This is Fifty
By: Alecia Kennedy
Tags: Life Lessons, Self, Midlife, Acceptance, Self Love

I am sitting in a Spanish-style home in the Baja California Sur feeling strangely optimistic and content as I approach my fiftieth birthday. Like most people, I never really thought I would reach middle age. Not because I thought I would die young, but because I couldn’t imagine myself as a frumpy, graying, eyeglass-wearing, teenager-having caricature of a middle-aged person. I knew intellectually that it would happen one day, but that day was always so far into the future that it was unfathomable.

Until it wasn’t. Until now.

So here I am at the point where I thought I would be despairing of my obviously dwindling days left on the planet, and I’m fine. My life is good. I mean, it’s pretty much how it’s always been. I keep trying new things. I keep searching for truth. Clarity. Sometimes I succeed and sometimes I don’t. But the difference is that now I know it doesn’t matter. Life is a series of experiments and experiences. We live, we try, and hopefully we learn to do better along the way. We are all the artists of our own life. And what we choose to create is uniquely ours. The trick is to create something that serves us well.

I am spending the week with those people closest to me in a beautiful locale. We swim, laugh, snorkel, get sunburns, and talk about our kids. As we look out onto the strange, desolate beauty of the desert, we drink sangria and margaritas and talk about our careers, our relationships, our lives.

We have struggles but we are optimistic. We have learned enough to know when to let go and when to keep trying. We have marriages, divorces, graduations, births, and deaths in our past and in our future. We know how lucky we are to still be here. We know how lucky we are to have lives that allow us to have this experience together. We are Generation X and we still have one hand in our pocket while the other one is outstretched reaching for the stars.

I am happy and shocked to say that I truly don’t have any regrets at this point. That’s probably because I’ve always taken chances. I’ve done the things that I’ve felt led to do, even when they didn’t make sense. I’ve said yes to life more than I’ve said no. But I’ve also finally figured out how and when to say no to people and situations that are not supportive of happiness. I don’t have to include everyone in my life, I just have to make sure those people I do include contribute to it in a positive manner.

Please do not take any of what I am saying as a suggestion that I have it all figured out — I still have a long way to go. But it’s getting easier. I struggle less mentally and emotionally than at any other time in my life. I care less about what anyone thinks. I feel myself becoming braver rather than more fearful. I am bolder than ever. I am more grateful than ever.

I am at peace in a way that my twenty-five-year-old self could have never imagined. The person I was at twenty-five was still worried about not having a straight path to success or not having all the answers. At twenty-five I expected to already have life figured out, to have a working plan for my career, to at least have a clue about my personal life.

At fifty I know that I will never have all the answers. At fifty I know that life is not a straight path lined with boxes to check. I know that doing all the so-called right things may not get you where you want to go and that sometimes your mistakes will lead you to where you need to be. I know that often the very best events of your life are unplanned and it is only in hindsight that you can see where all the dots connected. At fifty I know that if all my plans had worked out as I wanted at twenty-five then my life would have been less interesting, less full.

At fifty I can honestly say that I’m happy with myself. I have let go of so much of the anxiety that held me back when I was younger. I have learned to let go of a lot of things: people who do not love me, ideas about what I should be, should want, should have. I have let go of worry about tomorrow and about goals that were never really mine.

Fifty is about acceptance, curiosity, learning, laughing, and love. Fifty is not something to fear, not the beginning of the end, not a pit of despair from which I will never emerge. Fifty is just fifty. It’s just me right now. And although I never thought that I would say this, I’m ready for it.