There’s an old story I first heard from the mythologist Michael Meade, one that begins in a place many people recognize.
In the early years of the world—“back in the first days,” as the story begins—people began to get sick. Not just physically, but in their dreams, in their spirits, in their sense of how to live. No one knew what to do.
So a small group of people tried something unusual. They left the safety of the village and went out to the edge of the darkness. They didn’t try to fix anything. They didn’t even understand what they were facing. They just stayed.
Over time, something began to happen. Songs came to them. The others in the village were curious. They asked: did the song come from outside you—or from within?
The answer was clear: Yes. Both.
Eventually, they returned to the village and called the people together. They invited the ones who were sick into the center, gathered around them, and sang. Slowly, the sick were healed. And the healing of the few brought renewed vitality to everyone.
From that point on, whenever someone fell ill or lost their way, this was what the community did. They gathered. They sang. It was, Meade tells us, the beginning of healing ceremonies.
In the story, the sickness affects people physically, but also in how they view themselves and their world.
A lot of us experience a more modern version of that illness somewhere during the second half of life. Often, nothing’s obviously wrong. The work is fine, the relationships are fine, the life on paper holds up. But we keep feeling a bit restless. Maybe even unsatisfied. We wonder whether the way we’ve been living ought to shift in some way.
What strikes me about that story isn’t just the healing. It’s what happens before it. When people begin to feel lost, the answer here isn’t to rush in with solutions, or to look away from the darkness, or to push through it as fast as possible. It’s to go to the edge and stay long enough for something to emerge.
That’s not how most of us have learned to move through life. We’ve been rewarded for solving problems, fixing what’s broken, keeping things moving.
But then, at some point, that way of navigating stops working quite as well. Maybe we’re good with how things are overall, but we also know that we’ve arrived somewhere the old maps don’t cover.
The roles that once gave us shape don’t hold the same way. The goals that once pulled us forward don’t carry the same energy. We’re left standing in an open field at dusk, waiting for our eyes to adjust.
For many people, this is where something changes. Not all at once, but enough to know you’ve crossed into a different kind of territory.
Chip Conley and I have been calling this stretch the third quarter—Q3. Roughly fifty to seventy-five, between traditional adulthood and old age. It’s the subject of a book we’re writing, and it names something people are already living: a chapter when the old motivations don’t pull the same way, but the next set of directions hasn’t yet come into view.
When that disorientation arrives, the instinct is to do something about it. Figure it out. Get back to solid ground. That’s the achievement muscle we’ve built for decades, and it’s served us well up to now.
Q3 tends to invite a different move. It runs deeper than problem-solving alone can reach. It asks us to be still. To stand at the edge. To sit with the question: what’s trying to take shape, there in the darkness?
That’s a type of listening, and it often looks unremarkable from the outside. Going for a walk without a podcast. Lingering over a cup of coffee. Letting a question stay open for weeks. Noticing what you’ve been avoiding. Paying attention to what keeps returning: a half-forgotten interest, a relationship you’ve let go cold, a path you turned from twenty years ago.
You might be surprised by what shows up when you offer that kind of attention. A clearer read on a relationship, or on how you want to spend your time. A creative project shelved decades ago. Sometimes just the dawning sense that the life you’ve been running isn’t quite the one you want to keep running—and the willingness to let that awareness matter.
And notice that that’s only part of the story. The ones who hear the songs don’t remain at the edge forever. They come back. The actual healing doesn’t happen out there in the dark. It happens in community. What they receive isn’t just for them. It becomes something they carry back, something they offer to others.
That might be one of the most important shifts in the third quarter. What’s taking place in you doesn’t shape just your own growth and clarity. It also impacts the way you relate to the people in your life: how you show up, what you give.
Which makes your individual questions all the more important. When they start to emerge—about who you are now, what you want, where you’re headed—resist the urge to default to what’s always worked: solve, fix, keep things moving. When you find yourself facing that darkness, maybe you want to stay long enough for something to come.
-Scott
Scott Bryson, PhD, is an author and longtime English professor in Los Angeles whose work explores how people make sense of their lives through story, especially in midlife. He’s currently writing a dissertation that uses songwriting to reimagine ancient myths as guides for modern life. He speaks regularly to universities, conferences, and community groups.