I was just speaking with a friend who was saying the same things that I have been saying: things just start coming up in mid-life. It’s as if things catch up with you and for the first time, you can’t shake them. I think it is especially hard if you have lived the first part of your life for everyone else. You know, where you go along to get along and you are polite and push down the anger. I saw this quote by Ghandi the other day that said
I have learnt…to conserve my anger, and as heat conserved it transmuted into energy, even so our anger controlled can be transmuted into a power which can move the world
This is a powerful statement. I think so many of us take that anger of mid life: anger at ourselves getting older, anger at our dreams fading, anger at being mortal – and lash out , ignore it or even worse, continue to push it down. I think for many of us our response mimics the fight or flight response: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fight-or-flight_response.
Yet, I will argue there is another one: fight, flight, freeze or FOLD – I think for many they just give up at this stage. There is a midlife NOmentum and we MUST fight through it.
It’s hard when midlife just sneaks up on you and then one day all these feelings happen. It’s like a switch is flipped. But for some, I think it is more subtle, like the character of Beverly Goldberg on the Goldbergs http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2712740/ – where the mother just doesn’t know how to let go. We don’t know how to transition. Our life is ending one cycle and shifting into a new direction – whether we like it or not.
It seems like in this time we experience unexpected events that shake up the realities we are clinging to, or feelings of restlessness or even anxiety that disrupt old patterns. It’s time to find that which we have lost somewhere along the way.
For me, it was my creative, carefree side. The side that wrote and lived and laughed.
In Astrology, this is also called the Uranus Opposition and is explained in Erin Sullivan’s book, Midlife and Aging (see below):
The function of Saturn and Uranus, the mythic father/son conflict as we experience it in mid-life, is about resolution of conflict and the need for change, even if it is a violent or disruptive act. As a psychic complex, or a dichotomy, Saturn can act as the severing function of our creative ideas. We might be so worried about our own creativity that it never actually is given birth, but is “castrated” before any idea, concept, action or experiment is enacted! In contrast to this suppression, if Uranus has the upper hand, so to speak, then we can be too outrageous, too eccentric and simply unable to get our point across or find an acceptable median for behavior or communication.
The urge for creative experimentation and individuation at midlife can be stuffed back down inside the psychic womb, just as Ouranos stuffed the Hekatonchires back into the womb of Gaia. And, it would then take an “adamant” personal attitude toward ones’ own self to birth the inner urge for creative change.
How do we move forward when it all seems so painful and full of break ups and break downs? I think we need to remember that there are also powerful break throughs waiting for us too. Where are you in the midlife momentum? Have you experienced any of this?
For me, I will just take it day by day.