Growing

Many partnerships around me are undergoing a stress test at the moment. The word midlife crisis often comes up. A stupid word, I think, since it suggests that life, individual life, has a crisis. This perspective unsettles me. Why should life have a crisis? It seems rather that partnerships are being called into question. A breaking out, a drive for freedom, self-realization, wanting to make up for something. This too is a notion that unsettles. Was the past wrong? That would be a troubling notion. How can the past be wrong?

Rather, perhaps something has changed. This change unsettles what is familiar, stable, the status quo. The question is more this: Why do I want to change, and toward what? Is what I want to let into my life as change good? Only from this question does it make sense to invoke the concept of crisis. What if the change is good, what if it is bad? Who then has the crisis in each case?

We grow constantly, grow out of and beyond. We should support one another in this. For this growing causes growing pains. It causes stress at the points of fracture. Here anger and disappointment arise, fear and uncertainty.

Bringing about an external change may be more of a displacement activity. Then life may already have slept a little too long and failed to notice the change. Mindfulness is called for here. Listening to growing in order to prevent a crisis.