Our life experiences can be grouped into periods. When we’re younger, we see the future as a large roadway with infinite side pathways, any of which we can take. A nearly infinite journey; mortality is only a rumor. A journey that allows for development, failure, the elation of success while not realizing the momentary nature of it. We see life as a continuum.
But it’s not like that. There are periods, years, decades with characteristics. These do not simply fold into the next. They are finite, though differing immensely from person to person. Accomplishments and viewpoints develop during each with its own limitations. Moving on, attitudes change, abilities expand or diminish. What is the career span of a pro football player? From, say, a man’s early twenties till the mid thirties with luck. Creatively, the stamina and originality, and that blast of youthful thought that results in one’s greatest works usually occurs in the early days, the twenties through the next twenty years, Hemingway’s output, for example.
Then what of the middle life, the settling in of two decades of living? Youth with its outrageous and productive energy is gone. We sail ahead, moving along on the impetus of whatever we’ve accomplished. And we wonder, what now? Consolation comes from the the notion that we’re on our way, but’s this is the time of being lost, a time of absolute delusion. We hear, “If you haven’t made it by forty, it’s too late. What do we tell ourselves? “I’m on track,” or more delusively, “I have made it.”
The usual description of the next age period is described by the common statement of disillusion as a “mid-life crisis.” This is another way of saying we don’t know how to evaluate the previous five decades of our complete social or career acceptance, if reached that stage. Career conquests, sexual conquests, social standing? So what? Can we dribble on, presenting these placards of power to the new generation or the new bosses or or use our prowess with women for new conquests? The “now what?” nags like a bill that hasn’t been paid, some nebulous obligation that hasn’t been met.
Where is the seventy-eight-year-old me in this? Me, in particular? In a Zen-mind examination. Immersed in the cloud that hovers over a lifetime of triumph, ecstasy, morbid failure, and drift, wondering “what is it all about?” in sunken moments falling back on evening, Zen staring at Spanish moss in the last moments of twilight. This is mixed with vibrating threads that began to form exotic, soul-satisfying, tapestries when I was too young to grasp their significance, a vision of what I saw clearly before experience replaced the joy and possibilities of imagination.
