Introduction

But human beings need deepening places, too. And far too many never have any. Think about your deepening places, Meg.

— MADELEINE L'ENGLE

MIDLIFE IS MORE THAN A CRISIS. It is a summons to grow and a challenge to change. Midlife beckons one inward. It is a move to interiority, a passage to the deeper places where we discover our authenticity, where we realize both our limitations and our grandeur. It is here that we come home to our truest Self. We take our external experiences with us to the inside and look at our life. We evaluate our goals, hopes, dreams, beliefs, behaviors, experiences — all that has marked us and contributed to the person we have become — and we ask ourselves: “Is this the person I want to be in the future?”

Midlife doesn't go by a precise chronological timepiece that automatically tells us when it is time to evaluate our lives, although most adults experience this stage of growth roughly between the ages of thirty-five and sixty. I have learned that each persons midlife journey is unique. While some midlife characteristics and themes may fit each person, there are always exceptions and unique experiences.

I recall a man who told me that he wasn't “a wealthy executive who'd retired early and left a wife in order to marry someone younger.” He felt that this was the typical portrait of men in midlife and that most authors focused on the external changes of life instead of the internal ones. He was a struggling middle-class male in his early fifties who had lost his job and didn't know what he wanted in life. At the same time, he was much more focused on the inner life than on the external pursuits of a new woman or a new hobby, as many midlife men are described.

Similarly, while some midlife women may be experiencing the “empty nest” syndrome, others may be like a woman in her early forties who had two young children. She was enjoying this dimension of motherhood in her life and was just beginning to discover the thrill of the spiritual path unfolding for her. She felt that her children were helping her in this discovery and that she had experienced a lot of midlife issues in her thirties.

C. G. Jung recognized that what works for the adult person in the first half of life will not work for the second half. Each person s journey will unfold in a way that calls her or him to growth. Many books on midlife have been written since Jung first proposed that this period of adult growth is every bit as painful and unpredictable as the stage of adolescence. This stage is variously referred to by authors as “midlife,” “middle age,” “middle years,” or “the middle passage.”

Many people automatically refer to midlife as a “crisis.” Webster's Dictionary defines “crisis” as “the turning point in the course of a disease when it becomes clear whether the patient will live or die.” Midlife is a turning point, a time when one can no longer go by the dreams and the life-approach of one's youth. To simply continue the way one has from yo