The False Self Dies at 40, Then This Happens...
“You see, there’s something rather extraordinary that happens to a person around the age of forty.
Not to everyone, mind you, but to those who have been paying attention, to those who haven’t been entirely asleep through the first half of their lives.
What happens is this, they wake up.
They don’t wake with a jolt or some dramatic revelation necessarily, but with a quiet recognition that everything they once thought was important, well, simply is not.
Now this is curious because we’ve been told our entire lives that youth is the golden time, that the twenties and thirties are when life really happens.
This is during a time when we’re supposed to be climbing ladders and making names for ourselves, during a time we are trying to prove to the world that we matter.
And so, we spend these decades running.
But, running after what exactly?
Running after an idea, an idea of success that somebody else handed to us.
Running after an idea of happiness that came from some magazine or television show.
Running after an idea of who we should be that has nothing whatsoever to do with who we actually are.
Many thought at the age of 25 that we had it all figured out.
We thought we knew exactly where we were going and how to get there.
So, many of us were certain if not absolutely convinced that if we just worked hard enough, if we just achieved enough, if we just accumulated enough, then we would finally be happy.
Do you know what happened?
We worked hard, we achieved, and we accumulated.
When we eventually got there, when we finally reached that place we thought was the destination, we looked around and said, “is that all?”
You see, the first forty years of life, they’re really for a kind of preparation.
Not a preparation in the way we usually think of it, as in preparing for something better, later.
No, it’s more like the way a caterpillar prepares to become a butterfly.
The caterpillar doesn’t know it’s preparing.
It’s simply living, eating leaves, crawling around; doing what caterpillars do but all the while something is building inside it.
Something is getting ready.
This is what your twenties and thirties are and what they’re for.
You think you’re just living your life, making your mistakes, having your heart breaks, building your career, and trying to figure out who you’re supposed to be.
In reality, you’re really gathering material.
You’re collecting experiences.
You’re learning lessons that you won’t understand until much later on in life.
When you’re young, life feels urgent.
Everything matters so desperately much that the job you didn’t get, the person who rejected you, or the mistake you made last weekend feels like the end of the world.
This is because when you’re young, you believe that every moment is defining you, that every choice is permanent, and that every failure is a judgement on your worth as a human being.
But here is what nobody tells you.
All of that urgency, all of that desperation, is just growing pains before transformation.
Last day of the old, first day of the new.”
theartofmadeline
blakekathryn
amandla
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