Meditation 40: The View from Middle Age

It is common to think that there are stages on life's way.  Thinkers have different ideas about what and how many these stages are, but they all agree that there are stages and that, if we live long enough, we go through all of them. A life that is cut off in middle age is not completed by that death but simply terminated.  This is why we feel worse when the young die than when the old do. We expect people to start dying after 70, but before that we are likely to think that something has been wasted. Aristotle speaks of happiness as that which belongs to a long and fulfilled life.  We cannot speak of the young as happy in the full sense, for we do not know what misfortunes await them.

In youth there is a great abundance of vitality and sheer animal spirits.  Hormones are running strongly, and the world is an exciting and scary place to be. The future looks endless, though one is told that death awaits us all. Yet mortality is not very real to the young, even when they lose loved ones along the way.  There is much to do, plans to be made, an education to achieve, a living to earn, and preparing for retirement. Life that was so open begins to close with the choices and commitments we make. On top of this, life happens to us. We get hurt, injured, worn down by time and repetition. Slowly, ever so slowly it seems at first, our energy decreases, the blood does not run as hotly. We enter middle age.

This is not to say that we should all plan to die before we turn thirty.  With any luck, one does not plunge into decrepitude on becoming a certain age.  The vitality is still there, but now it is coupled with experience and a sense of the patterns of time and the world. One is no longer so naive, so trusting, so ignorant of cause and effect as one once was.  This is the trade off, what Plato calls "the turning of the soul," where instead of looking forward toward a limitless future, we point backward to a past that now has a meaning it could never have had at the time.  If one is ever to get one's life together with a clear eye and a sense of humor, it is now, in middle age, when the perspective from the middle puts the extremes of birth and death in old age together in a single view. 

By middle age, the seeds planted when young have come to fruition, for good or ill. We do come to a harvest in the normal course of events.  For the most part, once you get to 50 or so, what will be, will have been. Yes, there are still goals to achieve, perhaps, a future for which to prepare, a will to write, and so on, but the end is in sight now, and the time left within which to act effectively is strictly limited, despite not generally knowing the exact timing of our death, except in suicide or execution.  It is time, therefore, in middle age to make every day count.  Enjoy what you have accomplished if you can, and do not be too frustrated that not all you dreams and plans have come true, for that disappointment, like death itself, is common to us all.