“I desperately wanted to understand the beginning of my life, so I could make the second half different!”
I’ve been reading an interesting new book about midlife anxiety: The Hourglass Solution: A Boomer’s Guide to the Rest of Your Life. It includes some useful and thought-provoking solutions.
So far I agree with most of their assessment of the changes we all face as we age. They make a lot of good points! But I completely disagree with their definition of a “midlife crisis.” Here’s what they say:
“A midlife crisis…typically hits sometime between forty and forty-five. We remembered when that was going around–dramatic self-doubt and the ‘is that all there is?” blues. Halfway through your life, you wondered where it went. A midlife crisis was about the past, and the obvious answer was ‘get over it’ and move on. Most people did.”
The Hourglass Solution is not about that. It is about the years after your crisis which they define as best expressed as panic or some other unnameable anxiety. This book is not about past regrets, and more about fear of the future.
I don’t know about you, but I have a tough time separating my regrets about my past from my fears about my future! I saw my confusion about the choices I had made so far in my life, as important keys to how I wanted my life to begin to change.
I tire of those who minimize or marginalize the concept of midlife crisis…silly us! But we got over that! I think research on the boomer generation will show a reassessment of how essential a midlife crisis really is.
I see emotional turmoil at midlife as a major adult developmental stage which most experience, even if they themselves minimize its significance. It is a brief (or not so brief!) way station in our psychological development where we make the time to reassess what matters most, before we continue on with our lives. Contemplation and re-evaluation becomes supremely important as we begin to face our own death seriously, perhaps for the first time.
It helps if something dramatic happens in your life, unforeseen traumas like divorce, job loss, a death in the family, or serious illness. But most of us would benefit from a break sometime in our late 30s and 40s to seriously consider our options.
After the complete surprise and shock of losing my job, I eventually saw the gift I had been handed in 2004. With severance and unemployment checks, and an apparent inability to find more work in my field, I was given the freedom to simply sit quietly and consider it all.
If I had not lost my job then, or if I had quickly replaced that job with another I didn’t particularly enjoy, I might still be doing work I had long since lost interest in. I might still be living a life that was slowly killing me intellectually, emotionally and physically, a 9 to 5 way of dying.
A rebirth is what I sorely needed! I needed the encouragement to believe that I could be so much more than what I had become, and what everyone around me was telling me I was. I needed to re-frame my life and my choices in the context of 30 or 40 more years to live.
What did I value? What did I want more of in my life? What beliefs did I need to jettison immediately? How could I make my finally years the best that they could be?
The answer to a midlife crisis is not to simply “get over it.” The answer is to spend some quality time looking deep inside.
My greatest fear is that “when it comes time to die, [I will] discover that [I] have not lived.” –Thoreau
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My goal is not to screw up my current opportunity to reflect and make life changes for the stage.
At the age of 54 life seems easier in a sense. I’m single and the one thing that would make it a little easier would be if I didn’t have to work and could really enjoy my life. We look back and see things that we ignored and that could have made a difference. We are more compatible with our lives, and that’s a good thing.