Muddling through (the middle)

Elaine — Wed, 09 Sep 2020 01:07:32 +0000

Do you feel as though you’re muddling through the middle of this midlife season? Do you, like me, realize that you’re way past the beginning — you’re hardly sure what you’re doing in the moment — and you can’t picture how life will look in this next phase? Take heart, this is right where we are supposed to be!

I had to remind myself to have patience with this messy middle stage today, when life and changing roles converged at dinner time. I found myself juggling getting food on the table, helping my husband rearrange the garage so he could get his car out for a drive, and giving opinions to my daughter about wedding dress accents. And then the nurse from mom’s assisted living home called to say they’re sending her to the ER for evaluation.

It’s hard to know your purpose

We’ve been told that the magic is in the middle, and yet, so often we simply feel caught in a changing world, putting out fires, and struggling to make sense of life. We feel as though this isn’t how our lives are supposed to be (see I’m not where I thought I’d be).

Muddling through the middle is a natural part of the midlife process, helping us find our way from one phase to the next.

This discomfort is normal

One of the earliest and foremost experts on life stages, Gail Sheehy, author of “Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life“>Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life,” “New Passages: Mapping Your Life Across Time“>New Passages,” and Daring: My Passages: A Memoir“>Daring: My Passages: A Memoir, wrote extensively about the midlife phase. Sheehy passed away on August 24, 2020. She’s widely known for her wisdom in navigating the inevitable stages of life, including midlife. She compared passing from one phase of life to another to changing chairs.

“We must be willing to change chairs if we want to grow. There is no permanent compatibility between a chair and a person. And there is no one right chair. What is right at one stage may be restricting at another or too soft. During the passage from one stage to another, we will be between two chairs. Wobbling no doubt, but developing.”
Gail Sheehy (1977). “Passages: Predictable Crises of Adult Life”, Bantam

Muddling is an active process

Oxford Languages defines muddling as “the action or process of bringing something into a disordered or confusing state.” Isn’t that what change does to us?

I realize more than ever that making sense of midlife involves leaning into the muddle. To find our next phase, we must become comfortable with discomfort, accept the mess, and be okay “changing chairs.”

Muddling through means letting go

Sheehy says that passing from stage to stage requires acquiring new knowledge and letting go of what worked previously. She writes, “With each passage some magic must be given up, some cherished illusion of safety and comfortably familiar sense of self must be cast off, to allow for the greater expansion of our distinctiveness.”

I wrote about this tension between the familiar and the new in A season of letting go.

When we let go, we make space for the new

The muddle, sometimes uncomfortable, is part of the process of becoming new. When your roles shift and change, trust that you’re right where you need to be.

This sometimes messy muddle leads us to a new phase of life. We find our way by letting go what we’ve known to be true so that we can embrace the new. We may feel “wobbly” as we navigate changing roles and relationships with our adult children, our parents, even our spouses. But as Sheehy said, that’s how we grow.

And God always meets us in the muddle

I’m still waiting to hear back from the ER, but mom’s joking with the nurses. We’re pretty certain it’s part of a chronic condition and not life-threatening. We’ll let the doctors sort it out. And, I know that God’s got this.

Embrace this muddle in the middle and you’ll find your space.

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