Midlife as we see it in this country has a bad rap, conjuring up images ofspreading hips and thinning hair--a post-peak slide into senescence. Basically a life of diminishing opportunities. While this may very well be a carry-over from the 1960s, when everybody over 30 was considered the enemy, it is also a carry-over from Freud, who popularized the notion that children grow, but adults don't.
To Mark Gerzon, however, author of Coming Into Our Own: Understanding Adult Metamorphosis (Delacorte; 1992), the term "midlife" means just that-the middle of life. Whether it hits us on our thirties, forties, or fifties, it does not mean there is no more room for change, or growth. On the contrary, at a time when he thought his development as an adult was coming to an end, Gerzon found himself embarking on totally unexpected journey of renewal-entering what Carl Jung called "the second half of life." Granted, the baby boomers are reaching midlife, so naturally a new microscope will be focused on the subject. Yet resident boomer Owen Lipstein, tail-end boomer James Mauro, and post-boomer Matthew Scanlon all found Mark's work enlightening-and encouraging.
PT: Your book takes a much more positive view of middle age than we're used to. What does that say about our culture?
MG: We love youth. In America we're all in love with staying young. That works until a certain point in life. But if you only love what's young, eventually youth start to hate yourself. I see that happening to a lot of people, including me, in our 30s and 40s when we're no longer "young.' Either our attitude has to change, or we begin to die.
PT: Why has there been relatively little written about this time of life-except in terms of "midlife crisis"?
MG: It's true that there has been very little research done on midlife. There have been human development studies of adolescence and childhood. And there are new studies of the elderly. But it turns out that there's a period of 30 to 40 years that hasn't yet been examined-mainly the middle third of the life-cycle. Why not? Aren't those years important? In fact, they are what I call the "black hole of the life-cycle": roughly from 30 to 60 years old. As a result, we don't know what the hell we're supposed to do with those years. They're the lost years of adulthood.
The truth is we just don't know what the second half of life is for. When I interview Hindus from India they say, "Of course you have a midlife crisis. When you get to be 35 or 40, the script ends. So the only sensible thing to do is have a crisis and discover what's the purpose for the rest of your life.'
PT: How did you come to terms with your own midlife? By writing this book?
MG: For me, entering midlife followed a great success. I managed to get Hollywood and Moscow to start cooperating in the entertainment industry. Suddenly I was with all these famous people, I was on the front page of the L.A. Times, I was on the evening news. On the outside everything looked good; everything should have been a success and inside there was just the opposite. There was this feeling of hollowness and the fact that none of it mattered.
The dissonance between those two things led to my coming home from Moscow one time absolutely bone tired. I turned to my wife then and I said, "I think the first half of my life has just ended and the second half of my life has just begun." As soon as the words came out of my mouth they sounded phony, because I don't talk like that. But it wasn't phony-it was the truth.
PT: Which led you to examine the components of your life and take a fresh look.
MG: Exactly. I realized that the only alternatives our culture gives us is to be stuck in a rut or to have a midlife crisis. With those alternatives, no wonder people prefer the rut! A midlife crisis can be terrifying. It means you're having a nervous breakdown, you're going bankrupt, you're getting divorced. Generally not good news. What I do in my book is reframe the crisis as a midlife quest-as the opening shot on a journey rather than the end of the line.
PT: You use this word "quest," so it's a beginning. It's really noble, actually.
MG: It's a challenge, too. I'm challenging people to go into the crisis and through it. A lot of people going into the crisis are doing one of two things: getting stuck in it or running away form it. I'm encouraging people to go into it and through it, as you would a door. The purpose is not to walk through it, go back and do it again, walk through it, go back and do it again. The purpose is to walk through it and go on to the other side- the side that's called "The Second Half Of Life."
PT: Do people recognize these challenges?
MG: I think people are scared because they don't really understand the challenges. As I discovered, the rules of the second half of life are different from the rules of the first half. The rules of the first half are by and large inherited; while the rules of the second half are ones we have to discover for ourselves, anew.
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scanlon,
senescence,
thinning hair,
thirties,
time of life,
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