The main thing...

If there was something I wish that someone had warned me about my forties, it would be that I was going to have to watch a lot of my friends drive their lives over a cliff.

There are some decisions you can't come back from.

And I don't know where it all goes wrong...the point where you stop being who you want to be and become something else.  I do know this.  It requires a certain amount of self-deception. Whether it is the wife who maintains  the guy she is sharing intimately with is "just a friend" or a husband who thinks that pornography "isn't really hurting anyone" or the age-old indulgence of "I deserve this" (or conversely the punitive "they deserve this") there comes a point where we stop telling ourselves the truth.

What if we made it a spiritual discipline to be relentless with the truth about ourselves? 

What if we didn't let ourselves lie--even a little--to our friends or our families? Would it force us to look at things as they really are? Would we get help when there are empty aching chasms inside ourselves?

If we did that, maybe we would be able to address the real issues before our defense mechanisms took us to places we should never, ever have to travel.