by Magnolia Miller

Created on: April 28, 2008

If you live long enough, you discover that life has a way of teaching you its lessons, whether you want to learn them or not; and never is this more apparent than when one reaches middle-age.

Call it maturity, call it wisdom or just call it plain paranoia that your life has flown by faster than you can keep up with. But the fact is, at mid-life, you start paying attention to things and people that perhaps, until now, you've never noticed.

I was reminded of this recently, as I enjoyed a quiet dinner with my children at a local restaurant during what I affectionately refer to as the "senior hour" around 4:30 p.m.
While we were eating, I happened to observe two elderly women who were sharing a table near ours. With their snowy white hair, and wrinkles that had etched deeply into their faces, and a bend in their frame that only gravity can produce, it was apparent they were well into their 70's - perhaps even older.

As I watched them enjoy their meal and each other's company, I realized that there was a time in my life that I would have hardly been aware of them. I was much too busy. Too busy living for me, thinking of me and assuring myself that aging, death, and dying were reserved only for those, umm, old people. But then, a long comes middle-age and with it a new and unique perspective.

Often times, when speaking of the middle, we tend to think of the average, the ordinary, the mundane, the banal or perhaps even the mediocre. No one likes to think of themselves as average, ordinary or mundane, but in actuality, when you do find yourself in the middle; it's a pretty insightful place to be.

Living life in the middle affords you the particular advantage of being able to see where you are, where you have been and where you have to go, all at the same time. It's much like crossing a bridge and stopping half-way to take in the scenery.

Looking back, you can see the steps that have brought you to where you are. Looking ahead you can gauge the approximate distance you have left to go, and looking around, you are able to examine the vista of landscape, that up until now, you may have only been vaguely aware of.

Youth propels one so quickly through life that you scarcely have time to examine much of anything. There are far too many places to go, there is far too much to do and just who has the time to take in the view anyway?

But, mid-life gives you the permission to walk instead of run. To languish, if you so wish, in those moments of your life, that before now, had rocketed

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