Your Crisis or Mine?

We are careless about the words we use and the way we use them. I don’t mean the evolution of language over time, the entrance of slang into our lexicon, or even the rampant misuse of there, their, and they’re, even though that last one drives me mad…but not angry.

Instead, I’m referring to the misuse of language so pervasive as to escape notice, becoming an abandoned ghost trap floating through the sea of words, leaving a path of thoughtless destruction in their wake.

I’ve been thinking lately about the phrase “mid-life crisis.” For many this conjures images of a balding man in a bright red Corvette, leaving his wife for his secretary. For others the image is of a graying woman quitting her corporate gig to raise bees and sell honey at the farmer’s market, smelling faintly of patchouli oil.

In either case the use of the word “crisis” suggests a serious problem afoot that may require intervention of some form. We have a global environmental crisis. In the US we have a leadership crisis. The coronavirus pandemic is a world health crisis that kicked off an economic crisis. But a mid-life crisis? The word feels wrong to point of absurdity.

At 45 years old it would be difficult to argue I am not in mid-life. I’m happily married with no interest in a Corvette, but the idea of abandoning corporate life to become an apiarist sounds damn good. These days it feels I am going through less a crisis than the larval stage of an insect; the stage where a creature emerges from its cocoon, naturally and completely unrecognizable from when it entered.

Like many, the pandemic has driven me to work from home since early March and my entire routine has changed. For the first time in years I sleep 8 to 9 hours a night. I no longer spend an hour and a half a day commuting. I see more of my family. I breathe more fresh air. It has become clear the corporate life has been killing me slowly, eroding my health and my joy. Working from home has disrupted the prior norms and I’m finding a new, more natural rhythm.

 I also have more time to think.

Often, I think about the time I might have left in this world and how it should be spent. I have spent 45 years learning, growing, and working, often to satisfy the expectations and needs of others. This is especially true over the most recent twenty years, which I’ve spent working in finance, trying to push my career forward, to accumulate wealth for myself and others, to provide for my family, but also as a form of validation…as a way to keep score against people I often don’t even like.

The trouble is, if I’m halfway and only have 45 or fewer years of this life left, that isn’t how I want to spend it, at least not completely.

In these next years I want to walk in the woods more, to write more and better, to kiss my wife good morning and good night. I want to help more people in need, to cook and break bread more often with friends. I want to pray more. I want to read slower and more broadly, to think more deeply, to be more gentle, more forgiving. I want to stand in cold, clear flowing streams high in the mountains in my bare feet, to spend quiet moments with my kids, and one day to hold my grandchildren.

I want to argue and fight less. I want to hurry less. I want to pursue fewer frivolous goals. I want to squander time less.

In short, I want to savor each day and end them thinking that if that day is my last day, it was enough.

One of my favorite Henry David Thoreau quotes says, “a man is rich in proportion to the things he can afford to let alone.” This is the condition for which my soul longs.

Which brings us back to the phrase “mid-life crisis.” Isn’t it funny how the person having the supposed crisis never uses that phrase? Instead, its uttered by those with an interest in maintaining the status quo, even if that interest is in not confronting their own growing doubts and fears. We often strive to keep things as they are, ever unchanged as if suspended in amber, because it provides a false sense of comfort. We numb our minds and our souls to avoid the possibility that we were made for more because that possibility is too frightening to contemplate.

And yet, I suspect something innate in each of us, instinctually driving us through massive phase shifts throughout our lives. Infant to toddler, toddler to adolescent, adolescent to teen, teen to adult…but is it reasonable to assume our adult phase is static? Does is stand up to scrutiny that we would go through massive physical, emotional, and psychological development for 25 years and then stay stagnant for the next 75? Could it instead be possible that many, if not most, of us reach a point in our adult lives where we feel an almost primal urge to shift, to change, to grow, but the use of the phrase “mid-life crisis” and the associated social (not to mention familial) stigma drive most of us to stomp that urge into the mud, to toe the line, and march obediently forward, eagerly anticipating the day of retirement when our real lives can begin?

My grandfather took early retirement from Amoco Production company at the age of 55. His peers and co-workers thought he was a fool. Afterall, this was in the early 80s, the company and the oil industry were going strong, and everyone was making money. “Why would you stop now?” they wondered. He always said, “so I can work more.” From that point on he spent his days on the farm, tinkering in the barn. There were a few small wells on family land in the Louisiana swamp, producing maybe 10 or 15 barrels of oil a day, he looked after. Now and then he played golf. He fished with his brother and visited with his father. His father, my great grandfather, was a lumberman, a farmer, a grocer, in and around the Bayou Teche and the Atchafalaya Basin. He never retired because that word didn’t exist for him. It was meaningless. His days were full of work, play, and family. Neither of them ever made the money I have or probably will make. But they were free and happy, without the sense of being trapped within their circumstances. Every generation seems to have more wealth and less freedom than the one before. More stuff and less of themselves.

If I am having a mid-life crisis, it is a crisis of confidence in the story-line we’ve been sold by the American propaganda machine. My hunger for shiny things and the adoration of my peers is being replaced by a desire for sky over my head and sweat on my brow created by work I chose. Maybe I’m alone in this and really am going off the deep end, but I think I’m in good company and I look forward to all those of us in the middle part of our time on earth finally doing what we want to do with our lives. I’ll be the one at the farmer’s market with the ear-to-ear grin. If you see me and recognize a kindred spirit, stop and say hello.