The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife Author: | Language: English | ISBN:
B000QCS24S | Format: PDF
The Middle Passage: From Misery to Meaning in Midlife Description
Author James Hollis' eloquent reading provides the listener with an accessible and yet profound understanding of a universal condition - or what is commonly referred to as the mid-life crisis. The book shows how we may travel this Middle Passage consciously, thereby rendering our lives more meaningful and the second half of life immeasurably richer.
- Audible Audio Edition
- Listening Length: 4 hours and 34 minutes
- Program Type: Audiobook
- Version: Unabridged
- Publisher: BMA Audio
- Audible.com Release Date: May 8, 2007
- Language: English
- ASIN: B000QCS24S
James Hollis had written a short but well thought out book on the midlife crisis. The term "mid-life crisis" would not be a term Hollis would use, because he sees the conflicts and disturbances that happen at mid-life as wonderful warnings that new directions are needed to achieve a meaningful life. He compares the depression, the loss of energy, the unexplained anger, the flare up of passion, as earthquake type pressures that give evidence of the rumblings below.
He compares the magic thinking of children, to the heroic thinking of young adulthood, to the more realistic thinking of the second adulthood. It is during this second adulthood that we must recognize what behavior patterns we bring from our early family of origin and whether those patterns have become maladaptive rather than adapative. He asks us to be aware of emotional outbursts or unrealistic passions of any type that signal that an unresoved complex still directs us emotionally and may be blocking our growth. He asks us to be willing to go into the luminous darkness within to seek answers, after all, by midlife you should have seen enough of the world to know that answers rarely lie outside of ourselves.
I enjoyed the poetry of Tennyson, Rilke, and Kazantzakis that he uses throughout the book. I especially liked the linkage to Tennyson's Ulysses, a poem that honors the fact that Ulysses' greatest adventures happen after mid-life.
Hollis believes the greatest tragedy during the midlife crisis is to remain unconscious and never examine the illusions, concepts, complexes, and dark shadows within us. After all, as we reach mid-life, this is the last chance for a meaningful life. The meaningful life is a higher goal that the happy life for both Jung and Hollis.
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