Here, There, and Everywhere

I have felt my age lately.

Not in a “my back hurts all the time now” or a constant referral to people in their twenties as “kids” kind of aging, but a feeling of my age being more than a number.

My age feels now more like a ticking time clock and I am trying to grapple with that feeling.

I am in my 40’s and being in your 40’s is kind of like standing in the middle of a bridge. There is the part of the bridge that I have already crossed to get to this middle part and now there is also the rest of the bridge that I must cross, a bit at a time, to get to the other side. And that is okay, right?

But part of being on this bridge smack dab in the middle, is this feeling of time slipping away. The first half of your life is in the rear view and the second half is now beginning. With that pronouncement comes the feeling that I am missing out on something. That those regrets from the first half of my life need to be rectified in the second half. All those things I wanted to accomplish “someday”, well I gotta do them now because time is ephemeral and I need to get going and I don’t want to look back on the second half of my life in my later years and be disappointed and bitter and okay, what do I do now?

And so on and so on. Rinse and repeat. My brain repeating all of this, different words sometimes, like a hamster wheel running without a hamster.

While I know our brains tend to ruminate without much pushing from us subconsciously, I still can’t shake this feeling that I am supposed to be doing something. What that is, I don’t know. Do I need to make changes in my life? Do I keep things as they are? Is this wreaking havoc with my anxiety? Yes. Yes it is.

I put these words down here because I want to share how I am feeling and I know I am not the only person to feel this way. The term “mid-life crisis” wasn’t coined out of nowhere. While I am not in mid-life crisis mode nor am I wanting to relive my youth (no thanks!), I am feeling this push to do something, even if I don’t quite know what that is yet. This feeling will not dissipate so I am going to just sit with it. Not ignore it but listen to it.

My subconscious is trying to tell me something and I need to pay attention.

Read books, listen to podcasts, write things down. Something will bubble up and come to the surface and I want to be ready.

As I walk across this bridge onto the second half of my life I want to be intentional and embrace it all.