Portrait of a Midlife Crisis
Endurance is not the same as living.
Written in moments of existential crisis just before dawn on a cold winter Thursday while we are living the dream of a lifetime by rooting in Madrid for a month. Proof that our state of mind and our state of being are often disconnected.
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We all live with something. None are whole. It is the great tragedy of our times that we can only see the outside, while the whole of existence generates in the unseen. Everyone hides somewhere. Under the rock of achievement, or in the cave of inebriation, wrapped in the blanket of transitory relationships, possibly under the rug of a creative life—or worst of all, tenacious progress through accepting things that should change. That need to.
A lifetime lived in pain, punctuated by moments of anesthesia—brief mercies that soothe the scared little boy pulling strings from inside this aging hulk. The body greys, wrinkles, loosens its grip. It breaks down honestly. But the masters of fear do not age. Infinite creatures, they who refine—grow sharper, more intimate, more convincing.
The scared boy in me never stopped working. He learned early that survival meant vigilance, that relief came only in flashes: desire, touch, meaning, feeling useful. Not healing—just enough quiet to keep breathing. Keep spinning the wheel. So he stayed at the controls long past the point of reason, long past the point of strength.
Now the fears, honed to a razors edge, speak softly. They sound like wisdom. They say this is what a life amounts to: endurance, longing, small anesthetics against a vast ache. They insist there was never another way.
We cannot avoid this. We can only go through it. How we hold ourselves is the only power we have against the scared marionette. I don't know if we can cut the strings and set the boy free—that feels like an impossible effort. Some lucky few find the right key to their own lock. Sometimes we learn to see ourselves clearly, objectively, and honestly enough to recognize that we are not broken beyond repair.
We are too hurried in our lives to take the time we need to understand the locks we carry, and so we quickly settle into whatever shape seems to fit. We mistake familiarity for necessity. We accept the way things are simply because they have become the way things are.
But do not despair. If you shroud your darkness, your fear under the comfort of little anesthesias, life is not over. Just more difficult than it need be.
Sometimes—rarely—there is a moment of seeing. The strings. The hands that pull them. The difference between pain and identity. In that moment, the boy pauses. The body breathes. And the future, for just an instant, is not foreclosed—only unnamed.
Remember those moments. Our futures are not what we fear, nor what we carry. They are what we shape. Work to shape them in the light.
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“May your seas be wide enough for wonder, your harbor always waiting, and your light never fail when another soul is searching.” – The Lantern Keeper