Mid Life. Crisis?

Written originally a year ago, this post seemed worth revisiting after a weekend away with old friends……..

Lots of my peers are wrestling with relocating their lives. There is frequent talk of “making a change,” and often this manifests itself in a laundry list of other places they and their families could live.

Looking for better schools for children; more variety in dining; more diversity in neighborhood; a change in commute; a change in climate; a new house; a more challenging job. The list is familiar and endless.

Pawing the ground at middle age is hardly new territory. The stereotype of the midlife crisis is not positive to say the least; but there is a strange degree of beauty in the moment. I like to believe that change is always available, that what we lose little by little is the will to make it. Midlife wrestling with where we are and where we want to go has an air of Dylan Thomas, “Do not go gentle into that good night.”

Where it can go wrong is usually two-fold. One, we repress our real feelings and needs for so long that when our conscience can’t manage anymore the backlash is a destructive taking of all our unmet needs we’ve left untended for years. Two, there is a lack of clarity about what it is that is really unsatisfactory.

Is it REALLY that we don’t have enough of this, that, or the other thing in the place where we are, physically? Or is it that we don’t have enough in other places where we are, like our relationships or our careers?  Here’s wishing all of us a good place to be today.