Retraining

The heat climbed back up today. I guess I should thank my lucky stars for getting a few nights of decent sleep. I am not sure that will happen tonight. Oh well. Ever since cancer, I've learned that you can't get too emotional about not sleeping. That just leads to less sleeping.

I have this theory that at various points in life, we should have to report back to school for further retraining. Each session of retraining would focus on the skills you need for the phase you're about to enter. If you get married, you take some classes on how to be married. If you have kids, you take classes on parenting. Sure, you might have gotten a smidgen of this in high school (though most people don't these days), but that could have been decades ago. We forget things.

For middle age, I think we should learn lessons in how to manage our energy. We have to learn to prioritize things in order to have the ability to accomplish as much as possible without collapsing. For instance, if there is a crisis, it's important to stay calm. Being emotional will only drain your energy and you can't think of ways to handle it.

This would also be a good time to examine our habitual failings. Understand, I don't believe that failing at something makes YOU a failure. It just means you haven't found the right way to succeed at this goal. The problem is, many of us just keep trying the same thing over and over again. My mom married horrible people and never understood why her marriages kept failing. Instead of examining what lead her to jerks or why she felt she needed to be in relationships in  the first place, she just kept doing the same thing and expecting different results. That isn't how it works.

Of course, we don't have retraining programs. We're stuck just muddling through this on our own. To that end, I've started my own Midlife Failure Worksheet.

Midlife Failure Worksheet

1. What is your goal?
2. How long have you tried to reach this goal?
3. What actions have you taken to reach your goal?
4. For each action, spend a week seriously thinking about what you did and why it didn't work.
5. Research alternative methods of goal achievement.
6. Try one.
7. If this fails, go back to step 4 and repeat.

Who knows? Eventually, it may work.