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 past you with the blurring speed and velocity of a subway train.
And with its strategic vantage point, middle-age enables you to see the tapestry of your life in a panoramic view, which has been woven together with the threads of your experiences, one by one, moment by moment, year after year.
And the people and events that you scarcely noticed before in the distant background are now part of the foreground, fleshing out and giving depth to a life that otherwise would have been nothing more than a one dimensional character sketch flat and uninteresting.
Why it is we fail to notice such important detail until mid-life, I cannot explain. Perhaps it is because we are now becoming all too aware of our own aging and mortality. Perhaps it is because we now realize the common strands of humanity that binds us all together. Or maybe we have just simply suffered enough loss and grieved enough death, that the illusion it belongs only to others has finally been shattered.
There are times that I look back at the steps of my youth with a bit of forlorn longing, but I cannot say that I wish to walk them again. The richness of the life that I now enjoy is the reward for persevering through one half century. It is a reward that can only be earned through living the years where there are no short cuts or easier paths to walk. And though the fifty years have emancipated me from the foolish of my youth, I am still beholden to the lessons that I have yet to learn.
And now, those women, with their snowy white hair, deeply etched faces and gravity drawn frames are no longer strangers - simply old people - which I scarcely notice. Rather, they are fellow travelers on the road of life which have walked before me. They are pilgrims, sojourners, pioneers and teachers who have seen the way and likely know the way, and so who better to ask for directions and possibly even a helping hand.