The Age of Miracles: Embracing the New Midlife

by Marianne Williamson

Age can hit you like a truck, knocking the wind of your youth right out of you. For years you move around in reaction, seemingly defined more by what you aren’t anymore than by what you are now.

We realize one chapter of the book of our lives has closed, but perhaps the next one doesn’t have to be worse. In fact, it could be infinitely better.

Release the chains that bind me and free me to my truer self.

As each of us returns to the truth in our hearts, we will be released to our highest creativity and intelligence.

Midlife is about surrendering things that no longer matter, not because our lives are in decline but because they’re on an incline. Traveling upward, we simply let go of some baggage.

Mature angst is preferable to youthful angst; it somehow seems less tortured. You know too much now to either laugh or cry the way you used to. You see things from a different perspective, and with that new perspective has come a new sense of self. On some essential level, you have birthed a new you.

It’s been fascinating over the last few years, watching the high and mighty in business and politics fall precipitously—not because their plans didn’t work, but because their character flaws undercut those plans. Whether the microphone caught them making racist comments or their greed overcame their common sense, who they were as people made all the difference—more than their résumés, their degrees, or even their past successes. If you fail at the art of being human and staying human, you recklessly court disaster.

How familiar this sounds...

She was at Auschwitz from the age of 22 to 24. My problems at that age? Romance, career, and the like. Hers? Adolf Hitler.

Amazing to think about how differently an individual's life can be with just a span of a decade or more between.

“Oh my goodness, I’ve come back—and I survived! I came here to perish, but I did not! He who wanted to destroy me was himself destroyed, but I survived. I am a survivor!”

I experienced a peculiarly American split, a neurotic affliction that women of my generation were particularly prey to. I didn’t realize it consciously—few of us did—but the message we internalized in the name of liberation was that we could only be liberated if we became like men. We could be hot and sexy, or we could be smart and taken seriously; we could not be both. So many of us did what we thought we had to do: We suppressed the goddess, the wild wise woman, in order to make it in a world that we’d subconsciously joined in its disdain for the essentially female.

One of the gifts of age is that it finally becomes easier to ignore other people’s opinions. We’ve been through enough to know our own true feelings, and we’re ready to live the lives we would have lived all along if we had thought it was okay.

Women have been afraid to show our fierceness—on behalf of our children, our planet, or anything else—because we haven’t wanted to be labeled “witches.” The fact that the consonant has been changed from “w” to “b” has not changed the emotional reality for us.

We suppressed our joy under the false assumption that joy is silly. In fact, it’s when you realize how very serious life truly is that you take every opportunity to laugh when it comes along.

Once you’ve lived enough, once you’ve cried enough tears, you know how blessed it is to have something to smile about.

So it is that love can be hell. And so it is that love can be heaven.

We’re brought into each other’s lives on divine assignment, spirit working through the subconscious mind to draw us to people with whom we have the greatest opportunity for soul growth. But that doesn’t mean that the lessons will always be easy.

There comes a time when you feel like the high of romance isn’t worth the pain of its demise; when the risk of a romantic disaster outweighs the thrill of the ride. And that time is … you guessed it … more often than not around midlife.

I’d read hundreds of pages about the horrors of her past; now I wanted to know what finally getting it right would look and feel like to her.

You can go forward in timidity and fear, with an energy that reads, “I’m afraid of the demons. I come with lots of baggage.” Or you can go forward with the fabulous energy that only the experience of love in all its vicissitudes can give, an energy that reads, “I have seen the demons, but I stared them down.”

I read a quote once that no matter how old we are, the music we most relate to is the music of our youth.

Romantic love is a force of nature. Like an ancient goddess, it likes to receive gifts. It must be honored, respected, protected, and cherished. Otherwise, it simply leaves.

Romance isn’t here to complete your universe but to expand it.

It might have taken us 40 years, but we’ve finally matured to the point where we’re ready to manifest dreams we embraced a long time ago. What took us so long? Why 40 years? What stopped us? More than anything, I think, murder stopped us. The voices of Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., along with the four students at Kent State University, were silenced violently and abruptly right in front of our eyes. Those bullets weren’t just for them; psychically they were for all of us, and we knew it. The unspoken message of those assassinations could not have been louder.

America can be likened to a house, in which many of us ran to the second floor (art, spirituality, careers, fun) and left the downstairs (traditional politics) to less inspired thinkers. We kidded ourselves that it was an okay arrangement, until those of us on the balcony began to smell the unmistakable odor of a house burning down.

The first time around, we allowed ourselves to be silenced. It remains to be seen if we will be silenced now.