Saturday, September 23, 2006

Writer explores features of male mid-life crises

For Best Life Magazine, while considering "How to Have a Mid-Life Crisis: Sometimes a man has to lose his bearings to find his way", Hugh O’Neill quotes Thomas Moore and other writers to help readers accept the aging process:
"Our wounds are our uniqueness. Remember Tolstoy's wisdom that "all happy families resemble one another, but each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." The psychotherapist Thomas Moore argues in his book Care of the Soul, "Soul power may emerge from failure, depression, and loss." To deny our dark feelings is to cut ourselves off from what he calls "the gifts of depression." He's not recommending the pall of diagnosable depression but simply saying that a Rotarian, sunny-side-up persona is false and traps us in a limiting innocence. "The sadness of growing old is part of becoming an individual," he writes. 'Melancholy thoughts carve out an interior space where wisdom can take up residence.'"