Mid-life is a time when things tend to increase...waistlines...wrinkles...gray hair...or, if you tend to focus on the positive, perhaps your 401k and your paycheck. But there is one other thing; one that we don't really like to talk or think about. It is usually somewhere around that midlife mark when death seems to begin hitting a little too close to home. Sadly, the number of those we know personally who have passed on to the great beyond also begins to increase. Parents begin to fail and die, serious illnesses crop up among friends and colleagues and the obituary page is more and more likely to contain the name of someone you know or, perhaps even worse, someone your age.
A study that I heard quoted recently suggests that the age of forty-four tends to mark the peak of unhappiness for most. Is it any wonder really? By mid-life, we are reminded of our own mortality daily. The reflection in the mirror, the increasing aches and pains, the growing death toll all serve notice that our time will come, perhaps sooner than we think. Faced with this realization, many of us desperately try to run and hide. We dye our hair, tan our hides and shop in the juniors department. Or, we buy a convertible, tape down the toupee and head for the open road. We know our attempts to escape reality are futile, but they do manage to keep us sane, if only for a while. At some point though, we finally have to admit to ourselves that we just can't pull off a crop top and low rise jeans the way we used to and the road trip has to come to an end. What do we do then? How do we deal with the angst of facing our own mortality? How do some of us manage to move through this time relatively unscathed while others crash and burn?
Mid-life is a time of great upheaval and, potentially, great insight and opportunity. It all depends on how we choose to perceive it. We can focus on what we are losing or we can focus on what we have left. That is, in fact, what we're worried about isn't it? What we have left. We can't believe that half, or more, of our lives may be over. We question where the time went, what we really accomplished, and how we're ever going to get through that long list of things that we want to do before we die.
Fear - which is what most of us are feeling when we hit mid-life - can paralyze us or it can motivate us. It's up to us as individuals to choose. We can use the wisdom that has come along with the gray hair to carefully plot out the remainder of our lives and live them to the fullest or we can cry in our beer as we look through our high school yearbooks wondering how we went from there...to here. Bertrand Russell once said that "To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom." I believe that, at mid-life, we can use our wisdom to conquer our fears. It is at mid-life that most of us finally feel that we truly know who we are. We are confident in what we believe, what we value and what we want - and don't want for that matter. The challenge of this stage of life is to make proper use of this knowledge. Mid-life presents us with the opportunity of charting a new course for our lives based on years of life experience and self-understanding. And the time pressure that we are feeling?...that sense that time may be running out?...the fear? That's the motivating force that gets us to stop thinking about it, to stop talking about it and to start doing it!
So what are you going to do? Are you going to give in to the fear? Or are you going to harness it and ride it like the wind? Remember, this is the second half of your life. Your won't get another chance to get it right!
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