How I see “the mid-life crisis”
Some of you will think that I am too young to be writing about a mid-life crisis. But the reality is that people in my family have been passing well before their time much too often. Be it through tragedy, crime or disease, few of our lot have made it into their eighties over the past thirty years. This has left me relatively lonely in the world and lacking the emotional support most people in their early thirties still have from parents or grandparents.
This has also left me without a barrier between me and “the end”, allowing for the reality of my own fragility to sink in. On the rare occasion I give into fear and depression, I wonder whether I still have the time to accomplish the things that I want to and I struggle with accepting my maturing image. More frequently, I look at things from a philosophical or spiritual perspective.
As a philosophical person, I believe that everything in life is a gift. All people in my life represent blessings or lessons. All situations in my life represent blessings or lessons. And all of these blessings and lessons would become a lot less profound if, from the very beginning, I was not learning them while incarnated in a fragile mortal vessel. After all, pain and fear are just the other side of love and creativity. They are the fuel behind many great paintings, books, sculptures, theatre, art and cultural progress.
As a spiritual person, I see my body as nothing other than a dense, lower-frequency manifestation of my subconscious mind. I believe my spirit to be immortal, and this life to be transient and educational. I also believe that I am still a Young soul (like everyone on earth) and that I am only reaching for the levels of understanding which would allow me to embrace my own divine infinite nature without compromising my appreciation for life and for those I hold dear.
And so I need to live in a world that embraces the illusion of time in order to be awakened into feeling and in order to see the greatness in the most mundane places. Hopefully I will live in this world, as myself, for a long time.
I think that one day we as a society will go back to valuing old age and respecting the wisdom, endurance, optimism and courage that it embodies. But in the meantime, I will take what I can get from our vain consumerist culture and have fun celebrating the youth, health, beauty and sexuality that I still have.
