Finding my middle age melody

“The perilous time for the gifted is not youth. The perilous season is middle age, when a false wisdom tempts them to doubt the divine origin of the dreams of their youth.”

Elizabeth Peabody

Oh, how deep resonate these phrases! Becoming middle aged myself, a variety of emotional forces are battling to be on the forefront of what is also, luckily and richly, a ripening emotional landscape.

I look back on my life, tuning into my twenty, twenty-five, thirty year old self. Unrelentless seeking and creating was the slogan of those days. Fierce self-doubts got crushed by a willingness to embody and claim creative freedom, to stand for ideals I knew I wasn’t actualizing myself fully, to intuitively interact with the world as a, boldly speaking, futurist, always eager to create something that was not of this world yet felt like to be its emotionally logical progression.

I look back and sense a kind of melancholy eating away at that same, forceful demeanor.

But NO! my spirit shouts demanding. Here, nowadays, we encounter a new challenge. A challenge that has nothing to do anymore with the silencing of my internal conflicts and has everything to do with a parody-scare. With this I mean the middle-aged tendency to imitate one’s successes and loose sight of the vibrant, intuitive way of living that enchanted those young-adult states.

I must not search for similar states of mind. The consolation of likemindedness is also an internal habit. I must challenge myself to become even more demanding, more radical, more fresh than even my most tender childlike moments must have been before becoming aware of any ‘I’ hosting this dynamic, social-emotional, internal scenery.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s wisdom has reminded me that this particular developmental process has a lot to do with becoming sensitive to seeing reality as it is as well as becoming sensitive towards how it ought to be, as Dabrowski might have framed it:

“CARMON [interviewer]:

Gloria Steinem said that women are the one group that gets more radical with age. Is that true for you?

GINSBURG: I had great good fortune in my life to be alive and have the skills of a lawyer when the women's movement was revived in the United States. And I think my attitude, my aspirations have not changed since the '70s. My hope for our society that we're gonna use the talent of all of the people and not just half of them. I would contrast an earlier period in my life, when I just accepted discrimination as that's the way things are. Nothing I can do about it. So –”

(Source: MSNBC)

This makes me think of our current societal challenges. A lack of deeply felt emotional and social connection, ongoing existential thirst and seeking, our detachment from our surrounding nature, boundaryless growth as our prevailing paradigm and all of the dire problems interconnected with this way of living….

I certainly still have that inner voice full of annoyance pointing out ‘there’s nothing I can do about it’, but I won’t let that kind of ‘down talk’ determine my path.

I am going to sit with Ginsburg’s advice for a while and see what comes up for me:

- Listening, not only to likeminded

- The ability to not just tolerate but even applaud our differences

- Always do something outside of yourself

- To be able to see beyond the world you are in

(Source: RBG, documentary)

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