It’s hardly a secret. We know the day will come. Yet, when it announces its arrival, we’re in denial. At some point, we begrudgingly accept it: the middle age.
It’s difficult to pin the middle age. It’s probably when we experience what it means to be parents of rambunctious children and to be children of overbearing parents. When stray sprains and headaches show no signs of budging for days. When your memory fails you at the most inopportune time.
During one of my long morning walks, it stuck me: what if I had misinterpreted the script of my life so far? Did I allow myself to be sentenced to silence too long? Did I willingly forfeit my right to defend myself and let others' judgment to prevail upon me? Could it be possible that guilt blinkered me from seeing how debilitating circumstances forced my hand as much as my own incapacity.
The middle age, for all its attendant decays, provides one extraordinary compensation in bargain: perspective. All these years there was no data to understand the broad stokes of your life script. We were too close to the happenings, too intimately exposed to the emotions to really have an objective view. By your middle age, we’ve the data we need and the distance necessary to zoom out and have a bird’s eye view of our life.
If we dig deep enough, patterns emerge from our life graph. The exact situations, the engulfing environment, and the actors around us might be different. Nonetheless, a few patterns will scream for our attention.
A rational explanation to the this seemingly-surreal premise could be that the lens through which we experience the world does not change much over time. By ‘lens’, I mean our belief and desire defaults that are set in our teens (or earlier even) and that continue to operate in an autopilot mode. This programming dominates our perceptions, often overriding reality. No matter what’s happening on the outside, our lens is bound to color the experience.
The middle age is when you’re better equipped to realize that these defaults are of our own making. That our life choices are subconsciously tethered to these defaults making a mockery of our free will. That this limiting belief paradigm shaped our trajectories.
These belief defaults are also why all self-help books do not talk to us uniformly. As Nietzsche said: “A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.” A frugal man needn’t be persuaded about living within one’s means. In fact, if he’s overly frugal, he needs to realize something diametrically opposite: that obsession with finances derails him from relishing the finer aspects of life.
It took me 30 years to make an outlandishly childish discovery that elders can be wrong too. That we need to forge our own unique path based on our own gut and experience, instead of seeking validation from others who typically don’t see things as we do.
The middle age is an apt time to consolidate the experiences, churn the data, and extract meaningful insights out of it. The first time is always perplexing, for we’re emotionally reacting to the new and unknown. As we grow, the steadier familiarity with the unfolding of events enables a calmer, conscious response.
Find a time and place of solitude, and put your thoughts on a paper. Let me know if you’re able to glean some patterns from your life too!
It’s difficult to pin the middle age. It’s probably when we experience what it means to be parents of rambunctious children and to be children of overbearing parents. When stray sprains and headaches show no signs of budging for days. When your memory fails you at the most inopportune time.
During one of my long morning walks, it stuck me: what if I had misinterpreted the script of my life so far? Did I allow myself to be sentenced to silence too long? Did I willingly forfeit my right to defend myself and let others' judgment to prevail upon me? Could it be possible that guilt blinkered me from seeing how debilitating circumstances forced my hand as much as my own incapacity.
The middle age, for all its attendant decays, provides one extraordinary compensation in bargain: perspective. All these years there was no data to understand the broad stokes of your life script. We were too close to the happenings, too intimately exposed to the emotions to really have an objective view. By your middle age, we’ve the data we need and the distance necessary to zoom out and have a bird’s eye view of our life.
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| Perspective of our life path |
If we dig deep enough, patterns emerge from our life graph. The exact situations, the engulfing environment, and the actors around us might be different. Nonetheless, a few patterns will scream for our attention.
A rational explanation to the this seemingly-surreal premise could be that the lens through which we experience the world does not change much over time. By ‘lens’, I mean our belief and desire defaults that are set in our teens (or earlier even) and that continue to operate in an autopilot mode. This programming dominates our perceptions, often overriding reality. No matter what’s happening on the outside, our lens is bound to color the experience.
The middle age is when you’re better equipped to realize that these defaults are of our own making. That our life choices are subconsciously tethered to these defaults making a mockery of our free will. That this limiting belief paradigm shaped our trajectories.
These belief defaults are also why all self-help books do not talk to us uniformly. As Nietzsche said: “A man has no ears for that to which experience has given him no access.” A frugal man needn’t be persuaded about living within one’s means. In fact, if he’s overly frugal, he needs to realize something diametrically opposite: that obsession with finances derails him from relishing the finer aspects of life.
It took me 30 years to make an outlandishly childish discovery that elders can be wrong too. That we need to forge our own unique path based on our own gut and experience, instead of seeking validation from others who typically don’t see things as we do.
The middle age is an apt time to consolidate the experiences, churn the data, and extract meaningful insights out of it. The first time is always perplexing, for we’re emotionally reacting to the new and unknown. As we grow, the steadier familiarity with the unfolding of events enables a calmer, conscious response.
Find a time and place of solitude, and put your thoughts on a paper. Let me know if you’re able to glean some patterns from your life too!
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