Sometimes life offers up a perfectly timed—if painful—reminder that midlife is less about crisis and more about resilience, reinvention, and reckoning. Mine arrived face-first on the streets of Austin during the SXSW conference.
I was there for business and content development, fully immersed in the buzz of creativity and connection. What I didn’t expect was an unplanned encounter with the pavement, just two blocks from my hotel. One moment I was walking off the conference day’s energy, the next I was bleeding, stunned, and needing help. Now eight days later wondering what this fall signaled—not just physically, but symbolically.
There’s a peculiar vulnerability in falling at this age. At 35, I might’ve brushed it off. At 61, the tumble felt heavier, laced with fears about aging, strength, and recovery. What if this fall was a preview of fragility? It was a reckoning moment I hadn’t scheduled!
And yet—what unfolded next surprised me. Strangers appeared. A man offered me an ambulance. “No, what I really need is a towel or something to stop the bleeding.” He returned with black cocktail napkins that stemmed the bleeding. Thank God they were black napkins. Two veterans walked me to the safety of my hotel, offering me advice for the next day, “Just tell everyone you should see the other guy,” they grinned. That made me laugh inside even though I was throbbing on the outside.
At the hotel, when the ice pack provided by the staff failed to chill, I ventured to the only ice machine on the seventh floor and a nurse named Jill materialized in an elevator. After she asked if I was alright, she helped me back to my room. Jill assessed my injuries, and made sure I had everything I needed for the ER.
I expected pain. What I didn’t expect was to feel so powerfully held by the kindness of strangers.
Three days later, still sore and processing, I tuned into MEA’s Midlife Mastery Summit—a weekend designed to help us see midlife not as a point of decline, but as a breakthrough moment. The timing couldn’t have been more serendipitous.
Listening to voices like Arthur Brooks, Mark Nepo, and Martha Beck, I found language for what I was feeling: Transformative Vulnerability. Our challenges—chosen or unchosen—crack us open. They force us to re-examine what we take for granted: mobility, independence, identity.
Mark Nepo’s words rang especially true: “Life’s challenging moments can be gateways to unexpected strength and deeper wisdom—when you know how to navigate them with grace.” Falling forced me to slow down, ask for help, and receive it—a lifelong learning curve.
Day two, Tom McCook’s Simple Movement Practice was fourteen minutes of relief that I have carried home. Thankfully with the recording, I have some integrative exercises that help alleviate some of the pain as I recover and reintegrate body, mind, and spirit. The infinity movement at the end of his teaching holds a special symbol of grace for me.
In midlife, every obstacle carries with it the potential for growth. This isn’t the crisis we’ve been conditioned to fear—it’s the opening. It’s where decades of lived experience synthesize into wisdom. It’s where we stop proving ourselves and start asking: What matters most?
The truth is, my fall in Austin wasn’t just a fluke accident—it was a lived metaphor. We will stumble. We will face unplanned reckonings. But midlife gives us the muscle memory—and the community—to rise wiser.
Thanks to that fall, and the serendipity of MEA’s Summit landing in the same week, I’m walking away with new clarity: Aging is not what breaks us. It’s what strengthens us—if we let it.
-Annette
Annette Mason, Sabbaticalist and Succession Architect at Trilogy Design Works, wife, mother, Gee (grandma). She travels. She gets knocked down and gets back up again with the kindness of strangers and the wisdom of MEA and her compadres.