We sense it’s now or never, and this can manifest as a mid-life/mid-career crisis.
At a reader’s request, I’m excerpting an essay from last week’s Musings Report:
My friend GFB recently sent me a quote from Paul Bowles novel “The Sheltering Sky” (1949). If you are under the age of 30, it may not have the same impact that it has on those of us on the downhill slope of life.
“Because we don’t know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. Yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more, perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”
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The Bowles quote made me ponder the process of changing our lives, a process that requires greater sacrifices and effort as the inertia of our default settings grows ever heavier with age.
Everything requires effort and sacrifice to maintain: houses, yards, relationships, friendships, organizations, enterprises, roadways, social contracts–everything. If effort flags, things fall apart.
This is what sobers me about aging: the weight of our default settings rises while our ability to generate the willpower, effort and sacrifice needed to change our life declines.
When we think about the stages of life, the trajectories of our default settings and our ability to make sacrifices and exert effort define each stage.
When…