THE HILARY HENINGER

According to stats Canada, I’m roughly halfway through my life. Even with adjusting for good health, the knees of a 30 year old and no reading glasses in sight, the numbers don’t lie. That’s roughly 40 more years of living a life of my choosing (based on the average, which I’m not, but again, bear with me). However, as anyone with aging parents can attest, with the next 40ish years ahead of me, even if guaranteed in length, they likely aren’t in quality.

If you’re with me so far, or have started perusing job postings from the blue zones , let me reiterate that this isn’t a post about pessimism or foreboding, rather the opposite. It’s about optimism and awareness and intentionality, and maybe a quick check to see how youthful your knees are looking.

(PS.Once you start looking at people’s knees you can’t unsee them and I apologize in advance for this reality check. In turn, elbows are the great equalizer and if they faced forward, we’d probably all be crying. I digress – now follow the bouncing ball back to my point.)

Midlife crisis aside, and you are all welcome to have one, this isn’t some panic filled post about ‘following your passion’ or getting off the hamster wheel of life, this is about an authentic conversation on how we guide our choices, at every stage of our life, but certainly in the second half. I personally was lucky enough to have my crisis early which ended a marriage, brought me some of my favorite people and a whole lot of hard truths I had been avoiding. Not to worry though, for anyone feeling left out or like an underachiever, there is still time for you to have your own midlife crisis (let’s just agree not to cut bangs). Wether you do or not, approaching the mid point of life, seems to me, the perfect time to shit or get off the pot by being intentional with how we orient our lives. A self imposed gut check. A time to take the opportunity to align with our eulogy virtues, as David Brooks refers to them.

Depending on any number of factors, your virtues will surely differ from one another. The virtues however, outside of some alignment with the people closest to you, and in and of themselves, aren’t what matter though. It’s how we orient our life around them that does.

How we orient ourselves and the direction of our life matters. In my opinion, it matters the most. It is the lens through which we see the world. The assumptions we build our foundation upon. The problem that we are solving for.

Orienting our life around ‘not losing’ is not the same as orienting it around winning.

Orienting our life around ‘not getting hurt’ is not equivalent to orienting your life around building love.

Orienting our life around ‘not failing’ is not the same as orienting it around achieving success.

One contracts, the other expands.

One builds walls, the other boundaries.

You’ll no doubt feel better in the moment but they’re short term solutions.

They will all work, just be sure it’s the outcome you are looking for and the timeframe you want.

When we orient our lives around our wounds we optimize for different things than when we orient around our dreams.

We optimize for protection instead of possibility.

Ironically though, we don’t remove the risks we are often trying to avoid, we simply delay them. The risks of heartbreak, loss, grief, courage, truth, pain or disappointment don’t go away. They’re just deferred. To a different period of time, a different person, or a different circumstance, with the potential to become, at our most flippant, a regret of the dying.

It’s not wrong to do this. This isn’t about morality. Let me be clear on that. Who am I to say what you should or shouldn’t orient yourself toward or optimize for? In light of that, I also retract my statement on bangs, while fully accepting that I have taken many of life’s hardships to my hairdresser, looking for a miracle but swearing it was just ‘time for a change’ when I asked for that lob. My yearbook photos (unfortunately) tell the same story.

This isn’t about judgement, rather, this is about intention, and the impact of that intention. An opportunity to reflect on what we are consciously or unconsciously creating, given how much of our life we live on auto pilot.

In my opinion, a life worth living is built with intention and courage. It is not accidental. It is also not without hardship. It’s about what we will thank ourselves for when we reflect back on it all. The risks we took, the courage we had, the discomfort we endured. The highs to our lows. The intention and courage we took in relationally navigating our life, knowing that we had a choice to meet our lows with fear or courage and that while we didn’t always get it right, we oriented our learning in the right direction over time. That we didn’t optimize to get hurt less, but to love more.

The difference? the first part is a given, the latter, a choice.