….mid-life, that is. Your grade school years seem to last forever. Every birthday between five and ten years of age seems to take 730 days to reach. The years between ten and sixteen move a bit faster toward that ever so coveted driver’s license. Seventeen through twenty five starts to flash by, hitting a few speed bumps as you move through the college and job establishment years. Pretty soon you’re twenty five and start to feel “settled”. Twenty five through thirty are the invincible years. You’ve arrived and can do anything. Next thing you know you’re thirty and it suddenly gets serious. These are the years filled with career moves, mortgages, marriage, and children. You start spinning your wheels so fast just to keep up with it all and before you know it, you find yourself in your mid-forties, coming up for air. This is the point where you stop and actually realize your life is going to change in the near future and maybe now you should take some time to prepare for that and figure out just what that means. Yesterday you were twenty-five and life was stretched out before you forever. The words retirement planning or long term care insurance were foreign concepts. Today you’re in your late forties and realize attention needs to be paid to the latter half of your life, just as when you were eighteen and were deciding “what you wanted to be when you grew up”.
Don’t panic. A writer friend of mine wrote the perfect book – Midlife Crisis Survival Guide. It just came out yesterday on Kindle ebooks and the best part? For a limited time, it’s a free download. Then it will be available for .99. Either way it’s a real bargain. In it Chapman Deering is very clear, concise, and helpful. I, myself, love the last chapter where she helps us “boomers” realize we are not alone. Deering shows us that aging with a little time and attention to tweak ourselves is the key to aging gracefully – something at around age 48 I made up my mind I was going to do. Relax, ease into it, take care of what needs to be taken care of, don’t get crazy and just maybe you’ll see you get to decide all over again “what you want to be when you grow up”.
And so, as another day goes by, I loved this handy little pocket guide to mid-life, and …I have written.
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