Thursday, February 15, 2007 Middlescence (Midlife, single and full of life) By Eldred Cole SheSpeak
HAVE you ever felt that your mind contains many good ideas, but it is not always easy to squeeze one out?
It is easier to wedge out the last drop of beer off the bottle or to force out the last trickle of toothpaste from the tube than to wring a coherent thought out of our mind, especially if our sense and our brain are in their last stages of separation.
That is in essence symptomatic of midlife. Nah, I'm not talking about midlife crisis, being in midlife is a crisis by itself.
I am talking about being in midlife, and loving it, or to borrow the term used by columnist Mike Bellah, the age of "middlescence".
For us women, single, singled or married, mid-life is actually in our grasp when we go to the doctor and unexpectedly realize we are now so old, we have to pay someone to look at us naked.
When we slip on that beautiful dress we just bought from UK (ukay), we see ourselves in the mirror and grasp the reality that we no longer have upper arms, we have wingspans...we are no longer women in sleeveless shirts; we are covered by yards of clothing to avoid contacting a chill.
Mid-life has hit us when we bounce (a lot), but don't bounce back. (It's more like - splat!) Mid-life brings the wisdom that life throws us curves...and that we are now sitting on our biggest ones.
And it's very hard to "get jiggy with it" (according to Will Smith) with our younger friends ... jiggly, yes; jiggy, definitely no.
Sometimes, mid-life can bring out our angry, bitter side. We look at our cell phone user, always asking for money, know-it-all teenager and think, "For this I have stretch marks?" And then we have this urge to approach every young woman wearing next to nothing clothes and want to scream at them that eventually, they will get the kind of body we have? That even the Berlin wall fell, so as their firm young body?
And then yes, we become more reflective in mid-life. We start pondering the "big" questions-- what is life, why am I here... Why do all the good food dishes (things like chicharong bulaklak and chocolate moist cake) have 10 million calories per serving?
Why didn't God load the calories in, say, saluyot stew or okra salad?
Remember in the 1991 movie City Slickers, Mitch Robbins (played by Billy Crystal) asks, "Did you ever reach a point in your life when you say to yourself, 'this is the best I'm ever going to look, this is the best I'm ever going to feel, the best I'm ever going to do, and it ain't that great?'" Mitch's boss replies by wishing him a happy birthday (he has just turned 38).
Denying about not thinking our age is not going to cut it either. Life is short, age is real. Think about it. Just believe that our middle years can be the best of all.
It is the time to figure out the pleasures of the second half of our life. Take heart, we can be both an adult and a child, and if our inner child is comatose from disuse, midlife is the best time to resuscitate it.
There is still time to enjoy the simple pleasures, time to play, to laugh again, to recover childlike wonder and to view life as an adventure.
The great George Eliot says: "It's never too late to be what you might have been." And laughter is still the best medicine, even Nobel Prize nominees Drs. Gael and Patrick Flanagan declare "He who laughs lasts."
You see, attitude is the main thing. If we can learn to be content within ourselves, then we can be single or be married and living the life of a midlifer fully and happily. Let us just be grateful and count all of the good things in our lives first.
The lives in-between are where most battles are won or lost, not at the beginning or end. Chances are we are in the middle of one today.
So don't put our lives on hold until we arrive at where we are going. Success and joy are ours for the taking, not someday, but today. (For comments and/or violent reactions e-mail me at coi_416@hotmail.com)
