I woke up one day with the realisation that I have less life to live than what I had already lived. It wasn’t a gradual thing. It was a sudden thought that had crossed my mind while doing nothing special. I had taken a year long sabbatical from work and for the first three months of the sabbatical I was just trying to unwind the many years of being conditioned at work. We are conditioned to be someone when we are at work. When you remove the boundaries of work then we slowly morph into something else.
I didn’t know what to morph into. I had spent years training my brain to be a certain thing, to react a certain way, to say certain things due to the type of employment that I usually held. The day that I realised I had less to live than I had lived it allowed me to question whether this is how I wanted to be until my final days. Most of us are living in preconditioned social environments, that we are not consciously aware of, and thus don’t consider that we may have options. We don’t need to be how we were the last 20 years of our life. We don’t need to keep being who we were at any point in our life.
When you do reach a stage that you question who and what you are it’s fair to say you’ve hit some sort of mid-life crisis. I joke that I’ve had several mid-life crisis since my mid-20’s to my late 40’s but with each one I’ve seen personal growth and self knowledge jump to a new level. However knowng you have less time on the planet really kicks you where it hurts. In a way it feels like you’ve got one more chance to do something. One last thing that you can achieve before you’re just too old.
During the sabbatical I managed to read "Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor E Frankl". It highlighted that there are three main purposes that people can choose in life. The first Is family, this is obvious; Most of us have families that form the centre of our attention. One can continue living purposefully just making sure that our families are happy and safe. The second was creating Art, the drive to create art and continually think of a new creation is enough to sustain those that have this drive. The third was exploration. The continual exploration of new places and new people, for those that can appreciate change, can be a magical experience.
I fully agree with Viktor and being able to simplify at a high level what my purpose is allowed me to ease my mind and further focus all efforts to achieve it. Being the person that enjoys variety, and not having a family for myself, both my wife and I decided on a 70% exploration focus with a 30% art focus. We both have creative hobbies that we enjoy pursuing.
Like everything, there can be a variety of ways we figure out what to do with ourselves in mid-life. The above is what helped me.
