When The Moon Hits Your Eye

Not every crisis is a crisis. Apparently the Greek root of it just means "to decide," and I guess you can see where the development of the modern meaning might have evolved. It's the point where everything comes together, where the ossified status quo is made brittle, unsustainable by the gathering pressure of events, life; where a release becomes an inevitability, either by decisive redirection or by a failure of containment. Finals week is a crisis, every childbirth is a crisis, every championship game is a crisis, every Check Engine light is a crisis. It's not that a crisis necessarily demands you suffer, it simply demands resolution, one way or another. I guess you could try to decide to have your baby at 10 months instead of nine, but at some point you're going to use up your allotment of Braxton Hickses and your cervix is going to want to get involved. From what little understanding of what it is or how it works, any situation where your cervix gets involved, your attention becomes compulsory.

By those standards, I'm not really sure I buy the idea of midlife qualifying as a crisis. My therapist would definitely agree as she's pulled me up short when I tried to lay that bullshit out in a session or two. And you know it had to be serious because I'm abnormally hyperverbal* on therapy days, which is basically just a free hour for her. Any time she interrupts the erupting word volcano is basically lost money.

It's definitely true by midlife, you're bound to have accumulated experiences that make your choices seem less clear. I know this because I live with teenagers and newly minted legal adults. Even in the pettiest things,** there is an endearingly unearned clarity of purpose. With my experience I know of course that it's borne out of the false binaries formulated by not knowing what they don't know to consider,*** but it's a pointy, thrusting ignorance that pierces the muffling, hidebound layers of worry. Sure, a stereotypical midlife crisis comes about because people are assholes who want to leave their families and fuck a 20-year-old to remind themselves there's more to life than its inevitable end, but just anecdotally, minus those predictable trappings, it looks more to me like a person of just the right age to really begin to engage the idea of consequences.

It's ennui, it's indecision, it's frustration, it's detachment, it's (if you're unlucky) resentment. It's a restlessness of purpose that hums at a steady buzz that crowds out the things you snatched for yourself back in your days of idiotic youthful clarity like stability, comfort, honor and love.

Love, oy. There are those of you out there for whom love is your universal constant, undimmed by time or passing clouds, a gravitational center like the sun making order, even if it's just the welcome illusion of it, of your little system amidst the unsentimental chaos of the larger universe. And I actually don't resent it if that's where you find yourself. To let yourself be buffeted by its eddys and shearing forces seems brave to the point of reckless, even from the point of view of someone who's been there. It's genuinely impressive, like a magic trick I used to know how to do but can't quite recall the sequence anymore.

Maybe that's the answer though: literally become a magician. Then not only do you HAVE to learn all the (again, literal) tricks, but then you also get a magician's assistant, someone you spend a lot of time with professionally, working on sawing her in half or binding her in a straight jacket and drowning her in an oil drum, someone who (and this is crucial) looks great in a sequined leotard. And you spend a lot of time on the road together, sharing a van, sharing hotel rooms, having to do quick changes in front of one another as you set up between tricks, the close quarters and inter-reliance building a deep, fast river of intimacy that sweeps you forward together right through to your Vegas residency, where you enjoy decades of steady income and mutual admiration and respect until one day, obviously, she leaves you for the young guy who cleans out the tiger cage. But you don't mind really because, hey, you're a magician, you know a gag only works as long as you're both doing your part. If she's out, you're stuck up there in front of strangers wearing a cape. Best just to opt out gracefully as well. Plus, you know, the guy cleans out the tiger cages. That's dangerous work. He earned it. Good for him.

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*OK, you're thinking "really, abnormally hyperverbal, Mr. 700-Word Sentences?" but be fair, you only know me from here. I don't talk like I write. Think how much I'd get punched if I did.

**Assume I'm talking about Fortnite.

***Yes, I sort of just implied that I'm capable of quantum thinking.