I Have a Confession
A Mid-life Crisis
Written by Dan McDonald
Some of my long-time friends likely knew
it. I was one of the last to discover it. I received the memo while waiting in
a hotel room to watch the Belmont Stakes. I was in a Hyatt hotel with a
spectacular view of the Empire State Building, a place where I would never have
been found in my cautious no frills approach with which I faced life for my
first 58 years of life. But now I was 59 years old and that can mean a lot has
changed in one or two years’ time.
Empire State Building viewed through my hotel window
I was waiting to see if American
Pharoah could win the triple-crown. It was as if through American Pharoah
winning a triple-crown I might recapture a bit of the zestfulness of life I had
felt when in the month I graduated from high school a chestnut horse named
Secretariat captured America’s imagination by winning the Kentucky Derby,
Preakness, and Belmont Stakes.
I waited by looking at an article on
the internet. In one place it mentioned how men with ages ending in “9” were as
much as 25% more likely to have affairs than men at other ages. I hadn’t had an
affair but at age 59 I was dealing with the approaching of one of those “0”
milestone years. I have heard that women are more sensitive to their biological
clocks than men. But men it seems are often impacted the year before a
milestone year. It is like we start a whole year ahead of the dreaded year
dreading and trying to escape the inevitability of the milestone year until the
actual turning of 40, 50, or 60 will be anti-climactic. Until reading that
statistic I had never thought I was going through a mid-life crisis but then I
realized everything from the time a few months before my 59th
birthday had indicated mid-life crisis. A crisis which is not so much a
mid-life crisis as it is a sun is beginning to set in the west crisis of life. Living
in a family where most seem to die in their seventies, turning sixty begins
thinking of one’s mortality with a solemn earnest contemplation. The process of
facing this comes with the stages of denial, life reorientation, and some
acceptance.
This mid-life experience had
probably begun a little before my 59th birthday, maybe even near my
58th birthday. I had begun discovering millennial generation writers
who were leaving the Evangelicalism that many of us baby boomers had embraced a
generation earlier. I found their experiences important to consider. I found
myself questioning a number of the assumptions with which I had faced life. My
thoughts about life began to be reconsidered. I had lived a life connected to
my job and my church and my routines. On vacation I had either remained at home
or visited family members in the state where I had grown up. I was content to
live without frills or thrills. But then I began to think that this year I am
going to change. I am going to begin having at least one special vacation a
year. In 2014 I spent two weeks in California, visiting both the San Francisco
area and Yosemite Park, so as to see the Redwoods, touch a Giant Sequoia, walk
across the Golden Gate Bridge, and see a Giants’ baseball game. I loved it so
much I squeezed in a three day stay in New York City in December only to
discover I needed more time to see it all.
But the real evidence I was in a
mid-life crisis came on the day of my 59th birthday. A few weeks
earlier I had seen a millennial post a quote on Twitter. It said something I
found profound. It said, “The opposite of war isn’t peace. The opposite of war
is creation.” I asked her where that quote came from. She told me it came from
what was probably her favorite play (movie), “Rent”. I had looked it up and
realized it viewed life from a very different perspective than I did. I was and
pretty much remain a traditional Christian in my understanding of morality. But
maybe because I was already in the grips of a mid-life crisis I decided I
should go ahead and watch the movie version of “Rent.” I discovered this song
in the musical that I am sure I had heard before but now it grabbed my
attention. It was a catchy tune built up around the number 525,600. It was the number of minutes in a year. The song asked us
to consider how we measure the moments in a single year, the 525,600 passing
minutes in a year’s time. So on my 59th birthday wondering how many
people would notice I went into our conference room at work and wrote on the
board the number 525,600. I live in the reddest of red states and no one seemed
to mention the number as there is often something left on the board from some
meeting held in the room. But for me it was the beginning of the countdown of
525,600 minutes until I turned 60 years of age.
Secretariat ran an amazing race the
year I graduated from high school. He won the Belmont Stakes by an incredible
31 horse-length margin. Nothing like that had ever been done before and nothing
like that has ever been done since. When you are a kid in high school thinking
of the life you will live, the dreams you possess, the things you will
accomplish a horse like Secretariat seems to be a perfect illustration of what
life can be like. But over the years, triple-crown winners like the one the
month you graduated from high school are proven to be rare. Life itself is not
lived with only triumphs and accomplishments. We learn to settle for a few
victories and often we settle into a predictable set of routines where we live
out our routines of life. Then around age 59 we begin to question everything.
Life is reaching the short end. How will we live out the last of the fleeting
days upon this earth?
I waited to watch the Belmont
Stakes hoping to see a new horse complete the winning of a triple-crown. As the gates flung open
American Pharoah failed to get off to his characteristic great start out of the
gate. It seemed for a moment that he might fall short in the Belmont like so many horses that won the Derby and Preakness only to falter at the Belmont. After a less than flawless start
the jockey’s work was to guide the horse to a point where the stallion might shine in
the home stretch. Horse and rider moved to the front of the pack, overcoming the less than sterling start, and from the moment they hit the home stretch American Pharoah pulled away from the other horses to complete the winning of the triple-crown of horse racing. Perhaps Secretariat had been my young man's metaphor for the possibilities of the run that I was beginning on graduating from high school. Perhaps now American Pharoah overcoming a lackluster start could be a metaphor for making the necessary adjustments to be ready to finish well in the home stretch.
In life we each run a race. Our
competition is not with others in winning the race. Our competition is between
the person we could have been when we were created and the person who shows up
at the finish line after the home stretch run. In Christian terms, the race is
about how we stumble as we come out of the gate and how our guiding jockey can
still prepare us to shine in the home stretch. Most of us aren’t given the call
to race like thoroughbreds. Maybe our lives are more like a horse we would see
along a street in Manhattan plodding his way toward and through Central Park.
Even that horse needs to be prepared by the one who communicates the day’s path
the steed is to take on this day.
Looking back, I can see I am passing
through the feared mid-life crisis. But it hasn’t been a bad thing. I loved
writing as a young kid in high school. I was afraid of failure in my adult
years and passed my writing only to a few cherished or unlucky friends. I
inundated them with my writing while being careful to keep the secret to myself
around most people. Then in the beginnings of my mid-life crisis I started
blogging. I started blogging and soon I started taking photographs because
blogging is as much about seeing a story as reading one. Soon I began thinking
about traveling because there were things to be seen and done in places I had
never been. You see, a mid-life crisis is that point in our personal races
where the jockey communicates to the horse that we didn’t have a sterling break
from the gate. We stumbled. The rider communicates to us that there is yet time to make adjustments that will help us run the home stretch well. Life is often about making adjustments before, during,
and after any so-called mid-life crisis. The horse and his rider are a team in
the race moving towards the finish line.
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