Midlife

Imagine discovering superhero powers in your midlife –

“Everywhere you look, your contemporaries are reading that James Hollis book, The Middle Passage: from misery to meaning in midlife. You really don’t want to join them – you don’t have time to look for meaning, you can’t even find your keys. It sounds arduous and inconvenient. Unarguably, though, mortality is interesting; time has more consequence when it’s running out. Conflict is dramatic to watch but boring to live; urgency is dramatic to live. You thought you were playing Scrabble, but actually you’re playing Boggle. Which, you have to admit, is the better game.”

I'm hopeful that the term "midlife crisis" will become a relic of a different era. A time when we were issued a success script in our teens, and we either embraced or rejected it, and the die was cast for our adulthood.

Our lives are filled with rituals in the first thirty or so years. Baptism. First Holy Communion. Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. Graduation. Marriage. Bridal shower. Baby shower. These beautiful rituals act as a rest stop for the soul—an opportunity for your community to hold a mirror to you and say, "Hey, you're going through a big transition, and we're here to support you."

Last year, I offered my top 5 films of 2022 (https://bit.ly/48BsBCD), but we hadn’t coined the term “Chippies” yet. This year’s Chippies crop is exclusively focused on films with themes that feel straight out of MEA. This doesn’t mean they’re my favorite films of 2023 as I loved “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “Oppenheimer,” but these are the top 5 with midlife themes. I’ve listed these in my order of preference.

I appreciated this recent Fast Company article (https://bit.ly/48q5Kd0) on the topic of the “midlife collision,” a time in which there is a significant increase in the proportion of stressors women face today. It’s also called “role overload,” as professional women cope with a complex collision of care (children, siblings, partners, and parents), together with financial, work, and health issues (menopause or otherwise)—all of which have physical, mental, and emotional manifestations. In the MEA world, we call this the “messy middle,” when we’re faced with multiple transitions at once while feeling overwhelmed by how much is expected of us.

In the 1955 classic film “Rebel Without a Cause,” Natalie Wood’s mother utters, “She’ll outgrow it, dear. It’s just the age. It’s the age when nothing fits.”

“What’s it like to give a TED Talk?”

What first pops into your mind when you hear the word “midlife?” Yep, CRISIS!

I love reading the New York Times in the bathtub on Sunday morning. Unfortunately, down here in Baja, I don’t get the paper version so I’m taking the risky bet of carrying my iPhone into the bath with me. Yikes!