If you enjoy this, please take two seconds to click the Heart to Like it at the bottom, and ReStack it or Share it. This really helps my work get seen by more people and helps this place grow.
I remember the SexEd video from 5th grade. Still. I remember them talking about what it is to age, to grow older, to graduate into this next phase of our lives as adults. I remember the hilarious cartoon with the boy on a diving board getting a boner in front of the entire public pool. I remember a girl in my class calling gonads “gondolas” and getting sent to the principal’s office for my inability to stop laughing at it. I remember all that, I even remember the A² + B² = C² nonsense, but what I don’t remember about all those vital life lessons was ever being taught the truth I’m learning right now. It is this:
The middle of life is HARD.
At 43-years-old, I can now say that statistically speaking, I’ve got less life left than I have lived so far. I’m in the center of my timeline, taking in all the averages, and I never would have seen coming that now, right now, is the most challenging era.
Perhaps, I imagine, if I’d have had biological children of my own, if I would have started at the point of changing diapers and middle-of-the-night-feedings, the terror as to whether or not the baby is still breathing, I would have called that period the most difficult. Perhaps I thought it’d be that strange time right after college, when everything seems possible so nothing seems probable, maybe then?
I don’t know what I expected of this time, don’t know what I imagined 40s would look like, the shape they’d take, the colors they’d wear. I think that years of transition will always be the hardest, but again, I just didn’t expect it to push the limits of endurance, of patience, of compassion, quite like this.
Why, I guess I should ask myself, why is this time, this middle of life, such a formidable mentor in what it is to put your money where your mouth is when it comes to your spirituality, your kindness, your ability to navigate the random trials and tribulations without panicking?
I think it’s in the transition, really, it’s in the fact that we are in the middle of something, and as a middle child I can say with certainty: Being caught in the middle is hard. It always is.
Middle of what, Tyler Knott, you might be asking, what are you in the middle of? I’ll do my best to explain, to share what I am experiencing in the chance that perhaps some of you are too, and in the belief that sharing our aching can help to soothe it. Misery doesn’t love company, it just loves understanding that it’s not alone.
The middle, at least for my wife and I, has felt like a place where we’re preparing more and more to be alone (yes together, but alone) more and more. In a way that has never felt morbid, but natural, we are in a period where it feels like a goodbye is right around the corner in so many different ways. I spoke of this last month, the loss of constancy that makes life so hard as we grow older, and this is me, expounding upon that.
As those around us start to go, whether to begin their own lives anew, or to the next great beyond and starting again in new flesh or fur, we’re left with eyes that stare out in a neck that swivels, owl-like but sore. We turn our heads to both generations and we feel the strings that tie us together pulled taut, we feel the gravity as it lightens and spreads thin.
Still though, there is such care we must give, new worries for those we never needed to worry for before. If we’re lucky enough to still have our parents with us at this point, as so many are not, we feel the weight of their aging, too. We worry about their health, about them driving on roads with inclement weather, about scammers trying to trick them into giving away their money, about their doctors appointments or their diets or their nagging injuries or their decisions when they do things we wish they wouldn’t, in places they probably shouldn’t. We worry, because we’re old enough to see beyond the veil they carefully constructed as we grew up, the gossamer curtain that they sought to protect us with.
Still too, we worry for those we’re about to usher off into the big wide world. We count down the months until we’re packing up a Subaru to drive them to a dorm room and wish them well. We’re calling things “lasts,” though we know they really aren’t—last Christmases before college, last season of sports—a million lasts that we’ll discover later never were but still FEEL big. We worry if we’ve helped them be ready enough, if we’ve prepared them for the world that awaits.
We worry, and we worry, and we worry, though we try so hard to not.
This is the middle place, I think, the hidden struggle of midlife that I am sure is spoken about at great length, I’ve just never heard it. I’ve seen six dozen examples of midlife crises on movies and television shows before, I’ve seen the men buying the sports cars, the women cutting bangs, I’ve seen the books written about the sordid affairs had, the insane purchases of sailboats or brand new wardrobes, but I’ve never heard about this bit, this tugging from both sides, this caretaking across generations.
I know those older than us, our family members we adore, will tell us we’ve no need to worry, that they are fine, and I fully expect my own mother to chime in with a comment that proclaims her independence and complete lack of need for my worry or my care, but it matters not. We worry because we love, we care because we love, we help because we love. There is no other way.
Looking back now, I wish that principal would have leaned in during the lecture about inappropriateness for laughing at the idea that men had gondolas in their scrotums, the silliness of a cartoon erection embarrassing some skinny little pre-teen on a diving board, and told me the truth. I wouldn’t have believed them, I would have laughed still and taken my detention and thought them old as dirt and out-of-touch, but I think somewhere in me, it might have stuck. I wish someone would have told me that the middle bits Are the hardest bits, and you won’t know until you’re there.
We’re there, and it’s hard, and it’s scary, and in a weird way I also didn’t see coming, it’s beautiful because of that. Standing on the edge of some precipice, looking out, wondering what will be and when it’ll be it.
What a thing, this strange and stunning life, what a gorgeous and haunting and terrifying thing.
For now, we’ll keep on, it’s all we can do, it’s all we should do. After all, soon enough we’ll be out of the middle and nearer the end, looking back at the new middle, and flipping them the bird for ever daring to think we need any help at all.
It’s coming. Just not yet.
The middle of life,
the center of our timelines,
will challenge us most.
Share this post