What Happens in Mid-Life

Some people treat mid-life as a final shot at being young and unburdened. Out go the sensible clothes, replaced by whatever the twenty-somethings are wearing. They buy the fast, flashy car. Occasionally the shift goes deeper than wardrobe and horsepower: a person walks away from family, job, and long-held obligations, leaving everyone around them puzzled. A new partner, often considerably younger, sometimes enters the picture. What looks like reckless behavior is really a sudden rearrangement of what a person says matters.

Life tends to move in stages. Childhood first, then the years of schooling. After that comes the search for a partner, and for many the building of a home and children. Somewhere in there a career or a business gets started too. These things eat up enormous amounts of time, and the hours left over rarely feel like enough for the bigger ambitions a person once carried around: climbing Everest, writing the novel that wins awards, becoming known for something.

Is this really it? That question has a way of surfacing around this age. For some it opens into a kind of spiritual stock-taking, where the daily grind begins to feel like time poorly spent. A person who never gave much thought to mortality may start to now. Women face menopause and the close of their fertile years. The house empties out as children leave. Chronic illness shows up for some, and with it the plain fact that the body no longer does everything it used to. The options narrow.

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