By Daniel Lukasik, Esq.
New York lawyer Daniel Lukasik attended his 30th high school reunion this past summer. It was an occasion that produced this gentle reflection on life, law, and the sweet victory that comes from finally discovering one’s second act:
In a few weeks I’ll turn 48, and have been out of law school for 21 years.
As I entered the local watering hole where the reunion was underway, I could see the changes in our bodies and faces that bespoke the passage of time; each of us was entering the Fall of our lives.
Midlife, and all the challenges this stage of life brings, has been on my mind lately. But besides the reunion, something else has supplied the voltage for my middle age meditation: a book by psychologist Robert A. Johnson called, “Living Your Unlived Life: Coping with Unrealized Dreams and Fulfilling Your Purpose in the Second Half of Life.”
Johnson writes that the first half of our lives is spent addressing matters in the outside world – learning a trade, marrying and raising children, and finding our way in this difficult world. Then, “in the second half of life, the hunger of our missing pieces often becomes acute. It dawns on us that time is running out. So we often set about rearranging things on the outside. Such changes distract us for a time, but what is really called for is a change of consciousness.”
There is something inside of all of us which has been unlived. This is part of the maturation process and just plain growing up. We choose this; we don’t choose that. As we age, our lives take on certain defining features that we never could have foretold in young adulthood. And as I mingled at the reunion with people from so long ago, I imagined what unlived lives each of them had. We all smiled and made small talk as we swayed to the music. All the while, I imagined their hopes to live their unlived lives gently humming beneath the surface.
This is what Johnson has to say about unlived lives:
“… We all have both a ‘lived’ and an ‘unlived’ life,” he writes. “And in the process of becoming differentiated adults, we inevitably become split. Most psychotherapies are designed to patch up wounded people and then throw them back into the battle of oppositions. They guide people in how to become better adapted socially: more adept at making money, more highly disciplined, more dutiful, more economically productive. Even when such therapy is successful and gets an individual back out into the rat race again, you can watch them wither over time under the weight of it all. (But) in the second half of life, we are called to live everything that we truly are, to achieve greater wholeness.
“We initially respond to the call for change by rearranging outer circumstances, though our split is actually an inner problem. The transition from morning to afternoon that occurs at midlife calls for a revaluation of earlier values. During the first half of life we are so busy building up the structure of the personality that we forget that its footings are in shifting sands.”
Many, many lawyers are exhausted by the weight of our lives at the midpoint of the journey. It seems that our careers, and all the obligations that go along with it, have built a momentum that is seemingly unstoppable. So, we settle for distractions (entertainment, money, good food, etc.) along the road to retirement to blunt the pain. This pain is the pain of the unlived life; the part of their inner lives we didn’t get to live while committing large chunks of their time to building our careers.
I believe we must turn and face ourselves at midlife. We must stop running and finally listen (perhaps for the first time in a long time) to that inner voice that is trying, desperately, to get us to listen. Listening to that voice, it dawns on us that we are not the immortals we fancied ourselves in our youths to be. We recognize and sense our mortality and we have yearnings. We want to start living a life, instead of enduring one. Or, as Bruce Springsteen once said, “At some point, you have to stop thinking about the person you want to be and be that person.”
And maybe that’s what depression is about for some of us: painful symptoms that leak out because of un-reconciled parts of us demanding to be heard and lived.
If the central concern of the first half of our lives is building up our resumes of success, maybe the second half is a deeper search for meaning and purpose. For me, the unlived life has recently found expression as a writer. I feel meaning in writing about things flowing through the deeper currents of life; in sharing my insights, musings and struggles with you.
– Daniel Lukasik (University of Buffalo Law, 1988), is managing partner at Cantor Lukasik Dolce Panepinto in Buffalo NY, and represents plaintiffs in personal injury cases and civil rights matters in State and Federal Court. Two years ago he launched a now-nationally recognized website for lawyers suffering from depression (www.LawyersWithDepression.com), which provides information and resources for attorneys battling this disease. Reprinted with permission.
