Ang Galloway

Chip’s Note: Ang is one of my favorite Australians and I wrote about her early in my book, Learning to Love Midlife. She’s also a gifted writer so I hope you enjoy this musing of midlife fun.

A “half-life” is the time it takes for something to reduce itself by half. It’s a term that’s most commonly used in relation to radioactive decay, but it’s also useful in other contexts, which is why some of us (less sciency types) have started borrowing it to reframe how we think about a variety of things like knowledge, careers, drugs, even secrets… essentially anything where the quantity or strength of something decreases over time.

There is no shortage of metaphors to describe midlife, but none have resonated with me quite as profoundly as Leslie Bartlett’s literal and metaphorical ‘new lens on life.’

I’m not sure whether I vacated my old life or whether it vacated me ... but either way, I find myself here in this weird liminal space... betwixt and between two chapters of life, but not properly belonging in either.

I have finally moved into my new digs, smack bang in the middle of the city and it feels good.... but if I’m honest, it also feels a smidge confronting. Maybe that’s because I have officially stepped into that ‘new chapter’ that I’ve been pontificating about for the past few years and now I need to actually make good on all those grand plans I have for the second half of life.

Throughout history, coming of age ceremonies that celebrate a child’s rite of passage into adulthood have been woven into the fabric of societies the world over. From twenty-first celebrations, to Bar and Bat Mitzvah’s to the Amazonian bullet ant initiation, Ethiopian cow jumping and the Indonesian teeth filing ceremonies, coming of age is and always has been a milestone deserving of recognition.