“Growing older” suggests that you are an “old growth human,” who prioritizes emotional, cultural, relational, spiritual, intellectual, and, yes, physical growth during your whole lifetime. “Getting older” sounds like a passive affliction. Yes, you’ve pursued a career, bought your home, dutifully launched your kids, and been a positive influence in your community. But, for so many of us, we hit 50 – our middlescence – and we are unwilling to discover new ways to grow like we did in adolescence.
Hey, to all you 49 year olds, actress Hannah Waddingham, who played Rebecca in the TV series “Ted Lasso,” turned 50 last year and suggests, “You’ll never know yourself more than when you’re about to turn 50.” It’s prime time for deciding whether I am going to “grow” or “get” in the second half of my adulthood.
Writer James Hollis writes, “Midlife is an opportunity to reexamine our lives and to ask the sometimes frightening, always liberating question: ‘Who am I apart from my history and the roles I have played?’” Sometimes it requires us to be radically stunned into consciousness. It’s been said, Serendipity is too important to be left to chance. And, yet, so many of us leave our second adulthood to chance, passively waiting for the cosmic butler to show up and announce, “Your life is now served.”
Hollis suggests, “In the second half of life, there are two major tasks: The first is the recovery of personal authority…The recovery of personal authority is a daily task imposed upon all of us by the soul. Closely allied with the task of gaining, or better, recovering, personal authority is the task of discovering a personal spirituality.”
So, I ask you, dear reader, in 2025, how will you recover your sense of agency, your ability to not do what’s expected of you, but to do what will astonish you? And, how can you be guided by your soul in this process? What, now, does your soul ask of you? It’s time to listen and act.
-Chip
P.S. Was encouraging to see the NY Times Daily podcast end the year with an episode called “The Year in Wisdom” (yes, wisdom is trending).