Continue growing in midlife
                                           by Jane Glenn Haas
                                             December 3, 1999
     Tick. Tick. Tick. My biological clock is ticking and so is yours. No, not the reproductive one. That clock already tolled for me, if not for you.
     But what about the clock that tells our heads what time it is in our life?
     Demographers say my midlife clock is running down. They define midlife as the chronological  years 35-50.
     Mentally, midlife lasts as long as you keep growing, says Kathleen A. Brehony, a Virginia clinical psychologist and specialist in midlife issues.
     "People can grow until their last breath," she says. All that's required is being open to change and new experiences. There is more to life, she reminds, than sitting in front of the TV watching Wheel of  Fortune every night.
     Ms. Brehony says we decide how long we will reside in "midlife" by the way we cope with life experiences.
     "We can't control all the events in our life," she says. "We can choose how we will respond to those events."
     Events trigger the onset of midlife. "At some point, we react to the realization of our own mortality. We are hit with the reality that we are going to die and that should change everything for us," says Ms. Brehony, author of Awakening at Midlife (Riverhead Books, 1997).
     She likes to quote Dr. Bernie Seigel, author of several books on getting on with life after illness. "He said, 'People who live best are people who know they are dying.' And we are all dying."
     Facing a death or a life-threatening illness triggers change for many people and a retreat into addiction for others, she says. Those addictions can be television, food, even religious dogma. Addictions cocoon us from the pain of change.
     "By midlife, we have left so much of ourselves as a sacrifice on the altar of conformity that most of us are encased in a  deep coating of defensiveness and grief," Ms. Brehony says. "Neither old nor young, we have no control over our ultimate destiny and yet we have the power to transform within it."                                                                             
     In simple terms, we grow old the way we live - with gusto or with slowed gait.
     You can teach an old dog new tricks if the dog wants  to learn. You can't force people to keep on growing, learning and enjoying life. (Copyright 1999)

Back to Awakening at Midlife Main Page