Midlife Crisis...

We have heard about them for years.  YEARS.  And they are cliche’.  But they are also real.  People have lots of theories about them. Here is mine:  they are a wake up call.  Mid life is when you find yourself on the very top of life’s spike.  The apex of the hill.  It is a time when you have reached financial success, your children are launching into their own lives, your parents are aging but are still capable of living without a great deal of assistance.  You have done what you wanted in your career and now find yourself wanting something else altogether.  Thirty plus years of work, and now you are finding a lack of pleasure in what you used to love to do.   Your looks are changing.  Your body is changing.  And while you know this is normal, inevitable, there is still a part of you that delusionally believes that somehow you will someday return to a state of youth.

The ascent is over.  The hill conquered. The mountain summited.  You are there.  The place you have been climbing for all your life.  There you are, at the vertex.  And so for a moment, you take the opportunity to look around.  Some of us attempt to hide at the mountain top, anything to delay the inevitable descent.  Sometimes we are pretty successful.  Sometimes we appear to begin crawling down the side we just persevered.  Attempting to go back to a time that we somehow lived but failed to really enjoy or cherish or value.

This middle ground, with its height and vistas, looms large.  And we are granted views over our life, well lived or not.  And it engenders in us all a feeling of lack or a feeling of bounty. And it is this that drives us next...this feeling of lack or bounty.

If we are overwhelmed with this persistent lacking, we do all sorts of crazy shit:  the sports car, dating younger people, having affairs, leaving marriages, leaving jobs, going on trips, buying Sprinter Vans, staring new marriages, losing weight, working out, spending a small fortune on botox and filler and plastic surgery.  We attempt to distract ourselves from the inexorable descent...

If we are overwhelmed by this ever present feeling of bounty, then we tend to sit still, take in an appreciation of our lives and those about us, we make changes that support our wellbeing that are not frenzied or vanquished.  We love our kids, parents and spouses more.  We take trips of lifetimes and enjoy the fruits of our labor.  We spend idle time with friends and family.  We are at peace.  Neither seeking to exit the present moment or hurry the next one in.  We are content and feel the bounty all around us.

To be fair, I imagine there is quite a mix between the two extremes.  I know for myself, I vacillate between the two almost daily.  Overwhelmed with all I have accomplished and ascertained but always with this idea that I am running out of time.  I neither want to jump off into the void nor seek to rewind the past, I guess, for me, I want to remain at this life fastigium as long as I can. To take in the absolutely stunning views.  To have the benefit of reflective thought and delayed action.  I want to enjoy the delicate balance between fading youth and advancing old age.

Seems to me I can be in a place of quiet surrender or a desperate place of fear.  The choice is always mine.  I can see my mid life wake up call as a call to action.  And I can also see how very much I am in control of whether that action is intentional and reserved or frenetic and dumbly spent.  It is my choice.

I have a sports car.  I have dated younger men.  I have spent small fortunes on filler and botox and personal trainers and potions that promise to return the bounty of youth.  And I think I have reached the other side.  I did all of the above with a compulsion of someone trying to out run aging.  I did it with the delusion that somehow I could escape the warp of time.

But mid life always offers up the chance to review yourself. In fact, perhaps, this is the best thing about mid life.  Is that there is still that petulant child that resides within you. That causes the sudden and rapid departures from your norm.  But there is also this evolving wisdom that is able to place all that petulance into perspective and offer up some grace.

I love the sports car.  I am tired of young men.  In fact, I am tired of all men, save a couple.  I am tired of dating.  I am tired of thinking my life is not yet complete that I must find that ever elusive partner.  I am not spending the fortune on the lotions and potions to underscore my delusion that I can stop or delay the effects of time. Of course, I may change my mind about all of the above, but today, right here in this day, I am quite content in the life I have.  I long for nothing that I do not have in this moment and am enjoying the fuck out of the quiet tranquility of my life as it is, nothing added.

Some of us fly down life’s mountain.  Some of us dilly dally.  Some of us are thrown from the summit to our ultimate death. Some of us suffer greatly in a long, painful stumble, the bottom coming up to meet us long before we are ready. None of us get to decide.

I think the mid life crisis is a very logical result to the ever increasing knowledge that the agency and free will we have exercised with impunity for the whole of our lives is being curtailed, reeled in, and vanished.  We are not in charge, if we ever were.  But our inability to stave off old age, sickness and death has become more real, more concrete, more ever present than it has thus far in our living journey.

I have long maintained that heaven and hell are not a place, but a state of mind.  If you review your life and find it filled with loss and regret and pain unchanged, that is your hell.  And if you review your life and you are awestruck by the bounty and beauty and grace, that is your heaven.

And I kind of think this is what we are supposed to do with middle life.  We are supposed to review our lives and it is totally ok to come up short and make adjustments.  To not just step into old age and security and safety.  It is ok to take a last gasp.  To do all the things were too afraid to do before.  To take the chances on life, and loving and living that seemed out of reach to us in our prior existence as youthful acquistiioners.

Middle life is where we are able to sow those seeds unsown, or to decide we have sowed enough and now are able to sit back and just relax into whatever comes next. There is no wrong or right way to do this.  We each have our journey and reckoning and in our mid life analysis, we shall either fall short, exceed our own expectations or we shall founder.

Yes, middle life is an opportunity, a new chance at really living your life.  All the evaluation and perspective allows you to come more deeply into yourself, perhaps for the first time ever.  And, I am enjoying the fuck out of it all.  Perhaps middle life is where we finally have the courage to be who we really are, without adjustment or accommodation.  We get to stop being all the things we think we are supposed to be, and have the untethered courage to be who we really, truly are.  Finally.

And perhaps that is what life and living is all about, always.  Coming into your own, over and over again. Some might even say...Again, still.