MIDLIFE

  
There seems to be a juncture at around 40 or 50 in which everything comes up to be re-examined. Partly, I’m sure, it’s the confrontation with our own mortality. A real understanding in our bones -- not just an intellectual understanding -- that we’re not going to be around forever. In the light of our own disappearance and demise, some of the things we think are so important give way to much larger questions, much larger dynamics.

The image I use is that human beings are constantly making homes for themselves. And one of the great triumphs of being human is being able to make a good home for yourself at any particular place in the journey or epoch in your life. There may come a time when you’ve fully inhabited that house, and you have to leave it and move on -- either literally or metaphorically. And if you don’t leave the house when you’re supposed to, then you may still be in the house, but you’re not living in it -- you’re haunting it. It’s really an older incarnation of yourself that’s attempting to stay alive beyond its own dispensation.

That’s why keeping a physical connection with what’s real for you in your existence takes constant attention. One of the crises of midlife is that you know you have to change, but you don’t know if you have the energy or the wherewithal to even do it, because you seem to have to look elsewhere than all the places you’ve been looking so far.

Also, I do think that older people have more necessity for silence. That necessity becomes incredibly important after 50. Almost all of our great traditions and native cultures acknowledge this. Older people are actually encouraged to go off into the woods, into a kind of hermitage, and are allowed more time alone as their thoughts naturally turn toward a more silent understanding of what their life is now, and also toward what they’re facing in terms of their own mortality.

-- David Whyte