The Best Kept Secret Blog - The Two Sides of Midlife
This stage reminds me of an old Saturday Night Live sketch I once saw with Dan Akroyd and Gilda Radner as a husband and wife in heated debate. “New Shimmer is a floor wax!” she cries. “It’s a dessert topping” he argues.
Just when it looks like things might come to blows, in walks “announcer”, Chevy Chase. “Hey, hey, calm down you two. New Shimmer is both.”
Midlife is a lot like New Shimmer.
On one hand, we're exhorted to celebrate this stage - we're fit, fantastic and forty!
On the other hand, we start to realize that we're not in Kansas anymore Toto.
This Christmas, I felt like coming up with my own rendition of The 12 Days of Christmas. One friend who's dying. Four who are divorced and trying. Three with husbands out of work. And a partridge in a pear tree.
Dang, things get nasty at this stage.
Marketers either gloss over or offer us solutions to the angst us midlifers experience. 50 is the new 40. Not looking as young as you once did? No problem - have we got the product for you! And there's even the lingo to make us feel good about getting old. No one wears bi-focals anymore - we wear progressives. It sounds so good - who doesn't want to be progressive?
Now, personally, I have no problem with people tweaking and trying in order to feel good about themselves. It's not for me to judge what someone needs to do in order to get through the day.
But, at the end of that day, we'll still have wrinkles somewhere on our bodies, we'll still have parents who will soon see the end of their days and we'll still know loved ones with sad, sad stories. Perhaps those stories will be our own.
Just as the work of our 20s and 30s was about accomplishments with career and family, we need to understand the work of our 40s and 50s.
Maybe I''m still in Kansas but I like to believe that the insight and compassion we'll need to care for a dying loved one, the humility and empathy we'll gain when we lose a job, or the confidence and devil-may-care attitude we'll need to cultivate to hold our grey and wrinkled heads high when we walk into a room will be the reward for our work.
