The Gift of the Mid-Life Crisis

A year after my mother died, in the middle of a work day, I abandoned ship.

I had been sitting at my computer, doing the tasks of a normal day: scheduling meetings, developing documents and presentations, following up on some things and starting others.  But in a lull, an inexplicable wave of longing and ennui and bewilderment and sadness washed over me.  I abandoned my desk, walked to the car, drove to a nearby park, and sat in a car with two questions threading through my thoughts:

What am I doing with my life?  Why am I doing it?

I’m hardly alone in the asking.  I had asked those same questions to myself in quieter, smaller ways the year or two before my mother died, and it was in the loss of her that they sharpened into demands I could not ignore.  My husband encountered the phenomenon himself after the advent of inexplicable heart palpitations.

Sometimes there’s not an event that precedes the asking.  Yes, deep and existential self-interrogation can be prompted by grief and death, by sickness and facing the empty nest, by marital troubles or job loss.  But it also emerges as we age, the insistent demand that we examine how we are spending our time, and for whom, and on what, and if that aligns with what is fundamentally important or true about us.

Welcome to the mid-life crisis.

And I think we are deeply dismissive about it, if I’m honest.  We make jokes about men buying expensive cars and women starting businesses; we dismiss it as a cultural rite of passage like shaving or learning to drive.   Perhaps it is, in some ways.  But it is also maybe the last real opportunity people have or use to examine their lives deeply. To think about their souls.  To think intentionally through what they believe, or don’t.

So many of us spend our lives on autopilot.

No one does it on purpose, of course.  Life just sort of takes you.  You graduate from a school; you begin a job, or a family, or both; you look up and there are graduations and weddings and suddenly funerals, and you are miles from where you began without fully understanding how you got there.

This goes doubly in our technology-pocked culture, where burying our heads in sundry devices is yet another way to ensure that we don’t realize time is passing or how.  We dupe ourselves into thinking that we choose what we do—and then in our forties we glance up and start realizing how little choice we’ve exercised at all.

It’s a staggering, gasping realization.

One of my husband’s coworkers passed away suddenly.  He was in his early fifties, I think—astonishingly fit, a father and a husband.  He collapsed on his exercise bike.  Everyone was stunned.  And yet we all receive some version of this memento mori, a reminder that death is no longer an abstract concept but a stark reality.

And that’s what it’s about in the end: death.  Death, and how little time we have, and how we fritter it away.

This is a gift, if we allow it to be.  If we take it seriously.  That day in the car prompted a serious, months-long examination of my life.  I looked at habits I had fallen into, and asked myself whether I wanted to keep them.  I decided I was not taking God seriously enough and wanted to try.  I carved out more space for time with Him.

That wasn’t all.  I took a good long look at my job, and opted into a challenging work opportunity as a result of curiosity about what else I might be able to try or to do.  I decided to take my writing and creative work more seriously—to give it the time it deserved.  I became more intentional and present during chores, and when I was with my husband.

The joke about the mid-life crisis, of course, is that it results in wild and erratic decisions.  I understand how, because the intensity of the urge—the realization that time is short—can feel wild and erratic. In some cases, I think maybe it ought to be.  I don’t mean that we ought to all go blow our savings on a car, but rather that sometimes our choices do require radical realignment to live the way God wants us to live.

What are you doing with your life?  What should you be doing?  Closing the gap, sometimes, means a leap.

But other times, and for me, it meant gradual small changes. I made a ton: I stopped straightening my very long hair to please other people and let it relax into its long natural waves.  I wore makeup I liked and threw out the makeup I didn’t.  I picked clothes with colors that made me happy: all an effort to be more honest in how I presented myself to the world.   

I developed some good spiritual routines and places to slow down in my day.  I made time for God and wonder.  I put down my phone more and gave up all my doomscrolling news websites.  I put filters on my phone and boundaries on my time.  I stopped dreading laundry and turned it into a meditative time with God.  I found reasons to laugh and be grateful.

We will all, of course, fall short.  We will all stop in media res. There will never be enough time.

Blaine Eldridge writes about this, heartbreakingly, in The Paradise King (review forthcoming).  Writing about the death of Josiah in the Old Testament, Eldridge says:

“It is impossible to convey what a tragedy the Old Testament is, how disappointing its ending.  But of course, I don’t have to tell you.  You know it from your own life.  … Every culture I know has a related expression.  The Portuguese call it saudade.  The Romans, nostalgia.  The Celts, hiraeth.  In time, I’ve learned what it means.  It means Craig got cancer.  It means we left the old home.  … It means that Moses lay down. That David’s hand went limp.  That Elijah shot away.  It means that Aaron was buried and Abraham decayed and Jeremiah, borne away against his will, twisted in the saddle to catch one last glimpse of the temple, and then a hill blocked the view and he did not see it again.  It means that, apart from some intervention, the world is a ruined dream.

But.

But.

That is not the end of things.”

The midlife crisis a reminder of both of these haunting truths.  We do not dictate our final fate no matter how much we rail against it. We do not determine the day and the hour.  We can live fully and do our best and examine our lives and still fall short in the middle, never make it to what we meant to do. 

But that is not the of things.  And that revelation is what transforms crisis into opportunity.

What am I doing with my life? Why am I doing it? These questions have changed me.  I will not manage all my dreams.  I do not need to manage all my dreams.  I do not need to finish it all here.  But I can use the questions to spur me to use my time best, to be wise, to tend to what is urgent and will last.

God will take care of the rest.