Planning your own mid life crisis
Just as there is a degree of planning involved in your travels with a large dose of serendipity, so are these skills needed in planning your own mid life crisis.
It is important that you plan a middle life crisis. I know. I am an expert at it having had 2 so far and possibly there will be more to come.
If you are going to have a mid life crisis, clichéd as it may well be, then you should plan to have a very good one. This takes guts and strength to decide what it is you want to achieve and what it will take to get you to that point. First though, it takes recognition that you have to do something to wrench yourself out of this phase or to embrace the phase in a positive way.
A mid life crisis is a time of upheaval and change in your life and there are many triggers that can cause this. I was fairly classic in one middle life crisis, which was when the kids left home. That is what happens when you have children 13 months apart. They are little children together, at times revolting teenagers together and leave home together to pursue studies and interests. It was a time when suddenly all at once they didn’t need me, and having been a single parent for 17 years it was a gut wrench and a half. I now can see that this is just how it goes but that does not take away from the feeling of emptiness or relief (it could go either way).
Did I buy a Harley? Did I get a tattoo or a Porsche? Did I think I had better hurry up and learn to play the piano because I really want to play the songs by Supertramp? ‘Bloody well right’ I did. But I didn’t.
After sitting around and feeling very lost I decided that it was time to re-group. So, I made a list. I am a great list maker. The first on my list was to become a person in my own right again, separate to being a mother and separate to be being a teacher.
To achieve this I needed to do what has always worked for me, and that is travel. For some reason I find it a very humbling experience and it puts into perspective what seem like big issues, but in the scale of life are not necessarily that dreadful. Travel has a way of giving you a wake up call.
I remember it being a Saturday afternoon and I was lying on the lounge on a beautiful day feeling sorry for myself. I thought, that is it. This is when, looking like crap from probably crying, I went down to the travel agents and said “send me somewhere … anywhere, I don’t care”. She said ‘How about Vietnam?” I said ‘ok’.
I had travelled before and knew that it was probably the remedy to my grieving if that is what you call it. If not, at least it would be an interesting experience. So I went to Vietnam and I loved every second of my time there and I did return in a much better frame of mind. I had met lovely people, seen incredible things, eaten brilliant food and I was just me, not a mother or a teacher, but just another traveller. So in the immortal words of Sound of Music, when a door closes, a window opens or something like that.
While travelling, I was able to think.
One phase of my life had finished, so to speak, and it was now all about me. Selfish? Of course it is. Is this a good attitude to have? I totally believe it is. I still worked, I was still a parent but it was now ‘me’ time. Me, me, me. This is when I decided to meet a nice travelling companion when I returned home. So I made a list. What I would accept and expect. This in itself took a lot of guts and premeditated as it was, I thought it was something that I wanted. I had some trial runs when I returned. Really nice people, but not the right people. Then serendipity must have played a part. At a parent teacher interview, this man came to talk about his son. Yep, Gordy.
Funny, we had gone to the same university at the same time and hadn’t know one another; our kids all went to the same school and were all friends, yet we hadn’t seen one another until that day. The rest is history. So as far as a mid life crisis goes, this one was well executed and was worth every second of the anguish.
Revolting as mid life crises could be, they do happen whether you use that term or not. It does take a lot of courage to recognize it for what it is, and then to do something about it by making a strategic plan to get yourself through it and to come out the end a more enriched person. Travel is a particularly effective antidote or solution, if not just a time to reflect and gain some perspective. Someone that you can travel very easily with was just a coup in my strategy.
