It’s difficult to pin the middle age. It’s probably when we’re the parents of rambunctious children and children of overbearing parents. Or when you have memories enough for nostalgia, but still have the heart to nurse ambition.
During one of my long walks, it struck me: what if I misread my life’s script? Could it be possible that I had got it all wrong?
As far as clarity in life is concerned, the mid-30s got it made.
Equipped with enough experience to be unimpressed by glitz. Bestowed with focus on things strictly relevant. Ability to recalibrate the future plans based on learnings so far.
If done right, this period has everything going for it. Courage to be disliked. Capacity for failures. Confidence to challenge status-quo.
For all its attendant problems, the increasing years provide one extraordinary compensation in bargain: perspective. All this while, you were too close to the happenings around you to have a clear view. Your emotions were too recent and intense for an objective insight.
You now have the data and distance necessary for a bird’s eye view of your life.
As you dig deeper, patterns emerge from your life graph. The actors, situations and context may vary. But they’re all united by a pattern.
Surreal as this may seem, a rational explanation exists. Your world may change, but the lens with which you see your evolving world remains the same. By ‘lens’, I mean the belief and desire defaults set in our teens, that continue to operate in an autopilot mode.
As you grow, you become aware that your life choices were tethered by these defaults. That this limiting belief paradigm shaped your trajectory.
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 odd years to make an outlandishly childish discovery that nobody has figured it all out. The first time, you were reacting to the new and unknown. Now is your chance to respond consciously to the familiar unfolding of events.
We know what mid-life crisis is. I propose a variant: ‘mid-life clarity’. It’s when the fear of doing something imperfectly is outweighed by the fear of ending up doing nothing.
You need to pave your path based on your gut and experience. You must become your own light!
Musings by Madhav 
Leave a comment