E235 Living In the Middle with Mary Rogers
Have you written the middle of your story?
Life in your 50s is literally living in the middle of your adult life. If you haven’t noticed, middles are messy.
Beginnings are exhilarating. Endings are tidy. Middles are neither. I consider this a good thing and a bad thing.
As I share in this episode, the middle of any story – including your own midlife story – involves changes, twists, and turns. And until that phase of your life has wrapped up you can’t readily identify the middle story of your bigger story. Confused? Of course, because that is how it feels to live in the middle!
Some of my favorite quotes from the episode:
“When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.” ~Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace
Life is not so much about beginnings and endings as it is about going on and on and on. It is about muddling through the middle. ~Anna Quindlen
Every new beginning comes from some other beginning’s end. ~Seneca
Human beings love stories because they safely show us beginnings, middles and ends. ~A. S. Byatt
I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity. ~Gilda Radner
Learn more about the Winter 2021 Experience 50 Book Club
