Project Midlife Crisis
On the day I turned 42, I start thinking about all I still want to do
I have had thousands of hours and chances to do them
Do dreams disappear if I don’t get to them
Today, are these my best days or am I only half-way to living my dreams
- from Little Time by Jason Mraz
Those lyrics once hit me across the face and made me cry. That was a year ago when I turned 42. Last week when I turned 43, they stung slightly less. I still felt behind in life, of course. But, I suppose in the last year, I decided the poetic question was not rhetorical. It is a genuine question.
I choose to be “only” half-way to living my dreams.
I know that long life is not guaranteed. I know every day is a blessing. Yet, we can only plan on what is likely. When I was a hospital chaplain, accompanying people at the moments of their deaths, deaths from age 0 to 110, I saw this. There are no guarantees. I heard physicians talking in statistics, correctly never claiming when someone would live or die. “Half of the people in this condition live six months longer…”
In the most tragic, young, and surprising of deaths, I learned all we do when we talk of being healthy or safe is change the odds. We have no ultimate control.
Get vaccinated. Wear seatbelts and helmets and life jackets. Eat vegetables. Don’t smoke. That all simultaneously matters, and guarantees nothing.
I felt the midlife crisis welling up inside me on my birthday. According to my life insurance company, I am not quite half-way done. I would be past that for the average Canadian man, but a combination of physical activity and being, as many have called me, “boring,” slightly stack my odds to live longer.
I should note, for perspective, my birthday last week was particularly crummy.
I choose the word crummy not be cute, but for perspective, to whine without implying true tragedy. I woke up in a sketchy motel in a rainstorm, drove four hours home, lazily did not empty my car, then went to pick up my kids from school to go out for dinner, to celebrate my birth. And while we were out dinner, someone broke into my car and stole my luggage and my daughters’ backpacks. The shopping centre security and Montréal police were unsympathetic and unhelpful in every way. And I knew my birthday dinner had just cost about $1000 more than I planned. Then I went home and fell asleep alone in a completely unnecessary double bed.
Sometimes on my birthdays, I have gotten sad about milestones, some culturally imposed, some only expectations of my own imagination, about which I felt behind. “How can I be this old and not have … blah blah… yet!”
Last week I found myself having a far more melodramatic dark thought. I shifted from fear of “Oh no, I am half-way through life and I am so behind!” to, momentarily, enough to jolt me, “How am I supposed to keep doing this for another few decades…” I even knew my own inner thoughts were being over-the-top.
I needed to cry. I don’t think I did. But I needed to.
Throughout my life, I have had seasons of crushing depression. Counterintuitively, I am able to dismiss the depression more when there is a clear tragedy happening in my life. I am forced to confront it within myself more forcefully when it comes as a malaise and an apathy. In the musical Spring Awakening, a character on the verge of a tragic decision sings, “I don’t do sadness.” He is not an inspiration, but a warning. I needed to be sad.
Certainly among socially aware and professionally helpful people, both things I strive to be, I have observed a tendency for us to feel guilt about our sadness. We know of people who have it worse. How dare we be sad?
I am not diagnosed with a terminal disease. I am not oppressed. I am not imprisoned. I do not live in a country at war.
But “I am a 43-year-old struggling to make ends meet as a single dad in a house too big for my needs but it is also too expensive to move, who feels unloveable and behind in life” sad is a level of sad. Not the saddest. But mine. And I needed to cry. And didn’t.
Spotify random music selections attack me on my birthday weeks, though. Wallowing in all the aforementioned musings, another new-to-me song appeared on a drive. A different flavour of lyrical attack on my inner monologue.
Happiness is just around the corner from
Even when it feels like there is nothing you can do
…
I feel like shedding all my skin
Starting something new.
- Happiness by We Banjo 3
I was ruminating on all the past corners, and the only “just around the corner” I saw was my children’s 18th birthday, a day I have not been eagerly anticipating, because I have, as many parents (and through no fault of theirs) invested so much of my identity in “I am their dad.” That obviously stays true once they are adults, but the genuine question as they mature and need me less intensely and frequently remains: now what do I DO?
I have decided to have midlife crisis. An intentional one. I am not letting it sneak up on me and tricking me into buying a Jeep Wrangler. I am taking control of it. I can’t control if it really is midlife, or entirely if I feel like it is a crisis. But I am making it my midlife criss, golly darn it.
My hope in sharing all this with you, dear reader, is to share a journey of reflection, to reassure you are not alone if anything resonates, and to reassure you I am not alone if nothing resonates with you, so you have greater empathy for the next middle aged person you see crying on their birthday.
Just as I said we do not control our inevitable deaths, we only tip the odds, I believe that about our lives as well. We must acknowledge what is within our power, to make us act within that capacity, but we must also recognize the randomness, or the agency of others, that also contributes to our successes and failures, however we define them.
Project Midlife Crisis
Be grateful.
Delay Midlife.
Work on the Goals.
Gratitude. Canada, as a nation, has conspired to force me into gratitude for my birthday by always making Thanksgiving the first Monday after my birthday. Well-played. But when we spiral into feeling behind in life, a trait I have learned can be a genetic predisposition independent of actual age, we forget what we have accomplished.
So I force myself, before I can be disappointed in myself for what I have not done yet in life (less healthy) or even develop a plan to work towards outstanding goals (healthier), to list things I dreamed of doing in life, which I have, in fact done.
Worked at my childhood favourite museum, Plimoth Patuxet.
Became a father to children I love with all my heart.
Been published in a book.
Graduated from Harvard and Yale.
Was ordained to ministry.
Got a house in French-speaking Canada a short walk from the water.
Have made theatre professionally.
Delay Midlife. I am not half-way done yet if I can make my expected halfway point later! I want to be positively proactive about my health and safety. I want to have a balanced view and not obsess, but still make sure I am deliberate about improving and maintaining some habits that correlate with longevity.
Walk 5 km daily.
Swim most days.
Lift weights regularly.
Maintain a broadly healthy diet with no alcohol, limited meat and caffeine. (I don’t like how much fast food is in my life.)
Obey speed limits, wear a seatbelt, kayak with a life jacket, avoid doing things when too tired.
Stay up-to-date on vaccines.
Finally, work on goals.
The things about which I am sad at myself are my own goals. For me. Not goals others have to have. My friend and colleague of mine, Beth, who died too soon in her 50s after a prolonged illness once told me that she replaced the concept of Bucket List with her Fuck It List, as in, “Fuck it, I don’t want to do that.” It is liberating. There are many things I once thought I had to do to be a successful human. And they are not bad things, per se, but just erroneous. So one lesson I want to learn from Beth, among so many, is to be open to shifting goals from Bucket It to Fuck It. And perhaps if I live a long life, things that once seemed to overwhelming may find their way back. Allow me to share first my Fuck It list, as it stands at time of publication. These are things I once thought I wanted to do in life that I am wilfully okay not prioritizing.
Mastering a musical instrument.
Any further studies of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, or advanced mathematics.
Being a guy who is into running.
A career on Broadway.
This clears room for the Bucket It List.
Own a home in a French-speaking community in Atlantic Canada.
Finish the novel I started writing way back in college.
Finish the Ph.D.
Perform in the Edinburgh Fringe festival.
Find the love of my life.
I have tried to take away things totally out of my control from my goals, like how well such a novel may sell, or even if it would be published. It’s not that I don’t want those things, but I recognize that the goal has to be mostly within my power.
These goals also can influence one another. They are not sequential. Finding the love of my life or finishing the Ph.D. may provide the financially stability to buy the home. Yet, buying the home may make me more attractive to the love of my life. I don’t control those things. I just work towards the goals.
Happiness may be just around the corner. If I am going to bed alone a few birthdays from now, I will do it as Rev. Dr. Lonely Soul, who has written a novel and had a run at the Edinburgh Fringe.
Look at that. I have some plans for what to do if my kids don’t need as much of my time. The dreams won’t disappear. Like Gilbert Blythe, at the very least, I persist in my dreaming.