Finding Life in the Second Half of Life

I told my spiritual director that I felt confused and adrift and spiritually ungrounded. My spiritual director said “It sounds like a mid life crisis.” This confused me because I liked my job, I liked my husband, I was very emotional about my son going off to college, but wasn’t that the whole point of raising a child? I had achieved pretty much every modest goal I had set for my adult life. I knew I had many blessings and a life of privilege; how could anyone fail to be grateful for meaningful work, shelter and food, a life partner I get along with? But my spirit was restless and didn’t know what it was looking for.

My discomfort, the Mid-Life books told me, arose because I was not the same person I was before I had my son, before I started into the ministry. The person I was at 50 was not who I thought I would be. Moreover, many of those things that used to bring me excitement and fun just didn’t anymore, like the wellsprings that fed my inspiration had dried up.

Part of the reason I didn’t recognize the life transition I was experiencing is that the stories we tell, especially on movies and TV, are mostly about the first half of life, about the life’s work of our teens and 20s- figuring out who we are, what we are good at, finding work, finding a family, having wild adventures. We don’t have a many models or stories or archetypes for the important crossroads of the second half of life.

In my 20s I had been inspired by the women’s spirituality movement which proposes 3 phases of a woman’s life- Maiden, Mother, Crone. But when my son Nick was out of diapers I wondered “so, am I a crone now?” I read up on the Crone archetype, which is often associated with the wisdom of being near death. That didn’t seem quite right. Yes, growing older does have something to do with getting your affairs in order, and coming to grips with your own mortality, but what then? Where was the life in the second half of life?

Author Elizabeth Davis suggests that between mother and crone is a 4th archetype called “matriarch” – this makes sense to me. I liked this image of someone who is not actively parenting, but still has many years of meaningful work to do.

It’s not surprising that we need new archetypes for our times; our lives are different than they were in the old days when the traditional archetypes were being formed. We need new archetypes still that are not so deeply embedded in a gender binary, and archetypes that aren’t bound to reproduction, since not everyone is called to parenthood. We also need new archetypes and stories for the 2nd half of life which illustrate how people of all genders can be generative, growing, and full of life.

I spent a lot of time in contemplation, looking at my life as it was, and clarified that I did not feel called to a new career, a new marriage, a new home, so how could I find that spark of new life inside the life I was already living? I waited and waited for this next phase of my life to begin, gradually realizing 2 things; first that I was just going to have to grieve some parts of the old life before I could let them go, my father’s death, the empty nest, the closure of our music store, my aching back and arthritic fingers. Second, I realized that I was not getting anywhere sitting around waiting for this next part of my life to begin. I was just going to have to experiment and try things and do something different, anything, it didn’t really matter what. If there was no fresh wellspring of life in the things I was already doing, I was going to and try some things I was not good at, risk making a fool of myself. I fact, the books said, re-integrating the child part of ourselves was crucial for adults in midlife. The middle-aged person might forget how to have fun, how to play and explore, but the inner child knew.

This next chapter started to unfold as I followed openings of aliveness wherever they lead- like the colors of a sunrise- wouldn’t it be something to draw with colors like that? Like, what if small congregations could work together somehow, maybe collaborate in some way? Like, maybe I could get my old bike repaired and join my partner on his bike rides?

This life transition required not a big change in my outward life, but making a choice in my inner life. I remembered that back in my 20s I had committed to always being a life long learner. At this crossroads I could have chosen to be done learning and growing and just coast to the finish line. But when I started approaching the world as a learner, when I started asking new questions, new pathways of energy, life and imagination began to open.

While I was at this crossroads of midlife, my Dad was at a crossroads as well. After living with cancer for a decade, he made the decision to enter hospice care. I had imagined that once you entered hospice there was a steady decline to the end, but not for my dad. Yes, some days when I called, he told me things were hard, that he was discouraged, as his fingers could not play the clarinet any more or even type on the computer. But I’ll never forget those calls when he, a lifelong musician, rediscovered music. “Have you heard the Sibelius viola concerto”? He said “Unbelievable!”. Another call “I’ve been listening to Tchaikovsky again, boy that is really where it’s at” he barely had the words to explain how moving it was to rediscover Tchaikovsky, a composer he knew well. Just a few days before he died, that was discovering new wellsprings of life.

They say that not everyone who grows old becomes an elder, and I am beginning to understand this now. The elders are the ones who face who they are right now in this very moment, and choose life, choose growth. And the joy of it, the hope of it is that this learning and growth lasts our whole lives. Remember. we have a partner in this journey, which is life itself -- always animating us and connecting us to the web of beings. Blessings for each of you that you may find the new life growing under your feet as you journey each turn of the spiral of life