Let’s face it. No one wants to admit that they are facing middle age. It’s like letting go of your youth and admitting that old age is right around the corner. We don’t want to admit that we need hair loss prevention remedies or that we might not have accomplished everything we wanted to yet.

As we tighten our belly belt in hopes of keeping middle age bulge far from our daily influences and we wake in the morning to stiffness and upper back pain, we are reminded that we are slowly entering the land of middle age.

Somewhere inside I think we believe that if we haven’t accomplished certain goals by the time we run smack into middle age we believe that we haven’t really lived. We assign worth of life to worth of goals, as though saving a puppy or being around for an old friend doesn’t have a lasting impact.

Why does all this matter, really? Are we so afraid that middle age will bring us closer to our death that we are afraid to admit we haven’t quite really lived yet? Are we worried about what the neighbors might think or that we’ve sown all of our wild oats and we are now stuck in the land of responsible action?

Growing older doesn’t have to mean anything if we don’t want it to. Rather, we have the ability to decide that we are at our prime, wherever we are. Age is just a number. Granted, sometimes it’s a significant number. But it is a number all the same.

Middle age signals that we are halfway there, halfway through our life expectancy. As though from here on out climbing downhill should be easier than it was to climb uphill we tend to act as though we have nothing really special to share or nothing really innovative left to do.

In such cases, we would be wrong. We are not bound to our greatness or our lack thereof due to our age. We are limited by our own perceptions of what we should be. Some of this we are still carrying from our parents. We are still trying to prove them wrong about us and prove to ourselves that we were right about us. We said we’d be something special. We are. The real crime is that most of the time we can’t see it for ourselves and we have determined that some highly unattainable goal is what will make us, in our minds, ’special.’

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