When the World is No Longer Future

Musings on middle age while I'm on deadline

Accept these paltry musings on middle age while I’m on a deadline. Back in college I used to write poetry instead of writing my essays, now I write Substack thoughts instead of edits. Here we go…

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Twenty years ago, we sat in the shadow of an ancient castle, looking down on Princes Street while holding our cups of Starbucks tea (with a stroopwaffel precariously balanced on the top so the caramel would warm) — and all the world was future.

Idealism was rosy; our souls and imaginations were not yet bruised. We had not welcomed and weathered the arrival of our four delightful and chaotic children — the ones whose lives we learned to bend ourselves around so that diaper-changing and middle-of-the-night feeds would become silent steps in the liturgical shaping of our new selves as parents. Then, the city held out endless possibility.

The story and practice of hospitality was still new. We had just begun welcoming 1 or 2 around our table and red couch. We had not yet hosted 25 Scottish and international friends for an American Thanksgiving. A few years later there would be Bible studies and our apartment full of college students in Pasadena, barbecues in San Diego with neighbors, and years of people from church, neighborhoods, book clubs, and university students in Salt Lake City gathering around tables — tea cups or wine glasses precariously set as the children and dreams accumulated.

But eventually, sometimes as I’m sure it is with you as much as it is with me — that, much too soon, the dreams crash, or sometimes roll to a stop in the endless tactical decisions that we make as we grow older. Our souls feel a bit tight, a bit tender and bruised.

The tenor and cadence of life is no longer future.

Photo by John Moeses Bauan on Unsplash

Whether we’re stuck in what-feels-like the endless present, or those regrets and bruises of the past loom their heads in middle-of-the-night wakings, this middle agedness feels just so…middle. (Or “mid” as my teens would say — but probably no longer because if I’ve caught on to a new word, its time is likely passed).

Novels rise and fall on successful middles. Are we invested enough in the four Pevensie children and the fate of Narnia to follow the endless chasing by the White Witch, Edmund’s treachery, Aslan’s romping and claws so that redemption feels altogether good, right and true, when we finally get there?

Do we have patience enough for Tolkein’s whole cosmos or the digressions in Moby Dick? Can we stick through the moments of horror in Flannery O’Connor to get to the startingly shocking nature of grace?

Let’s be truthful, dear readers, sometimes I finished those books just because I had to. I trudged through Chaucer and Melville. I wanted the quirkiness of American Gothic not the book of manners of Austen or nation-building of Walter Scott. But, dear reader, I did what was required. I made it through middles.

So, for those of us in the middle of things — of places, of what portends to be a brutal American election season, the middles of faith journeys, parenting and relationships, or work taking new shapes — perhaps (and we pray there is) the shocking revelation is just around the corner. Or, more likely, it may be awhile off. So we soldier on.

But what makes for a good middle age? I suppose while future-orientation is necessary and provides a dopamine hit, staying the course in the middle is the long, slow, painful and beautiful way of wisdom. It is the amalgam of integrity, the crucible where loss gets turned into gratitude, and where we get to try on the garment of selflessless.

Sometimes it looks like obscurity; sometimes it is faithfulness on a platform. But the work you have done in those early years begins to show its fruit. May the fruit of our middles be delicious. Carry on, friends.