the fifties are the new twenties

Love After Love

The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other’s welcome,

And say, sit here, Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you

All your life, whom you ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott



I turned fifty in February. Since that time, it’s occurred to me more than once how this time period parallels my twenties. In talking to friends, I think this may be especially true for those of us who made major life changes in our forties. The last part of that decade I began to seriously take stock of my life and jettison what no longer nourished or challenged me to grow. I broke up a twenty year marriage, faced the fact that the spiritual community I was part of was harmful to my spirit, and started to ask from my relationships that I receive as much as I give. Life provided some hard knocks; I had a major house fire and got my heart broken. Despite it all, in the last half of that decade I fell in love with my life in a way that I could have never imagined, the mid-life “crisis” enriching me in ways I feel I’m only on the precipice of understanding.

So how are the fifties the new twenties? Entering my twenties I felt a sense of exploration, there was a real spaciousness in experiencing life. There were hard knocks in my twenties too, including lots of death and loss. This shaped me and opened me spiritually. There was no push to settle down, to have children, and no desire to make a permanent commitment to anyone. I could feel that off in the distance, which intensified the need to stay free. It was time of sexual experimentation and openness to different forms of relationships. The early fifties are feeling eerily similar.

Here at fifty, having spent the last two decades creating the template of my life, I’m now free to improvise. The hard work of forging a career and creating a home is over. The biological urge to have a child and get a partner with whom to build a life is no longer driving me. Parenting an adolescent has its challenges, but it is drastically different from the rigor and selflessness of parenting an infant or young child. As in my twenties, I’m curious how life will now unfold, and open to just about anything. In my twenties, I was fully aware of my youth, and that it would soon be over; I was becoming an adult. Strangely, this is mirrored in my fifties. I’m very aware of the preciousness of this middle passage; I am on my way to becoming old. Suddenly, I feel fully awake to the incredible beauty and splendor (thank you, Reya, for giving depth to this word) of being alive. In my early twenties there was a giddy ecstacy of cutting free from my parents, of being on my own. I feel this resonating in me again, only this time I feel I'm truly cutting free from old patterns, patterns that were a result of childhood, that don't serve me. Liberation seems to be a theme of both decades.

Like the thirties, the sixties loom large. And like in my twenties, I know the current decade will end with a Saturn return, the time when Saturn returns to it’s original position it was in when I was born. Saturn strips away illusions and makes limitations visible. For many, it is not an easy time. For me, given I had worked so hard at eking everything I could out of my twenties, my Saturn return was rather triumphant. I’m aiming for this again. At the end of my twenties the return marked the transition into adulthood, testing me on whether I was ready to move from the phase of youth into the phase of maturity. I sailed thru it, knowing what I wanted to do with my life, getting my degree in those years and getting initiated as a witch. Around 57 I will be tested again, transitioning into the next phase of the life cycle, moving from maturity into old age, and hopefully, wisdom. I can feel the value of this time period, how important it is to keep my heart and eyes open, to not only enjoy the popcorn, but to feast on my life.

Yumm.