This past weekend I went to a school reunion. Most of us hadn’t seen each other since school. It’s an interesting time as we are all on the cusp of 40. I always thought midlife crises was made up of people getting depressed about getting old and trying to get into relationships with people much younger than them. As a young person I could never understand why older people would talk so much about their age. I know now that it’s because you simply can’t believe it! You have to talk about it in order to make it sink in; you don’t feel your age. You think that at some point you will hit an age and feel like a grown up. Feel confident, secure, sorted, a person who has all the answers. It never happens, then you realise that your parents can’t have had the answers ether! Life is simply about fumbling though in the best ways that you can.
I have decided not to have a mid-life crises and in fact not to try and convince myself that I am any age. I decide to be ageless, I am proud of my life experience, but I don’t think time is purely linear. Time is a construct of the mind. Tell a young woman she has cancer and watch the worry make her age before your eyes. Staying young is about thinking young. It’s about being curious about the world, looking at the tops of trees and not worrying about the cracks in the pavement.
Everyone wants to be surrounded by people who love them at a milestone age; you want to feel achieved in some aspect of your life. For me I would like to reflect not upon what I have, but on what I gave. If you can reach midlife having given more than you took, and having made the world a more loving place, then you have earned your entry into another 50 years of health and happiness.
