Midway through our life’s journey, we begin to feel the weight not only of our own lives, but also of those we have not lived. Maturity comes when we cease to deny our own finitude.
It is a sunny day in June and I am sitting in a room on the ground floor. From outside the window comes the twitter of birds. All the local starlings have come flying down to eat the cherries from the trees that grow in front of the house. There has not been much time to enjoy the sight (and the taste) of the beautiful fruit. A ripe cherry is a fruit whose time is coming to an end. It will be no bigger, nor more lovely—it is whole and perfect. There is nothing to be added. Nothing can happen to it anymore.
Decline in the Afternoon
But people? With people it’s completely different. When it seems they’ve reached the peak of their potential in life, somewhere between their fortieth and fiftieth year, they do not speak of fulfillment, rather, they run into a mid-life crisis. In his short essay “The Stages of Life,” Carl Gustav Jung compares the paths of human destiny to the course of the sun throughout the day. First it rises. This is a period of becoming rooted in the world, building one’s position, determining one’s significance. One’s greatest task is to climb higher and higher. This is not simple; not everyone has the strength and courage. Some remain on the starting blocks, terrified, frustrated, and unhappy. Others set off into life: they learn, work, make families, achieve success. This is up until the sun reaches its zenith, its climax. This can come as a surprise, because in an individual life no one can say in advance what this climax will be. And yet, as Jung writes, at noon we have “the beginning of life’s decline. Man’s values, and even his body, do tend to change into their opposites.”
In the first half of life everything is more or less clear. We have to face up to what fate brings our way. We roll up our sleeves and do what we have to do: act, decide, be consistent. Sometimes we set our jaws and give up on plans or dreams, we make compromises. Change comes unnoticed. We’re still full of vitality, still active; we have many tasks and plans to carry out, and yet, with some astonishment, we note a new plane of existence. This could happen at a time when our children cease to be children or when a loved one dies. We feel that something has ended, that a plot has concluded. Then, for the first time, we are conscious of the fact that everything will one day come to an end. In Making Death Thinkable: A Psychoanalytic Contribution to the Problem of the Transience of Life, Italian psychoanalyst Franco De Masi writes that our ideas of mortality are not fully realized until the second half of our lives. Then we begin to understand that our capacity to make plans, dreams, and hopes is—to say the least—limited. We cannot approach our lives with the absolute certainty that something is definitely still going to happen.
De Masi cites French philosopher Vladimir Jankélévitch’s view that despair is a lack of a future. A shadow of this despair appears midway through life: a sense that there are limits to what may come. It is true that one accomplishment of Prometheus—perhaps even greater than stealing fire from the gods—was to gain the assurance that people will never know the dates of their death, allowing them to dream and plan even if they are to die the next day. After passing the zenith, however, we can no longer deny our own mortality. As De Masi writes: “The thought of life hurtling toward death is something like an intense unconscious mental disturbance that recalls a depressive breakdown. One’s death emerges as chaos, as a state of confusion and oppression. Small wonder that this new experience triggers anxiety and resistance.”
If we have more hatred than love, the attempt to wrest control over this chaos takes the form of megalomania, narcissism, envy, cruelty, rapacity. The anti-aging industry rakes in profits from our rejection of the passage of time and the resulting physical changes. This rejection can take a variety of forms: pretending to oneself and to others that nothing has changed, that one is as physically spry as ten years before; an erotic “second childhood” in its male and female incarnations; anger and fear that younger people are waiting to take our place. “These futile efforts to stop the flow of time,” suggests De Masi, “can, however, lead to one’s character becoming emotionally impoverished or warped. The mid-life crisis can only be mastered when a person constructively faces the concept of the end of existence and the traumatic effects of thoughts of mortality.”
Surrendering to Change
The crisis passes when it turns out that the old framework of our lives ceases to hold. What we have supposed to be evident and certain is no longer so. The tasks, duties, and aims that gave meaning to each new day, month, and year seem less important than before, or perhaps utterly unnecessary? “The state of human uncertainty in contact with death […] is a result of the impossibility of knowing one’s destiny; and it is from this ‘ignorance’ that the presence of absence is born. Death is precisely an absent presence. The vision of death is in itself an inextricable part of a lack of integration,” writes De Masi. Death is absent, for when it comes, all else vanishes. Yet, in the second half of life, absence enters our consciousness. The presence of the absent changes everything. We may fear this change, oppose, or deny it. Or we may give in to it. Jung tells the story of a pious man, the head of a church council, who became unbearably intolerant, morally and religiously, at the age of forty: “At the same time his moods grew visibly worse. At last he was nothing more than a darkly lowering pillar of the Church. In this way he got along until the age of fifty-five, when suddenly, sitting up in bed in the middle of the night, he said to his wife: ‘Now I’ve got it! I’m just a plain rascal.’ … He spent his declining years in riotous living and squandered a goodly part of his fortune. Obviously quite a likeable fellow, capable of both extremes!”
For fifteen years, his state getting worse, this man struggled with something. Possibly, he was expending more and more energy in fending off a growing conviction that he was missing something important, something he did not want to know, which did not fit his vision. He was not alone. It is not so easy to accept the thought that something is missing from our existence—which we have carefully organized—that there is a nagging sense of absence. The words structured and ordered have special significance here. An orderly life is finite, closed, closer to stagnation, barren routine, tight structure. On the one hand this seems reasonable and it is hard to say exactly why it ought to be torn apart, why one should permit oneself a bit of madness. And yet, as seventeenth-century French author François de La Rochefoucauld memorably put it, “He who lives without folly isn’t so wise as he thinks.” Stagnation is boredom, and boredom is a living death—it means not only staying in one place, but also the hideous feeling that it is impossible to move on. This does not mean there is nothing to be done. You can become absorbed in your work, get a promotion, even look for a new job. You can spend time with family, watch your children grow up and leave the home. You can take care of your aging parents, plan your next vacation. In truth, however, nothing is happening. The future as a space in which you can develop seems closed. It is hard to reconcile yourself to this, because the inner change you start to experience in the second half of your life also brings a troublesome consciousness of opportunities not taken, of chances that fell by the wayside.
It is only an illusion that the vital decisions you make are always thought out rationally. The choice of a professional path or partner could be a reflection of a “false self,” a figure you have (unconsciously) developed to conform to social pressure. Your choice of a path in life could have seemed attractive because it was safer than others or it met your parents’ expectations. Or it provided a way out of an oppressive environment. And maybe that environment was so bad, so full of violence and contempt, destructive to your sense of self-esteem, that it was hard to keep your own desires in mind. In our earlier choices there is more despair than joy, more efforts to escape than to consciously choose our own path, more searching for a safe asylum than courage.
Taste the Moment
Jung writes that midway through our life’s journey, we begin to feel the weight of the lives not lived. In extreme cases, this burden may turn out to be unmanageable, as it does with the protagonist of Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich, who, on his deathbed, bids farewell to “life with the consciousness that I have ruined everything that was given me, and it is impossible to rectify it.” Realizing this, he begins to cry out—and he cries on for three days . . .
Maturity begins with the mid-life crisis. We might try to fend it off, denying reality. We might wallow in sadness over the times that have passed, over wasted opportunities and lost youth. We might hide away in depression, or take on the truth of the transitoriness of our existence and the riddle of mortality. It is a riddle because death, the negation of life, is unimaginable. Regardless of whether or not it is the Son of the Night who appears, the grim, winged, silently descending Thanatos, or a macabre skeleton with a scythe—this famed iconography is all merely a poor attempt to reflect the emotions stirred by the unthinkable.
Paradoxically, only a brave encounter with the unimaginable can be of help; a chance to beat stagnation, to save oneself from boredom. By facing the absent, we cannot keep from questioning our own presence, from wondering: Who am I? What am I doing here? What is really important to me? How much is what I have worth to me? “Thinking about one’s own death ultimately leads to encountering oneself, to knowing the reality of our life and its authenticity when the truth can no longer be evaded,” writes De Masi. The process that begins in the second half of life has nothing to do with the simplicity and clarity of the first half. A person becomes mature when they realize their situation, they neither deny it nor despair—when they can perceive that their story includes both what has happened and what has not. As the Israeli Jungian Erel Shalit submits in his Cycle of Life: Themes and Tales of the Journey: “Even if we have managed to walk our own individual path, having been fortunate to follow the road less traveled and found our way home to a sense of meaning in our personal quest, we need to carry the unanswered questions and unknown possibilities of the road not taken.”
A mature person can juggle a contradiction in their mind—a consciousness of the finitude of life, on the one hand, and the point of having dreams and plans on the other. They know they are building something that will certainly be abandoned some day. And despite their convictions, or perhaps precisely because of them, they can perceive the value of what befalls them. It is no accident that one of the most important spiritual exercises in the garden of Epicurus was meditatio mortis—not to torment oneself with the prospect of death, but to learn to taste every fleeting moment of life.
The presence of the absent frees one from stagnancy, introducing a tension that is crucial to development. It poses questions that there was never time to ask oneself. It makes one aware of problems that, as Jung says, are never solved, for their whole meaning comes not from solving them, but from working at them. This is a new challenge. Without it, life would not be full. Maturity is a time for questions, not answers; for movement, not stopping; for searching, not respite.
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