Midlife

Today’s blog post title comes courtesy of this article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Here’s the Reader’s Digest version (and, if you don’t know what that means, you’re probably not over 50):

This question affects a growing number of mid-lifers who feel like a brown banana in the produce stand—well past its sell-by date. And, yet a publication in the New England Journal of Medicine (2018) found that the most productive age in a human’s life is not in our 20s or 30s, but between the ages of 60 and 70.

Earlier this month, 51-year-old Peter Mel put himself in a club with only one member: riding the “Biggest Barrel” and the “Biggest Wave” at Northern California’s Mavericks winter surf break captured in this article.

When something becomes “second nature,” it’s instinctive and natural. And, to “nurture” is the process of caring for and encouraging the growth or development of someone or something.

"The developmental demands of this newly awakening self are enormous, but they are mostly overlooked in our culture. While the awakening of early adulthood, which are mostly about identity, are culturally supported with rituals and celebrations - weddings, graduations, ordinations, baptisms - the more subtle spiritual awakenings of the middle years are culturally invisible." Stephen Cope

“Wholly unprepared, they embark upon the second half of life. Or are there perhaps colleges for forty-year-olds which prepare them for their coming life and its demands as the ordinary colleges introduce our young generations to a knowledge of a world and of life? No, there are none. [...] that is not quite true. Our religions were always such schools in the past, but how many people regard them as such today? How many of us older persons have really been brought up in such a school and prepared for the second half of life, for old age, death, and eternity?”

I was 18, a sophomore in college, attending an early autumn nationally televised football game. All I was wearing was a diaper. All I was carrying was a calf nursing bottle full of alcohol. And, all I was asking was, “Is it halftime, yet?”

Welcome to Act 2 of 2020 as we’re now one-third of the way through the year. Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey suggests that the process of transformation has three phases which mirror the rites of passage in indigenous societies: departure from the past, the dramatic initiation phase, and the return to society but in a new role.

It’s been said life is like a sandwich—the more you add to it, the better it becomes. But that was before the Sandwich Generation came along, a cohort of overextended midlifers who would prefer less, not more.

Have you lost anyone to suicide? During the Great Recession, I lost five friends - all men 42 to 52 - during a two and a half year period when I was feeling cursed myself.