminder of a truth I already knew: it was time to get back to booty boot camp.

Although I'd noticed a slight tip in the scales around 40, I wasn't concerned. I'd always been slim and easily able to drop unwanted pounds by simply cutting back on calories for a few days. However, when I married for the first time a few years later and my eating habits began to mirror those of my husband and step-kids (I inherited two live-in teens), that tip snowballed into a slide. I progressed quickly from a whole foods vegetarian to a pre-packaged foods-eating carnivore with a penchant for sweets.

These were the days of eating for pleasure and for comfort, for satisfaction and for solace. And, whatever it was, eating more of it. Naively unconcerned, I ate onward until one day I sat down and could feel my boobs resting on a fleshy little mantel between my bust line and my belly. I was horrified.

In response I joined a gym. I started with the treadmill, but soon realized I could burn more calories on the elliptical machine. I hired a personal trainer and began a cardio and resistance regimen in earnest, all the while nurturing fantasies of returning to my former figure: abdomen flat instead of protruding, butt cheeks taut instead of rippled, waist 26" instead of . . . (you get the picture). In short, I wanted back the body of my 25-year-old self (or even my 35-year-old self).

I've been in denial. I think that's why my workout routine stalled after about a year. I'd worked myself to muscle stiffness and fatigue, but couldn't break that extra 10 pound barrier no matter how hard I tried. Recently, I acknowledged for the first time the piercing truth that my former body is not coming back. And it's a crushing blow.

I'm not encouraged to discover that for the average woman of 50 to maintain the weight she was at 20, she has to eat between 1/4 to 1/3 fewer calories a day. And, she has to exercise regularly. Why isn't this common knowledge, I wonder? Passed down to us by our mothers or taught to us in school like reading, writing, and arithmetic? Or even advertised on T.V. between the bologna and beer commercials?

Let's face it. Women have more fat than men. It’s an evolutionary hiccup dating back to the prehistoric era when this higher fat ratio gave us the edge against starvation and the ability to continue the species. Men needed more muscle mass for hunting and with all that exercise chasing down dinner, they burned off their extra calories. Sitting around the cave, tending to hearth and home, we were not so fortunate. Although prehistoric starvation is no longer a concern for us women, excess fat still is.

Both men and women are subject to the midlife bulge and declining metabolisms, but aging women are at a disadvantage because we simply have more fat. The equation looks like this: more fat - less muscle = fewer calories burned. Fewer calories burned = more fat. It's a vicious cycle made more vicious by the fact that we have to burn an astonishing 3500 calories to lose one pound of fat, the equivalent of a 12-hour day on the elliptical machine. It makes me want to put my head under a pillow and eat a Twinkie.

Still, the news isn't all bad. The experts tell me that I can attain a reasonable (not ideal) weight and body with proper nutrition and exercise. If I eat a diet of complex carbohydrates (lucky for me I like brown rice), low saturated fat (grilled fish, it’s what’s for dinner!), adequate protein (please pass the beans) and high fiber (I think I bran, I think I bran), I’m on my way. But diet is only half the solution.

It turns out the 30 minutes I spent red-faced and exhausted on the elliptical machine, endurance draining from me like sweat from my pores, may have been better spent walking briskly or running. I was on the right track, however, with alternating days of weight resistance training to build my muscle, which in addition to increasing physical strength, comes with the added bonus of burning 50 extra calories a day for each pound of muscle. (For those counting, that's 50 down, 3450 to go).

Other helpful tips I gleaned for moving from youthful self-indulgence toward mindful mid-life eater: no more cooking our way through every kitchen gadget we received as a wedding gift (bye-bye bountiful bread maker), no after-dinner snack trips to the kitchen (farewell, beloved Honey Baked Backyard BBQ potato chips), no eating in front of the T.V. (arrivederci NCIS crew, we’ll be eating dinner without you), no high starch vegetables (au revoir potato, corn and peas), and no more cuddling in the recliner instead of going to the gym (sayonara to “Oh, sweeeetie, you’re heavvvvy.”).

It's tough to swallow the idea that no matter how much I exercise, it won't be enough to lose or maintain my weight without a more restrictive diet. I have to eat less. Period. Maybe the quantity issue will be helped by the final recommendation that instead of one or two big meals a day, fewer, smaller meals with some healthy snacks can make less seem like more.

Most of all, I get that redefining weight maintenance and success at this stage of life is imperative. Even if I were to get back to my pre-marriage, pre-midlife weight, the likelihood is slim that I'd be fully satisfied with my figure or the fit of my clothing. With age, even if weight doesn't change, apparently fat distribution does.

So, I end with this note to myself: you're in a new phase of your life now. Get over it, love the body you’re in, pick up your salad fork and your gym shoes and power-walk on.

for more information visit: http://partnership.hs.columbia.edu/klauer.html or www.newsweek.com/id/44119