The No-Man's Land of Mid-life Crisis

A mid-life crisis moment has blown its way in with our recent arctic blast.

It is interesting in that it is not like the sorts that I have had to deal with before. There was really no depression, hardly any anger, and no perceived longings that I was aware of.  Instead, the thing that characterized the whole event was a sense of listlessness.

I had no energy.  I had no direction.  I had seemingly endless options that I could work on, but I felt as if I did not want to make the effort to work on any of them.  Why?  Because none of them seemed to have any meaning or move me in any direction other than the one I am going in.

Maybe the year end meeting at work was a contributor.  Realizing the effort you put in simply  brought you to an almost parity state like last year is not a true motivator - and looking down the road at the coming year and seeing nothing changing seems to eliminate any real sense of next year will be better.

But it is my own personal life as well.  I still continue to struggle with arriving at goals for 2014, now almost a month after the year has begun.  Why?  Because the goals I have written down seem the same as the year before, and the year before that, and the year before that:  things that I want but I have either no ability to accomplish or, if accomplished, have no ability to transform my life.

My life feels more and more that it is being tucked into the fringes, hidden amidst the jungle of the major responsibilities of what I am supposed to do - and even when I come up with the things I would like to do these seem almost immediately overgrown by the reality of a work and a family that has their own set of activities and realities to accomplish.

The issue, of course, is that this is where many people step off the cliff:  hounded by a set of realities they feel they cannot change anything significant about their life and so they "mid-life crisis off", acting foolishly at best and erratically at the worst.  A new car, an expensive something they cannot afford - in the most extreme of cases, a new life.

 None of this comes without a price of course, from ruptured bank accounts to ruptured lives.  But I suppose - based on observation of others - that such things are hardly considerations or, if they are, they are counted as less important than the sensation of being alive.

If I think about it, that is the real point of a mid-life crisis:  it is exorcising the spirit that one has become somehow less than alive, an automaton, a series of tasks and duties with all meaning, all beauty, all passion scrubbed from one's daily existence.  To break free even in random and possibly dangerous directions is be re-injected, even if briefly, with the sensation of a life bursting with excitement and possibilities.

Do I have a solution?  No.  Merely submerging things once again, playing the faithful family hound, is just an adult version of kicking the can down the road.  And I have a shade too much responsibility to do something wildly erratic, as I am too realistic to downplay the real cost of things to others.

Which leaves me where I was Friday:  in a no-man's land wants and desires and needs and realities, staring over the top of the trench to the ground I dare not try to attack - yet desperately need to.