***Midlife is a Crossroads, Not a Crisis

Midlife is a very important stage of life. If you want to move through it well and wisely, you need a reliable map. Here's why.

Without a reliable map, midlife can leave us feeling anxious, depressed and lost. To move through midlife well, we have to know what it is, understand what it involves and learn how to meet the challenges and opportunities it drops in our lap. Because many of these challenges and opportunities come veiled in turmoil and confusion, we also need to learn how to "decode" them properly.

Midlife is poorly understood by educators and health professionals. And the superficial view of life portrayed today by the media today, leaves many of us unaware that the first and second half of life are very different.

When compared with people who move through midlife well and wisely, people who don’t live a less satisfying second half of life. And they have more stress and more health problems, and they’re less successful at work and in relationships, including family relationships. They also die younger and often with much regret.

Midlife is a crossroads, not a crisis. At midlife we arrive at a crossroads where we encounter a natural internal movement within ourselves to shift our identity and dive deeper into life. If we recognize this "natural movement", we can turn in its direction skillfully. Then we can begin to write a new screenplay for the second half of our life.

But if we don't recognize it, then we live the second half of our life with the wrong script, the script for the first half. This mistake breeds stress, heartache and lost opportunities. Perhaps if you look around you can see it in many people's faces.

Midlife passage often brings chaos, turmoil, anxiety and depression. Think of it this way: When a lobster's shell becomes too small for her, she sheds it to make room for a new and bigger shell. She's soft and vulnerable until her new shell grows firm and solid. The lobster knows what's happening and so although she is at risk, she doesn't get all anxious, worried and depressed over it.

We actually go through a similar experience at midlife, but it's psychological, not biological. This natural movement within us to dive deeper into life demands that we break out of an identity that's too small for who we truly are. But because, unlike our lobster friend, we don't realize what's going on and what's at stake, we feel that something is wrong with us and we get anxious, depressed and bummed out.

At midlife, who we truly are (we could say our "soul") grabs for the steering wheel because it wants to drive during the second half of our life, and not be a passenger. The dress rehearsal is over. But the turn toward our deeper, more essential identity often meets with strong resistance from forces within us, forces that would like to maintain the status quo. Because to them it feels like we're leaving known territory for some foreign and unsafe land.

This is one reason why our midlife passage can be filled with stress, doubt and fear. The emotional baggage from our past can also slam into us at midlife. This is actually a call to get our inner house in order so we can dive more deeply into our life. We discover that we cannot let go of our past because it's not behind us, it's in us. And we have to come to terms with it.

At midlife our identity loses its solid ground while we are in movement between different possibilities within ourselves. Psychologically we can feel like we're living on a suspension bridge. Any emotional upheaval is like a strong wind that can leave us feeling out of control as the familiar images that have defined us in the past no longer seem fixed, secure and reliable.

If we resist change and rigidly hold on to the old images of our first half of life identity, we run the risk of missing life's deeper opportunities. We then might develop a kind of chronic dread about having to face growing old and, inevitably, of having to die. Life, in such circumstances, can lose its bright colors and become something that we merely endure with fear and worry rather than living with any gusto and passion.

Don't believe the cultural biases against aging or the commercially driven propaganda about youth. Midlife is more of a psychological time than a biological one, it's not just tied to our chronological age. So don't just count your years, look at what's in your heart instead.

The ancient Romans called anyone under 50 "junior" for a reason. Midlife is a time of growth, not of decline. Don't miss it.