Life Floats.....

A friend of mine was telling me the story of a friend of hers who has begun having some serious hormonal issues associated with menopause. That combined with some realizations that 50 is fast approaching and certain things in her life are not what she expected them to be have really got her down.

This isn't an uncommon occurrence based on what I've heard in my many conversations with women at this time of their life. Nor with me.

As I was listening to Pamela, I was musing on how you go through life, making choices and decisions....just living your life. You make some good decisions and some not so good ones. For many of them, you can see the immediate consequences of course. They work out or they don't.

You have kids or you don't. You get married or you don't. If you're single, you decide to stay in this or that relationship, or to leave it. You probably face that one more than once. Professionally, you accept additional responsibility or a proffered new position, or you don't. At the time, these decisions make sense. But it occurred to me that it's the larger implications of them that remain hidden to us.

Until mid-life that is.

I think mid life becomes such a big deal because we finally have enough 'data' to see the patterns formed by the accumulation of all those seemingly sensible choices. Unfortunately, the pattern of seemingly sensible decisions has landed us somewhere we did not expect to be. WAIT A MINUTE! HOW DID I GET HEEERREE??

From the vantage point of your late 40s, the past isn't exactly what you wanted, and the future doesn't stretch nearly as far as it used to.

Suddenly, you're 49 and unmarried. How did THAT happen?? Or, you're not at all in the professional space you wanted to be. The last kid is off to college, and you look at your husband of 23 years and realize you don't know each other. 'Yikes, wha' happened?', you ask yourself.

Voila! Mid-life crisis. Life sneaks up on you, it floats by before you realize how much scenery has slipped out of sight.

Mid-life is the time it seems to me, when we have to learn to let go. Letting go of kids, relationships through death, divorce or simply outgrowing, physical looks, dreams. Not that we don't have to let go all through life, but I think mid-life letting go, in general, goes much deeper, to things we hold deep in our hearts.

Letting go involves a grieving process. That's to be expected and it's healthy to accept and honor those feelings. And yet, mid-life doesn't represent the end of the line by any stretch.....

Being the eternal optimist, I've found that letting go of something means you've freed up space for something else. I prefer to think of a mid-life crisis as a mid-life recalibration. There is still plenty of time to dream new dreams. To reacquaint yourself with hubbie, to make new friends, do new things.....deciding what to do with that new space can be exhilarating. And scary. And overwhelming.

But before we get to that point, like Pamela's friend, we grieve.......