Time

Judith Warner’s latest article for the New York Times is an evocative, heartfelt meditation on middle age. This might be my favorite thing she has ever written (and that is saying something). As I read her words I have that overwhelming feeling of recognition, nodding vigorously while I also blink back tears. Warner writes about singing along to the song from Fame with her twelve year old and realizing in a flash of joy and heartbreak that that song, and the words about “I’m going to live forever” now belong to her daughter and not to her. She notes: “The sense of limitless possibility: hers. Vaulting ambition: hers. Anticipation, excitement, discovery, intensity: all hers.”

I’ve written before about how I have this exact feeling when I listen to our old nursery school’s CD version of “Our Turn to Dance.” As Livingston Taylor’s voice sings, buttery and beautiful, I always feel tears rising in my eyes. I know that it is now Grace and Whit’s turn to dance. I don’t feel sadness about that, precisely, but I do feel keenly aware of all that is already gone for me.

Warner then moves on to a beautiful description of her experience of middle age. Her words are a haunting elegy: “This is the cruelty of middle age, I find: just when things have gotten good — really, really, consistently good — I have become aware that they will end.”

I’ve had a sad, skinless couple of days and I am still not entirely sure what is going on, but my reaction to Warner’s writing suggests this may be part of it. I’m so aware of my children and where they are right now, but an integral part of that awareness is my realization of how much has already happened and how much I have missed. My knowledge of my own limited time pulses like a heartbeat in my head, marking every single moment that passes. It is a zero sum game, this life of ours, and with every day that goes by we have one fewer to live. There’s just no getting away from the cruel, inexorability of this.

I watched my mother receive an award from her high school yesterday, and my heart swelled with pride watching her. As I ran to the luncheon (late from a trafficky drive down) I saw 5 year olds and 18 years olds in the same plaid-skirted uniforms (it is an all-girls’ school). And then there was my mother and some of her classmates, still dear friends even all of these years later. So many moments in the human experience seemed to coexist in that single building, and the fullness of it was almost too much to bear.

Warner ends her article with her personal view of the gradual changes in emphasis that define our lives as we move through middle age: “There are trade-offs: intensity versus contentment, exaltation versus peace. And perhaps the best exchange of all: you trade in an idea of yourself for a reality that, if nothing else, can make you laugh.”

It seems to me that to reach that most elusive and extravagant of goals, contentment, we have to fully accept these trade-offs. We have to come to terms with the self now vs. the self imagined. This is, of course, a significant challenge for most of us, one that requires true maturity. I know that I’m not all the way there, personally, but I do believe in Warner’s assertion that there is great pleasure and joy at the end of the effort. So I wake again today with a renewed commitment to that effort. Every day is another opportunity. For as long as we have days.