Fifteen years ago I hosted a party in honor of my 40th birthday. It was, in my mind, a mid-life celebration.
I've always tried to take in stride those things I couldn't control and to have a hand in directing those things I can. I've tried to accept the results of my choices even when I didn't like them or feel responsible for all the consequences.
From all the hints I'm getting, maybe I should try to figure out if I should be thinking differently now.
The book Chip recommended is Running to the Mountain by Jon Katz.
Katz obviously had something marked on life's schedule for his 50th birthday.
The fact that his 50th coincided with a number of other significant changes in his life
made that date a flashing neon signpost on his highway of life. I do think about what I
want to do with this second half of my life, but since year 40, none of my birthdays
have been great milestones. To each of us our own.
The difference between Jon Katz and me as to age signifiers is not the only difference.
Katz' world is as strange to me as mine probably would be to him. At times the world which is his is as alien as the one Arthur Golden described in Memoirs of a Geisha. Budgets of millions of dollars? Firing 30 people in one day? House husband and stay-at-home father? East coast urban communities? I identified much more with the rural New York setting he called Yokumville.
Yokumville was the collection of villages near the isolated house he bought in the mountains
as a meditation retreat and distraction-free work place.
He probably used that term derisively at first, but by the time the residents (and their big trucks) had
drilled him a new well, helped him remodel the house, landscaped the yard, and installed a Primestar
satellite dish (and other things), the term becomes one of respect and admiration.
Along with his adventures with the house and turning 50, Katz was seeing his daughter through
serious surgery, then through high school graduation and heading off for college. He was rebuilding his
writing career and maintaining his marriage and his sanity. Katz recalls and reflects on lots of life crises.
Like a good observer, he finds some gems for others of us. I had to get beyond the feeling that
Katz was not addressing me. That process was not unlike the process through which he found
respect for the skilled, generous, open people of Yokumville:
"Forging a connection with people was also a spiritual experience in itself. Oddly, I hadn't seen myself as good at it. I'd had too many job scrapes, moved too many times, left too many friends behind. I talked to few strangers back home; I guarded against others' intrusion. But since coming to the mountain, I seemed to be talking to everybody -- the guys at the hardware store, my fellow lunchers at the Burger Den, neighbors I encountered on the road."
The most striking reminder to me was a revelation he had as he found himself opening up to more people. Katz also found himself opening up to new ideas and new endeavors:
"In midlife, it's tempting to succumb to the idea that because you have more years behind you than ahead, what you already know will carry you along."
Now, there's one I need to inscribe in big letters on a wall in front of me. I feel that temptation almost every day.
Just as he had intended, the retreat to a mountain top became a spiritual quest. With help from a foot-high pile of books and journals by Thomas Merton, Katz reaches the point of no return:
"There is a huge risk involved whenever you seek to discover yourself. You might find that you're not as happily married as you thought you were...That you have few true friends, or the wrong ones...
"Before these realizations, you might have been content to stumble along, to accept the reality of your life. Afterward, though, you face a choice -- to change or not?"
I'm not doing justice to a book full of ruminations and exposed self-revelations. While this book is labeled "a midlife adventure," it might well work as a focus of meditation for anyone contemplating or reflecting on big changes in life. Yes, some of the concerns are strictly masculine and strictly middle aged, but many are universals.
Thank you, Jon Katz for Running to the Mountain.
And thanks to you, Chip, for recommending it.
A less enthusiastic, less sympathetic review by Stephen J. Lyons from Salon.com
Reading's Home Page | Title Index | Author Index | Genre Index
