Guided Reading Activity 10-3 the Culture of the High Middle Ages
An Ode to Middle Age
Your body begins to betray yous. Yous have neither the vitality of youth nor the license of sometime age. But being over the hill has its pleasures.
From the exterior information technology looks steady.
It looks resolved. Sitting heavily in a chair, with settled opinions and stodgy shoes—there'due south something unbudgeable about the middle-aged person. The young are dewy and volatile; the old are toppling into fragility. But the centre-aged hold their ground. There'due south a kind of magnetism to this solidity, this dowdy poise, this impressively median country.
But on the within … Y'all're in deep flux. A second puberty, virtually. Inflammations, precarious accelerations. Dysmorphic stupor in the bathroom mirror: Jesus, who is that? Strange new acts of grooming are suddenly necessary. Maybe you've survived a bout of something serious; you probably have a couple of fussy fiddling private afflictions. Yous need ointment. It feels similar a grapheme flaw. Maybe information technology is a character flaw.
For all this, though, you are weirdly and unwontedly at-home, like someone riding a cycle without using his easily. You're not an apprentice adult anymore. You're through the disorientation catamenia, the Talking Heads moment—"And you may find yourself in a beautiful firm / With a beautiful wife / And yous may ask yourself / Well, how did I get here?" You're through the angst and the panic attacks. You don't notwithstanding have the wild license of old historic period, when you can write gnarly, scandalous poems like Frederick Seidel, or tell an interviewer—as The Who's Pete Townshend recently did—that "it's too late to give a fuck." Just y'all're more free. The stuff that used to obsess you, those grinding circular thoughts—they've worn themselves out. You know yourself, quite well by now. Life has introduced you to your shadow; you've met your dark double, and with a bit of luck the two of you have made your accommodations. Yous know your friends. You love your friends, and you tell them.
I'yard generalizing from my ain case, of course, considering what else can I practise? As well, a sense at concluding of having some things in common with the other humans, the other wobbling bipeds—this, also, is i of the gifts of centre age. Good experience, bad experience, doesn't matter. Experience is what yous share, the raw weight of it. The lines around the eyes. The bruising of the soul. The banging up against your ain boundaries, your own limits.
Limits, limits, give thanks God for limits. Thank God for the things you cannot do, and that you know you cannot do. Thank God for the final limit: Expiry, who now gazes at yous levelly from the pes of your bed, and with an ironical twinkle, because you still don't completely believe in him.
At whatsoever rate, if you're reading this, you're not dead. So: Should you leap gladly, grinningly, into these contradictory middle years, when everything is speeding up and slowing down, and condign more serious and less serious? The middle-aged person is not an idiot. Centre age is when you can throw your dorsum out watching Netflix. The middle-aged person is being consumed past life, and knows it. Feed the flame—that'south the invitation. Become upward brightly.
Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/01/ode-to-middle-age/603067/