Halftime

A dear friend shared this Brene Brown quote with me after my last post:

I THINK MIDLIFE IS WHEN THE UNIVERSE GENTLY PLACES HER HANDS UPON YOUR SHOULDERS, PULLS YOU CLOSE, AND WHISPERS IN YOUR EAR:  

“I’m not screwing around.  It’s time.  All of this pretending and performing—these coping mechanisms that you’ve developed to protect yourself from feeling inadequate and getting hurt—has got to go.

Time is growing short.  There are unexplored adventures ahead of you.  You can’t live the rest of your life worried about what other people think.  You were born worthy of love and belonging.  Courage and daring are coursing through you.  You were made to live and love with your whole heart.  It’s time to show up and be seen.”

It reminded me of a podcast I heard recently.  In it, the host described a publicity stunt by Will Smith in celebration of his 50th birthday.  You can see as much as you care to on YouTube, but he literally bungee jumped out of a helicopter over the desert outside Las Vegas.  The host quoted him as saying it was his “halftime show” marking his transition into the third quarter of life.  She went on to say something along the lines of, “We are not supposed to stop striving as we reach middle age.  This is just the beginning.  Games are won in the third quarter.”  I tried to find this exact interview with the Fresh Prince and came up short, so I can’t quote it directly, but as a former basketball player and current coach, this idea really resonated with me.  After spending so many weeks and months navel gazing over my age and the passage of time and the current condition of my life, I was invigorated by this new metaphor.  I still like the midsummer one a lot, especially when you acknowledge that the “frenzy of the harvest” that I mentioned last time implies an awful lot of life work yet to be done.  But thinking of my life as a game yet to be won forces me to put down my wine glass and get up out of my dock chair and figure out my next step.  I’m a competitor to the core, and part of my struggle has been that I didn’t think there was much left to achieve.  Please don’t misunderstand—it’s not that I believe I have nailed every aspect of my life—but it does feel as though I accomplished a lot of what I set out to do as an ambitious, dreamy eyed student stepping out into the world.  I have landed more or less where I wanted to—and I never thought much beyond 40 when I set my sights on my future in any case.  

Take, for example, this exchange I vividly recall from college, which I have quoted countless times in recent appointments with physical therapists and orthopedic surgeons:

Athletic trainer after preliminary rehab on (another) severe ankle sprain:  “We can tape you up and you can play tonight, but you will probably regret it when you’re 40.”

Me at 19 (snorting): “40?  I’ll practically be dead by then.  Tape it up.  I’m playing.”

Isn’t that how we usually envision our lives?  We sort of skip over this middle section with its monotony of bills and   housework and slowly aging bodies we never intended to let get this way.  We picture vividly the wedding days and the big promotions and the new houses and the baby's births.  But the grind of the day to day--once the career aspirations are more or less achieved ("I'm a lawyer!", "I'm a vet!", "I'm a program manager!"), and the dewy babies are eye-rolling teenagers, and the not-so-new house needs some upgrade as uninspiring as a new roof or bigger water heater, and the old body needs a new hip--don't factor much either in our  imaginations, or in any of the media and entertainment we consume (books, movies, magazines, social media). 

But if it’s only halftime, there’s a lot of game left to play.  Even if we won the first half, we aren’t done.  There's more to the second half than just maintenance and waiting.  Any team that steps back on the court after halftime with the game plan of playing not to lose, surely will.  The universe unquestionably has her hands on my shoulders and is whispering “You need to get back out there—on your terms this time.”  I know this is true for so many of the rest of you, or my last post wouldn’t have struck such a cord.

Of course, no player worthy of the team colors fails to make some adjustments heading into the second half.   You are more tired and probably a little bit bruised and beat up.  You don’t carry the same optimism and confidence into the second half as the first.  You’ve seen what can happen, and you are significantly better prepared— more seasoned and aware, more cautious and alert.  On the flip side, you’ve honed your team.  You've had to make some cuts to your roster and that wasn’t easy, but hopefully the teammates by your side now are the right mix of aggressive and smart, fast and effective, supportive and strong.  They compliment you and your skills and they love the game just like you do.  They all want you to win because if you do, they do.  

The stakes are higher and harder though (aren’t they always, in the 3rd quarter?). There is no denying that you are that much closer to the end.  Mistakes in the third quarter are a lot more costly than those you make in the first.  The challenge for all of us is to adjust our strategy to the life we have, while never backing down, giving up on, or surrendering ownership of what winning looks like in the end, for us specifically and individually. We can’t fall asleep to this—allowing the drift of our lives, the expectations of the world around us, or the demands of our loved ones to sweep us into old age with many (any) of our dreams left unfulfilled.  I also believe we need to step into our ability to actually change some of the rules.  Some of them are obsolete and some of them are just stupid.  In the second half, we ought to be able to look the rules, and the rulekeepers, in the eye and say, politely and with all the sportsmanship in our well-behaved hearts, "hell no."

I am just now opening my eyes to this need.  It took me quite awhile to even define what was eating me.  I thought I was just sad that my beloved oldest child was about to start her senior year.  Or that my joints were giving out two decades before most people’s.  Or that my job was starting to feel a bit monotonous.  Or that parenting teenagers is a grueling exercise in frustration and self doubt.  Latching onto this halftime metaphor has helped me start to reposition my thoughts around this phase of my life.  It is not just about over.  There is so much game left to be played.

On a side note, I was trying to articulate some of this to my teenage son the other day.  Because the pitch of a mother’s voice occurs at the frequency of a dog whistle to her offspring, he only heard a mere fraction of what I was saying.  When I got to the “Will Smith skydiving as halftime show” part his ears perked up.  Somehow, he managed to wrangle a promise out of me that for his 21st birthday and my 50th (which occur in the same year), we would skydive together to celebrate our momentous passage into new phases of life.  I was kind of thinking “book club dinner party” would be a nice halftime show, but I guess we’ll see.  I’ve got a few years yet.

In the meantime, I am really trying hard to define my game plan for the second half.  I have literally dusted off some old corporate strategic planning documents and spent hours poring over metrics and strategies for myself.  What does “exceptional health” look like in the third quarter? What plays do I need to start running to create true financial independence?  What do I want my marriage to look like?  How do I define parenting success?  After my last post, a friend mentioned creating a bucket list which was one of those “duh” moments of brilliant insight for me.  Of course.  Lay those into a long term strategy.  What sights do I want to see?  What mountains (literally? Figuratively?) do I want to climb?  Does collecting my pension in 20 years after 40 corporate years of dutiful service define life joy and winning for me?  Where do I want to live?  Who do I want to be?  It has been quite a daunting process, but it has invigorated me.  It led to the creation of this blog.  It led to me finally scheduling a doctor’s appointment to get this next thing taken care of.  It led to a change in how I approach discussions about budgets and goals between Chad and I.  It led to me finally rolling out my yoga mat again (once in the last 6 weeks.  I mean, you have to start somewhere).

So I will begin, again—smarter and tougher than I was in the first half.  I will bring the best parts of my game with me into the next quarter, and I’ll dump the plays that haven’t been working.  I’ll be up to the challenge.  And I plan to win.