Lust for life: I want more!
Now it's official: When I recently sat in the office of my homeopathic soul-healer and tried to teach him what a stark tension between lust for life and fear of death I have been for some years, he laughed hysterically and shouted: "You are like a man - in the midlife crisis! " I do not expect him to wrinkle his nose in disgust. He is a conservative man. But he is still right. Yes, I have an unbridled energy, yes, I want to get out. Yes, I dream of a vehicle that I use to whiz up and away. Yes, I smoke again, I sometimes come home in the morning, just before my children go to school, I watch over the "philistines" in my environment, and, yes, I have shot myself into a younger man. On my 45th birthday my life companion gave me a greeting card, then a laughing white-bearded Harley driver and the sentence "Let it crack, old man!". Unfortunately, such cards are not available to women. Allegedly, the midlife crisis is just something for men. That must change urgently. I also reclaim this last male privilege for myself. As a woman. And I'm not the only one. Two of my friends have already left, one just went to the desert and the other into the arms of an adventurer.
They are turbulent emotions, they are not only fun but also frightening. So I sought and found some orientation in the book of evolutionary biologist David Bainbridge. It is called "We Middle Ager, Our Best Years," and the British author cleverly strives to pay tribute to us humans between the ages of 40 and 60. By claiming that in his middle age, man is so balanced between creation and destruction Feeling and understanding that I am fortunate enough to have finally reached the "cognitive climax in the life of the most intelligent living being in the universe known to us". However, the researcher David Bainbridge considers the "mid-life crisis" to be an invention of people who want to make fun of middle-aged men. What he writes is very interesting, but partly penetrating optimistic and in some ways wrong. Because: I am a woman and in the midlife crisis! And she's damned serious. When you get to the bottom of it.
It started when I became a mother. It suddenly occurred to me that my life is finite. Until then I had lived in the belief that you still have so much time! Friends who did not manage to get older and became sad on their birthdays did not just laugh at me. I really did not understand her. We're still young! I said. But suddenly my life did not seem to be in front of me anymore. But behind me. It was a sudden realization. As if I had suddenly turned around, for the first time. I was deeply shocked.
What had that got to do with the children? My girlfriend said: You get scared of your own death, because the children need one. I thought: now that I have created life, I would be aware of its end. The positive biologist Bainbridge would explain it to me this way: I wanted to have children for the sake of keeping the species, but that was not my duty. The duty of the middle-aged is to pass on their knowledge, their experience and their care to their offspring. For this, there is this uniquely long middle age of man. It has a uniquely sized brain. The information from the outside needs, because his genes alone do not enable humans to survive like other living beings. My half life would still be in front of me: so that I can fill the brain of my descendants with culture and humanity.
To pass off offspring. For this, there is this uniquely long middle age of man. It has a uniquely sized brain. The information from the outside needs, because his genes alone do not enable humans to survive like other living beings. My half life would still be in front of me: so that I can fill the brain of my descendants with culture and humanity.
I felt "as before"
That's a nice idea, I'll implement it. But she is not enough for me. Because I can not completely forget myself. Once upon a time, my children were very small, and sadness overwhelmed me in Rome. Mandarins hung on the trees in Rome at the beginning of December, the wind blew through my hair while riding a moped, and I was able to do what I wanted. I felt free. I felt "as before". When I did not have a family yet. I thought: This freedom, that is your actual state of aggregation. When I got home and hugged my kids, I cried. Out of shame. And about the loss of my old self, in my first life.
I believed I could complete this my past. Or to have. And that was probably the moment when I turned away, turned around - and suddenly life seemed only half as long.I tried to ignore the fear and she became quieter. It was no longer the fear of the end. It was a standstill. Standstill means: Life is now halfway around. Unfortunately, it is very long nowadays. The essentials are done. And so it goes on and on. 40 years. In a long while.
I watched the people around me, and most seemed to come to terms with it, in the eternally same repetition of everyday life, on the sofa, in their comfort zone. Some broke out, with mad fury, destroying their relationships and families. I did not want both: not standstill and not the end. So I lay in bed every night before falling asleep and fell from all references. I stared into the room like nothing. The emptiness. Everything, apart from my children, makes no sense. Often I felt buried alive. That was not really a fear of death. It was afraid of a loss of life.
But parallel to this fear grew her antivenin, probably from survival instinct. This joie de vivre! She was driven by the thought: Now get serious! Do what you always wanted to do! When, if not now? A strength grew in me that I had never known before. It reminds me a little of the energy that my friends' housewife mothers got when their kids were out of the house. Then these women set off again. While their men rapidly degraded, after they had just left fast on convertible and mistress.
Later in life, you have control of yourself
Except that today I live completely different: I was never a housewife and feel, right now, more like a man. I changed course as if I were sitting in a boat where I had been sailing off the coast for years, rowing out to sea. I wanted to go, absolutely. I did not just let myself go. But I did not say NO, I said YES. Especially at work, to myself, to my own ideas, wishes and destinations. For example, I wanted to do a reportage on child labor in Uzbekistan. Instead of scrounging off as usual with the idea that this was too dangerous, too far and I was not a foreign reporter, I sat down with the utmost naturalness for the project. As if it were my everyday work. Amazingly, that worked.
The biologist Bainbridge writes: "The woman lives rather in the feeling as if the world would happen to her and not the other way around the world." In wonderful middle age, however, that changes. For it is the phase of life in which one has a great deal of control. About his own life and that of others. And psychologists know that control and well-being are closely related. The more self-determined I can live, the better I feel. Not for nothing, David Bainbridge says, because of their experience and maturity in the whole of human history, the middle-aged are so wise that they exercise power not only over themselves but over society.
My everyday life changed too. It started with little things. A glass of champagne. A fat layer of duck liver pate on bread. Let's pull on your cigarette! Come, let's go, into the sun, to the sea and on to the world. She is so tall and I only have one life. The word joie de vivre is too weak. It's more than lust, it's a greed. Like a gorilla she rears up, drums on her chest and shouts: I want more! Who knows, maybe for the last time, before I get old and weak? And that's why she has to get out, the power. Otherwise, I am deeply aware of it, I get sick.
"Crisis" actually means opinion, judgment, decision. You are at a turning point. You suddenly judge the same thing differently. You change. It is a transformation. It should not be laughed at or stopped in the middle. Because we are all involved in it: not only I have a crisis, the others get it - because of me. Because I provoke the existing conditions. Unfortunately, not all of them hold out. The partners are not, the family is not, the girlfriends are not. Out of fear. Before changes and unconventional behavior. Biologist Bainbridge claims that typical of the middle age is the suddenness of change. Suddenly the skin is dry, suddenly I see bad, suddenly I am middle-old. And, as he says, at the height of my mental stability. That may come. But I still have to transform myself into a middle-gerian who is so balanced. This is a violent process, a crashing phase between panic and exuberance.
All this I wanted to verklickern my pretty conservative homeopath. And that my partner and I are now living an "open relationship". That I would give up neither my family nor my old self. That my partner's smile, of course, often passed away. And that he helps with the diagnosis of "irrational hormone boost". Although he also knows that I'm not in the transitional years. "A crisis is easier to endure if you declare the patient crazy," I said to my soul healer, looking him straight in the eye. He looked at me as if I had turned the world upside down.He has neatly separated into husband and wife. In ridiculous guys who turn into pubescent boys in their old age. And in women who are mature and at home. Finally, I simply asked him to prescribe something that sustains this great gorilla greediness in me. Then he giggled, almost like a fish, and pressed two globules into my hand. Surely it was testosterone.
Read on David Bainbridge: "We Middle-Ager, Our Best Years" (345 p., 22,95 Euro, Velcro-Cotta)
