A friend has been going through what they are confident can be defined as a “midlife crisis.” I too have been thinking about a lot of the “big picture” stuff the last year or two, and have been trying to get better at living life. I do a lot of reading, offline and on, and a site always full of aspirational nuggets of wisdom at Maria Popova’s Marginalian. Took me over five months to get to this blog entry, but there is a lot worth taking in. She writes in her introduction:
“If we abide by the common definition of philosophy as the love of wisdom, and if Montaigne was right — he was — that philosophy is the art of learning to die, then living wisely is the art of learning how you will wish to have lived. A kind of resolution in reverse.”
I believe it’s all worth reading, but I really like the quote from philosopher, mathematician, historian, and Nobel laureate Bertrand Russell on broadening your life as it grows shorter:
“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”
Also really like this thought on kindness from Tolstoy:
“The kinder and the more thoughtful a person is, the more kindness he can find in other people. Kindness enriches our life; with kindness mysterious things become clear, difficult things become easy, and dull things become cheerful.”
Again, it’s all worth reading and pandering, but I will end with this quote from Roman Stoic Senaca before getting to my final point:
“There are more things … likely to frighten us than there are to crush us; we suffer more often in imagination than in reality.”
“Midlife Crisis” sounds terrifying, but I think it’s the word “crisis” that scares us. Two definitions of the word, however, can give one hope:
- The turning point for better or worse in an acute disease or fever.
- An emotionally significant event or radical change of status in a person’s life.
A crisis does not have to be bad.