Falling Inward at 40

Right around the time of middle-age, usually sometime between the 30s and 50s, there’s a falling inward that starts to coincide with a falling away of what was once thought to be true. At least that’s what I’ve observed in my own life.

After turning 40 earlier this year my life was upended with an incredible amount of change, all at once. I packed my bags and relocated to a new city after accepting a job at an agency I’d never heard of until the weeks leading up to my decision to apply. Within a matter of a few months I found myself slightly disoriented in a completely new environment, during one of the coldest Ontario winters we’ve seen in decades. With my lifelong origins spent working and living in a smaller urban environment, the Toronto skyscrapers seemed to swallow me from above as I first made my way south from the subway station, down the downtown sidewalk to my new office. The frigid winter air further compelled me inward to protect myself from the fierce cold that blasted against any open skin.

Looking back on those first moments after relocating cities last winter, and the previous autumn when I decided to close my beloved private practice office in search of new opportunities, I can’t help but see how my life was being orchestrated as part of something much bigger. A broader developmental milestone that I had entered; and a cycle of my youth that had officially come to a close. The winter became a perfect enclave to cloister myself in stillness between worlds - where I had been, and where I was going. Where that is exactly I’m still figuring out, but I do know now that it’s part of an unfolding that is often experienced by many people around my age, give or take a few years.

As we grow older, we are invited to stop participating in certain patterns of behaviour or beliefs that have already served its purpose. In a youth-obsessed world, it is incredibly painful for the ego to conceive, that by the time we reach middle-age the stamina, time, and opportunities afforded to us in our youth begin to ripen and show early signs of falling away. The task of aging gracefully is then to accept that this body-mind stream is as organic as nature, subject to the arc that life naturally takes as it crests and valleys in accordance with the rhythm of all other living beings on this planet. It admittedly even pains me to share this as I write these words, as I too have been heavily influenced by our modern culture of vanity and consumption, steeped in the denial of our temporary nature.

While the winters of our life are inevitable, as are endings, loss, and the shattering experiences of trauma, I’ve also received the insight recently that these experiences are often not what they first appear to be. The culture that we’re steeped in might have us believe that loss is something to be feared and avoided, but nature demonstrates to us a very different view altogether. In the natural environment, endings are woven directly into the newness of its next evolution. It is true that when winters enter our life it signifies change and a letting go of how things used to be. There is an inevitable grief that encompasses our transition through the coldest seasons of our lives before we arrive into the warmth of spring. At mid-life there is a similar invitation to grieve everything that hasn’t come to pass, and perhaps won’t, while finally relinquishing the last remaining tendrils of childhood fantasies that often drive our youthful striving along the way to mid-life - often a brazen vision of the perfect job, body, family…

There is something beautiful about relinquishing youth and accepting that life is finite. Something that is very counter to what we may have been taught while growing up. It’s that with the passing of time and falling away of youth, the soul has time to mature. As we enter the winter seasons of our life, more and more we can view those moments as a form of stillness that invites us to fall deeper inward, into our self. The opportunity afforded us at middle-age and beyond is that our attention becomes less and less drawn to the outside world. Instead, the focal point of observation deepens within ourselves and within the relationships of those who are at a similar point in the journey. Beauty begins to blossom inwardly. The grace of getting older is in its capacity for mature wisdom - the ability to take inventory of the bigger picture, and to share that with those who are younger. With the eventual inevitability of slowing down comes deeper awareness through stillness, and in the meditation of stillness next comes wholeness through our capacity to commune more deeply and authentically with life. The teaching of this path has been lost in our mainstream society and for that reason, many older people suffer from a sickness of un-relinquished ego and vanity that eventually begins to perilously fold in on itself, creating the various forms of destruction that we’re seeing around the world today.

The best we can do when the winter of mid-life and beyond arrives is to allow it to descend upon us. Not to resist the cool winter air by chasing warmer seasons of the past, but rather honouring its presence by seeking an inner place of refuge. Within that place of refuge and stillness we can allow the winter season to envelop the past entirely as we learn to fall inward, going deeper into ourselves. Eventually we begin to enter a phase of life that is led through a steadiness of mature revelation and that which is revealed to us as a calling, rather than the motivations of a willful ego.