A shed of my own: Not necessarily Marcus Berkmann’s
Posted by: adonis49 on: April 5, 2012
A shed of my own: Not necessarily Marcus Berkmann’s
Do you think mid-life crisis is in the eye of the beholder? Whatever statistics of researchers in social sciences mildly try to make you swallow?
Do you believe by now that mid-life crisis is actually a series of crises after “maturity”, interspersed with memory lapses?
Like this kid of 9 who wrote: “Mr. Salteena was an elderly man of 42“.
People in their late 30’s prefer to be labeled “thirty something”, and as they reach their 50’s, they like to be called “fiftysomethings”…simply because they lived that glorious period…
Is middle age defined by physical limitations in endurance, such as:
1. Going “ooof” when sitting down on a sofa
2. Refraining from eating pizza after sundown,
3. Preferring to change to slippers immediately as you enter your home…
Is middle age defined by leisure of wider opportunities, as Jane Fonda expressed it: “People tend to be happier after 50: They are less stressed, less anxious, less hostile…Maybe because they realize that “I have been there, done it, and none of it killed me”. You tend no longer to make mountains out of mole hills…”
Late French author Albert Camus wrote: “Nobody realizes that many of us invest tremendous energy merely to be normal“( looking normal in the eye of the majority?)
Dr. von Heller wrote: ” Forty is a critical age. Between 35 and 40, everybody has to turn a corner in his life, or smash into a brick wall…”
In mid-life crisis we become increasingly paranoid of physical shortcoming, only to discover that the rear tire of our bicycle is flat, and nothing is wrong with our leg muscles…Has one of your kids commented: “You’re a grown up. What do you know about style?”
Jane Austin in Emma wrote: “One half of the world cannot understand the pleasure of the other…” Is she referring to the two groups divide: Youth and after middle age?
After all, at which age have you started checking the obituary pages of your local daily? Given that you have started reading anything at all before then…
Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “True terror is waking up and discovering that your high-school class is running the country (politically)…” Middle age people knew how stupid they used to look and think, and now they are behaving as the wisest of all…
J.M. Barrie wrote: “I have warned against letting the golden hours slip by. A few of them hours happened to be golden because I let them slip by…”
And Albert Einstein wrote: “I live in that solitude which is painful in youth, but delicious in the years of maturity…”
Note: Marcus Berkmann is the author of Rain Man, and he latest is “A shed of his own” reflecting on mid-age crisis
Adonis Diaries 
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