Every now and again, my wife likes to remind me about how she is so much younger than me — two weeks younger in fact. It started when I hit 30 and she was still 29. She would have a little boast about how she was still in her twenties but I was seemingly over the hill in my thirties.
So you can imagine her delight when I turned 37 years old. What is the significance of turning 37? Well, in my country, Australia, 37 is the median age of the population. All of a sudden, I found myself in the old half, while my wife was still in the young half — for two more weeks anyway. I am now older than 50% of of the people in my country. Or, to look at it another way, more than half of the people in my country have been born while I have been alive. How did this happen?
To make matters worse, the mathematicians among us would have calculated by now that being 37 means that I finished school around 20 years ago — almost to the day, actually. A few months back, I had the pleasure of attending my 20 year school reunion. Now, I can assure you when you arrive at this moment — and you will much more quickly than you think — it is a strange and surreal experience.
Imagine closing your eyes and being aware that your best friend from school is standing in front of you. They are talking to you and their voice sounds the same, they have the same personality, the same sense of humor, the same mannerisms and idiosyncrasies. But then when you open your eyes, a fat, balding, middle-aged person is standing in front of you — aside from the one that you see in the mirror every morning. That is what your 20 year high school reunion is like.
Crossing over to the “old side” got me reflecting on my life. The conclusions that I arrived at were both frightening and liberating. Life, it seems, happens in two halves.
The first half of life is about construction
The first half of life is all about building. We spend the first half of our lives building for ourselves an identity that we believe will be palatable to the world and personally satisfying. We construct our sense of self. We build our families, we build our fortune, we build our careers. We attempt to do all the things that we believe will make us fulfilled and happy, following the well-worn path of western individualism and the ‘self-made-man.’
Set before as are the milestones that are supposed to mark increasing degrees of satisfaction. When I was young, it was getting a license and car, getting good grades and having academic success. As I got older, it was about finding a good partner, settling down, having a family, buying a house. Then the focus shifted to career and climbing the ladder. Each milestone promised so much and as I ticked them off on the list in my mind, they did indeed bring me satisfaction — but only for a while. Then, I needed to move on to the “next thing” to keep from getting bored.
Building. Climbing. Striving. Achieving. Doing.
These are the things that characterize the first half of life. And, they’re not all bad things, but they do make a person exhausted in the end.
The second half of life is about deconstruction
If the first half of life is about building, the second half of life is all about tearing down everything you built, breaking it into tiny pieces and carefully examining each to determine what is actually important. It is the journey of deconstruction.
Here I am in the second half of my life, having achieved all the things that the world promised would make me fulfilled and happy — financially secure, with beautiful family in a beautiful home, living the middle-class dream. I’ve had success. I have arrived. But I still have another half of my life left to live. So, what now? What’s next? I can’t shake the thought that there must be more than this, but what? Have I spent my life climbing the ladder only to reach the top and realize that it’s resting against the wrong wall?
It is a scary thought, but these are the questions that everyone is ultimately confronted with. We reach a crisis of limitation, at which point we have a choice.
I could keep on trying to climb the ladder — dye my graying hair, buy a sports car, find a mistress and cruise around like I am some kind of king. But if I do, I’ll end up looking like an old fool. Alternatively, I could throw my hands up in despair, give up the climb and just accept where I am, slipping into mediocrity and maintenance — simply going through the motions, deadening and medicating the feeling I have, that this can’t be all there is. Eventually though, I would become a bitter and angry old man (and we all know them).
There is a third option. I could come down off the ladder that I spent the past few decades climbing. I have this nagging feeling that there is nothing meaningful at the top of the ladder that I can’t have at the bottom — down on the floor, playing with blocks with my children.
Letting go. Surrendering. Contentedness. Peace. Being — rather than doing.
That’s the second half of life — at least for those who will accept it.
The art of letting go
It all sounds very nice, but ‘letting go’ is not something that comes naturally to most people — me included. When you run a Google search on “growing old,” much of the advice is about how to care for your aging body: Get a regular health check; stay active; make healthy food choices. While this advice is good, it neglects the fact that a human being is more than just a body to be cared for. We are emotional and spiritual beings too, and need tend to those aspects of our lives as well.
As I reflected on what it means to grow old with dignity, in an emotional and spiritual sense, I arrived at a few conclusions. I decided that there are certain things that I must let go of if I ever hope to become that sage-like elder who provides generative wisdom to my family, society and the next generation, rather than an embittered and cynical old person. For starters, growing old with dignity means letting go of:
What other people think of us
When we are young, we spend so much of our time, energy and money on things that we believe will make other people like us. As I look at my own children now, I realize that ‘being cool,’ is such a high priority for younger people. But, could it be that this is just a symptom of an insatiable desire to be feel okay about who we are — to feel like we belong?
While it is important that we regard the opinions of those closest to us — such as our families and closest friends — too often we place too much weight on the opinions of people we don’t actually care all that much about, and even on unwritten (sometimes imagined) societal norms or cultural expectations.
Much of our concern for what other people think is actually misplaced. Studies show that people tend to overestimate how much, and how badly, others think about them anyway. As Eleanor Roosevelt once said, “You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.” What a profound thought. What if everyone else was so busy worrying about what people think of them, that they aren’t actually thinking about you at all?
Only when we free ourselves from being a slave to what other people think, can we truly embrace our own life’s journey. What a shame we don’t realize that until our life’s journey is half-over already!
The need for certainty
If 2020 has proven anything, surely it is the fact that we are not in control. Many of us had grand plans this year, only to have them completely disrupted by COVID-19. I don’t know about you, but my ‘five-year-goals’ are completely out the window and my overseas dream holiday was canceled.
While it’s fine to think about the future, plan ahead and take steps to mitigate risk, at the end of the day, we are not really in control of what happens. Control is just an illusion that makes us feel a bit better about our lives. The reality is we cannot control others. We cannot control the environment. Often, we cannot even control ourselves. We do not know what is around the corner. Cancer? Retrenchment? Disaster? Another pandemic? Who knows?
This reality is a difficult pill to swallow. According to neuroscientist, Dr Bruce Lipton, your brain doesn’t like uncertainty — it’s like a type of pain, something to be avoided. Certainty on the other hand feels rewarding, and we tend to steer toward it.
So, what’s the problem with that? As we get older, we become addicted to certainty. We prefer the certainty of finding answers in data from the past, rather than risking the uncertainty of new, creative solutions. This explains why we like routines, structure and order — which are not bad things. It explains why children learn so much faster and better than adults. And, it also explains the phenomenon of being ‘stuck in a rut,’ that many older people experience. We end up choosing things we know over things that might actually be better for us.
‘Being busy’ as a status symbol
Many people wear their work ethic as if it were a badge of honor. After all, if you’re waking up earlier than your peers, working longer hours and taking on more work, then you’re getting ahead, right? But at what cost?
What are we missing out on in our frenetic desire to be productive all the time? Do we have time to stop and smell the flowers? To savor a delicious meal? To linger a bit longer in the company of good friends?
I once had a friend who used to say, “A busy person is actually a lazy person.” What she meant was that someone who is always on the go has never taken the time to set appropriate margins and boundaries in their lives that give them time for rest and play. Life is not supposed to be lived at a hundred miles an hour all the time. What is more, with the passing of time, life will cause us to slow down — one way or another. We might as well get used to the idea!
Finding your identity in what you do
You are not your job. Yet, if asked who you are, what would you say? Teacher? Writer? Entrepreneur? Artist? Engineer? The fact that we tend to identify ourselves based on our work betrays a common misconception that many of us carry: We believe that our work title is our identity. The problem with making our work the centerpiece of our identity and life’s purpose is that we must always continue to work, or else we risk losing ourselves.
Instead, we must ask ourselves who we really are when everything else is stripped away — all the titles, and plaudits and achievements. Our self-worth must consist in who we are, not what we do, because the time will come when you and I no longer have a job. What then?
Everything that was ‘supposed to be’
“I’m nearly forty years old! By now I’m supposed to…”
- Have paid of my mortgage
- Landed my dream career
- Found my dream partner
Insert your own answer here. The crisis that we often experience as we get older is crisis is really a crisis of limitation. We arrive at a point and realize that life — at least to some degree — has not turned out how we dreamed it would be. Things were supposed to be different. I was supposed to do this or that. Things were not supposed to be this hard.
Part of growing old is grieving everything that was ‘supposed to be,’ that wasn’t, and a full acceptance of what is, instead. Regrets prevent us from living in the ‘now’ and enjoying the moments that are right in front of us.
So What Now?
We live in a world that glorifies youth, but there is nothing more beautiful than a person who ages with dignity and grace, becoming a sage to the generations that come after.
That is what I want to be.
Since I spent the first half of my life constructing my self, my meaning, my purpose perhaps I should spend the second half deconstructing the very thing I dedicated 37 years of my life building. I think I need to pull it all apart and break it all down. What is real? What is true? What is it that really matters here?
I need to let go.
I don’t know that answer yet, but hopefully, I have at least another 37 years to work it out. Yes! Growing old is really an invitation to discover what is truly important in life. I don’t know about you, but I’m grabbing that opportunity with both wrinkled hands!
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This post was previously published on Medium.com.
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