The Age of Miracles Read Free

People who were still whining “I don’t know what I want to do with my life ”at the age of 40 suddenly feel as if they know. It feels more like being a teen than like being old.
    In her book The Longevity Factor, Lydia Bronte writes that we’ve added 15 years to our lives … but in the middle, not at the end. We should name and claim this period as a new midlife, for indeed it is new. This period was not acknowledged before because it wasn’t there in quite the way it is now. As we acknowledge the existence of this new psychological factor in the makeup of contemporary life, we build a container for otherwise dispersed, inchoate yet remarkable energies.
    We can bless and transform the midlife experience. We do this by changing our thoughts about it—thoughts that inform our physical cells and constitute the blueprint for our worldly experience. The work is to do two things: drop our limited thoughts, and accept unlimited ones instead. Our thoughts are reflected in our experience, from the state of our bodies to the state of our world. As we reprogram our thoughts, we reprogram everything.
    For women, it’s become common to say that 40 is the new 30 and 50 is the new 40. I’ve asked myself if we just want to believe that or if it’s actually true. Conveniently for me, I’ve decided on the latter. But it’s a double-edged sword, if you think about it: On the one hand, it’s an acknowledgment that we’re looking so much better for longer; on the other hand, it’s also an acknowledgment of how long it’s taken us to finally grow up. What generations before us seemed to figure out much sooner, we’ve taken years to even begin to understand.
    Those of us now maturing into midlife and beyond will not be called a “lost generation,” but we will be considered a generation that had to lose a decade or two in order to find ourselves. In the end, we weren’t so much wasting time as we were working through issues that previous generations hadn’t had to work through. We took longer because on a psychic level, we had a lot more to do.
    Don’t worry if you feel like you’re over the hill now. The landscape is different. We are removing the hill.
    Visiting a childhood friend of mine, I saw a photograph of her from 20 years ago. The difference was dramatic, as she’d physically transformed from radiant youth to a more reserved middle age, and her face now seemed to say, “I’ve given up.” Yet I knew the spark of her youth wasn’t gone; I could still feel the fire she’d had all her life. “That’s Linda,” I told her, pointing at the picture. “I think you should bring her back.” And I could tell from her eyes that she knew what I meant.
    We know, at least intellectually, that we don’t have to sink into dowdiness or resignation at midlife. Youth can give way to something else, something equally spectacular, as we are called into the next phase of our existence. We can consciously lay claim to a more glorious mid-and-later life experience than we might otherwise have had the audacity to imagine.
    We can release the weight of unprocessed pain and embrace the lightheartedness of a wiser and more humble heart. We can see this not as an end-time but as a new-time. We can embrace the fact that in God there is no time. The new midlife is a call of the soul.
    My biggest sorrow, when looking back on my youth, is how much of it I somehow missed. Now, looking at my life today, I don’t want to make the same mistake. I don’t want to miss this. As Bonnie Raitt sang like she was singing it for all of us, “Life gets mighty precious when there’s less of it to waste.”
    My youth was full of so many miracles that I simply couldn’t see at the time. But whenever I’m tempted to dwell on the ways I failed to embrace my good while young, I am reminded that the Author of my good has not run out of miracles.
    That we age, if we are lucky enough to do it, is a given. How we age is up to us. The purpose of this book