The Midlife Chrysalis

By Audrey Stallsmith

The midlife crisis is so common that it has become a cliché. Middle-aged people—especially men—are supposed to become dissatisfied with what they have accomplished at some point in their forties or fifties. They then begin to ask “Is this all there is to life?”

At that point, the more selfish of them may buy expensive sports cars or even dump their spouses for flashier models in an attempt to feel young again. But it’s actually not the lack of youth which is the problem, although it probably is increasing maturity that makes them aware of something missing.

David Brooks posits in The Second Mountain that, once we reach the summit of what we can accomplish professionally, most of us still will be dissatisfied. That can happen whether or not we made an actual success of that career. After a slide into despondency, we either can wallow there or begin to climb a second kind of mountain.  One that is less about our ego and more about service to something outside of ourselves—either other people, God, or both. In other words, midlife crises can become midlife chrysalises from which we spring reborn.

Probably the reason that men are thought to be most vulnerable to such crises is because they were, in past generations, the ones most likely to base their worth on their careers. Women generally found their success in their children. Since there is little else as important as the shaping of young minds, I’m guessing that those housewives actually were more likely to feel satisfied with what they had accomplished, as long as those children didn’t turn out badly. In that case, the mothers too may have begun to wonder whether they had wasted their lives.    

Although Brooks’ theory is an interesting one, I’m sure he would concede that some people don’t take until midlife to realize that basing their peace of mind on careers or offspring is a losing proposition. In fact, the majority of those who dedicate their lives to God instead do so as children or young adults. 

So, as Brooks suggests, the rampant depression among young people these days may be due to their recognition that the freedom to achieve isn’t enough unless they are provided with something worth achieving. And they seem less willing than prior generations were to settle for practical careers which to them seem prosaic. (Though those of us who write prose might resent the fact that prosaic sprang from “having the style or diction of prose; lacking poetic beauty.” That eventually came to mean “commonplace” or “unromantic.”)

“If you don’t know what your life is for,” Brooks writes of today’s young people, “how does it help to be told that your future is limitless?” He adds that “Freedom isn’t an ocean you want to spend your life in. Freedom is a river you want to get across so you can plant yourself on the other side—and finally commit to something.”

What I see in the lives of my twenty-something nieces and nephews convinces me that they definitely are looking for something to commit to, but not having much luck in that search. They seem to feel obliged to sample everything in their quest before settling on anything. Unfortunately, some of them appear to have abandoned their childhood faith in the process, apparently not realizing that it provides the ultimate cause and the ultimate commitment.

Even those who do commit to God in their youth can become tired of the journey by the time they reach middle age—and think they should have reached the promised land by now. Under those circumstances, they may react as the Israelites did in Numbers 21, where they called manna “light bread” and began to look wistfully at what the non-liberated lived on—not realizing that it was considerably more insubstantial than manna!

In those circumstances the Old Testament sojourners required a painful goad from stinging snakes. We too may need big trouble to force us to raise our gazes from our slogging circumstances to the One who has been providing for us all along    

Brooks is right, though, that some people only discover—or, perhaps, rediscover—God after a crisis, whether it occurs at midlife or not. Chuck Colson comes to mind, since he was converted in his 40s while on the verge of being sent to prison. Granted, his crisis was more extreme and more public than that experienced by most of us. But he did, indeed, climb a second mountain later in his life with his ministry to other convicts.

So I think God’s garden is a lot like mine—a work constantly in progress, since I tend to pluck marked-down, middle-aged plants off of store shelves to fill empty spaces in my plot. Some plants, like some people, get rooted much later than they should have. But those latecomers, due to a sense of urgency, well may out-produce those established at the proper time to allow maximum growth.

Or, to return to my original metaphor, there actually are several generations of Monarch butterflies and chrysalises each summer. Those who take wing the latest actually last the longest as they must embark on a long and difficult journey to overwintering locations in California or Mexico to make future generations possible. We also need latecomers in the church, who can testify from experience as to what doesn’t work in life, to keep future generations on the track of what does.