loosening

in praise of the luxuriant submission of midlife

Here’s the thing no one prepared me for about getting older: that I’d be into it.

Because I am. I mean, I like it. In fact, it kind of turns me on. The tangled mess of my forties has been strangely exciting in a drowsy, hypnotic whogivesafuck kind of way. For the first time since childhood the world has begun reveal itself to me at a pace that I’m sufficiently relaxed to enjoy. Midlife feels to me like a gentle undoing, an act of luxuriant submission. It’s like sipping cold wine in a hot bath while reading a long absorbing book. It’s indulgent and lazy and honestly? I find it kind of hot.

The end is still a long way off but I’ve given up swimming against the relentless riptide. And as time sweeps me out further out to sea, I’ve finally seen it, by which I mean glimpsed the inevitable - oblivion. It’s just there, on the horizon, to the left of the lighthouse. Look — do you see? Death. That humourless old blob harrumphing toward us like a grim cyclonic slug.

In the meantime, I’m down with this long slow unravelling. My resting mood these days is like a half-tipsy Victorian debutante wriggling free of her corset after a tedious ball. It’s not so much a new state as the old one minus the nonsense anxiety. I don’t miss the urgent force that propelled me toward this job or that house or this country or that man or contract or goal.

I understand now that so much of what I experienced as ambition or passion in youth was in fact a form of projection underpinned by a quivering dread. I thought I was striving to Accomplish Important Grown Up Things, when what I was actually doing was trying to ensconce myself in a high tower, one with ramparts and a walk-in designer closet surrounded by a crocodile moat.

But it was only once I’d barricaded myself inside those towers and heard the dead bolts slide shut that I understood what real panic felt like. The castles we build out of fear are not safe harbours, they are prisons. Gilded cages that must be renovated, renegotiated and if necessary abandoned then set alight. It’s sad but also: it’s good.

Assuming all goes well, my lease on this planet is almost half over; no break clause (as yet). So I guess you could say it’s the beginning of the end. The memories I have of my past are a story — one that is every bit as rich and pressing as whatever the future might hold. Memories are treasure — this is the realisation that midlife brings you — that the past and the story you make if it is the real reward for being alive and noticing things and pondering our lives the way we do. The vividness of these pictures and stories, those first shocks of pleasure and pain. First anguish, first love. The wonder of discovery, of our bodies and the bodies of others, the transcendent beauty of nature. Even our trauma is precious, because it forms who we are.