Wasted

I had dinner with some younger friends the other night. One of them, who has been a teacher for over 20 years, said she recently signed up for a certification program to become a personal trainer and also joined a volunteer fire department. Wow! Big changes and a big commitment. She is clearly rethinking the path she’s been on for years and craving a new direction. She’s in great physical shape. I could see her doing both things well. She went on to have second thoughts about the certification, though, saying, “Here I go again. I won’t make much money.”

I thought about something I read recently that said, “don’t waste a mid-life crisis.” I thought about friends years ago, who discarded spouses and careers midlife, and still ended up miserable. You can’t reboot a life as easily as you can unfreeze a computer. Change—without some deep reflection about what really matters to you—will stay superficial and won’t get you any farther ahead no matter how different the new version of you looks on the outside. It’s easy to know what we don’t want. It’s a lot harder to understand what really makes us happy.

A “midlife crisis“ can happen at any point in life. Life constantly provides triggers, opportunities for us to reevaluate where we are headed and to course correct. Those triggers sometimes arrive on an individual level as a result of loss—death of someone close to us, marital discord, getting fired, a health scare. Or, we experience a collective reckoning like 9/11 or the pandemic that begs that we take stock of how we are living. Many of us make vows to change when we are in the midst of a crisis, but scramble to return to the status quo, even knowing that reality fails to support our best selves.

There’s never a shortage of wake-up calls, but the willingness to dig deep and realign to values, is rare. We want change…as long as we don’t have to. My friend needs to decide what it is that she is looking for and what she is willing to give up to have it. If wealth is a core value and is driving the change, she doesn’t need to give up her goal of being a personal trainer, she just needs to make sure that she has a sound business plan. The factors precipitating a change in her life are complex. She’s disillusioned with the educational system, newly divorced, financially recalibrating. Maybe my friend needs to find a better-paying career, one that excites her again and also allows for her to spend more time in the gym. It’s easy to be seduced by a quick fix, but meaningful change only comes from understanding what you really need and being willing to let go of the versions of yourself that you’ve outgrown.