It happened while we were talking to Julie and Mark Bennett of RV Love when I found myself telling them in an interview that we shared a common life event that I termed, "The Second Life". Julie agreed with me, saying she had never heard the term, but that it did apply to them as a couple whereas they left their jobs, their previous existences, fell in love and moved full time into an RV and have been living a "second life" ever since.
A couple weeks later, Jennifer and I were in the car discussing that conversation and debating whether it should be called a rebirth or a second life. That is the event that used to be called Mid Life Crisis I think for our parents generation but is now more of a second life I think for us Gen X-ers and in many ways it is a rebirth, but the truth is when you are reborn, you cast off all that was and begin anew without regard to who you were before.
Cut to a craggy cigarette stained alcoholic being lifted from a river all dressed in white as they find Jesus and you'll know what I am thinking when I use the term "rebirth". This is not that and never shall the two be confused, because there is much less pageantry to a second life and all to often the second life begins in the ashes of the first life. It is by the very virtue that your first life has fallen apart that you find the inspiration to begin a second life.
I have some experience with that both personally and professionally. In my previous life I ran a non profit where I taught people to sail called Connecticut Community Boating. Most times when people came to me, they had just endured a break down of some sort. They got clean of cancer, left a bad marriage, had a career meltdown or something else that made them come to me to volunteer to work with inner city youth and clean up trash off of beaches. There is something about volunteering that soothes the injured soul, but when they could do it while also playing with sailboats and crossing a bucket list item off, they dove in with abandon to get involved with CCB. And most times we got very little sailing done, and a whole bunch of therapy done instead.
And I loved that part of it. Helping a wounded soul was very satisfying work. But it had to end I suppose and end it did in a glorious blaze of alcoholism, mental illness and bargaining with God to either let me die or help me find happiness. Its seems the doctor became the patient and I awoke one Sunday morning and decided it was time to go to Church. That was my rebirth. I wasn't born again, just reborn in the hopes of casting off the pain and sorrow I carried with me into the wreckage that was my former life. I still had to do a bunch of cleanup and it is a process that I continue on until today through therapy, marriage and yes, The Charted Life.
I now have a new career, a new wife, a new life in a new state, with a new outlook. I didn't emerge from some chrysalis with brand new wings and a pretty song in my soul like a butterfly. Instead I slogged through death, pain, anger, molestation and a whole bunch of other glitches that had worked into my psyche since I was a kid and realized I wasn't functioning in a healthy fashion as an adult and I needed to start all over with a "second life". And so that's what happened, first I was reborn and then I started a second life. Because I couldn't just quit the first life and walk away as a baby takes his first steps into the world. Babies don't learn to walk dragging the couch and neither could I start anew by dragging the baggage of a house foreclosure, parental abuse and business failure.
A rebirth is to begin anew without regard to the baggage of the past life, a second life uses the remnants of your previous life to build a new life in a fashion that is not determined by anyone else. Your parents designed your first life, your circumstances and your decisions that were made in your childhood determined your first life. Now that that is over, use it and design a second life for yourself.
There are literally millions of us Second Lifers living and working among you. If you launched out of your play pen into a perfect career, a perfect marriage and perfect life that you are still riding high on, then good for you. But if you are one of us and you are struggling to reinvent yourself in the wake of what ever happened in your 20's, then you my friend are a second lifer just like me and I welcome you to the fold.
This Second Life can be whatever you want to make it. Whether it is crossing off bucket lists by using your savings to buy that boat and sail to St Somewhere or driving halfway across the nation to buy a burned out Airstream that you are going to restore and see the Grand Canyon with, it's up to you. Now is the time when you make the deliberate choice to use the lessons you learned as a younger you and build a new life that is what you want it to be.
But here's to hope. Between the great recession, the rash of natural disasters that have reshaped our country with names like Sandy and Florence and Katrina, the end of your marriage or the fight that you just cant finish with your kids. All of these things are firestorms that will and have brought us to our knees. And it is the Second life that is derived from those ashes that we are given once the smoke clears and it is your second life to do with as you please. So go do it.
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