Shock When the Center Cannot Hold
Our Collective Midlife Crisis Holds the Germ of New Life
This post initially only went to paid subscribers back in February. I’ve edited it and added a video and audio meditation and reflection below. I am delighted to share it with all subscribers today.
I remember being a new mother, learning to wrap my tiny infant in his blanket like a sweet, safe baby burrito. Suddenly, one day, he kept kicking free. In my sleep-deprived haze, I tearily called my older sister—a veteran with four babies approaching double digits by then—wondering what I could possibly be doing wrong. She gently reminded me that this was all part of the plan. After all, I didn’t want a burrito baby but one who would always be stretching his way into a larger sense of himself. Indeed.
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning, and under every deep a lower deep opens.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
W.B. Yeats, in The Second Coming, writes: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold.” Indeed, we are living in a time when the center is not holding. Things are falling apart all around us. It is a tumultuous time. And a frightening one.
But haven’t we all, at some point in our lives, walked through a moment when the life we knew no longer held? When the way we navigated the world—our rules, expectations, givens, limits, and comforts—no longer worked? A death, an illness, a job loss, a revelation—any of these can bring us to a place where the structures of our past fail us. Two such moments occurred on February 5th, although in different years, each of which changed the trajectory of my life forever—my traumatic brain injury in 2018 and my kiddo, Bee’s, near suicide in 2021 mere months before their actual death.
We call it a midlife crisis, but in truth, it is far more than that.
Midlife crisis is often a turbulent season, marked by endings and grief. It is no wonder that it sometimes results in divorces, moves, or radical shifts in direction. And yet, as Jett Psaris, author of Hidden Blessings: Midlife Crisis as a Spiritual Awakening, reminds us, this season also germinates seeds of tremendous possibility. We don’t realize it at the time, but our egos can only take us so far. We aren’t meant to live within the constraints of the first half of life forever.
When the center doesn’t hold, we are being invited into something deeper—an awakening to our truest life, a consciousness more aligned with who we are at the soul level. If we allow midlife to do its work on us, we emerge from the ruins of our old life more integrated, expansive, heart-centered, and resonant with the earth, our fellow human beings, and the Love permeating all that is.
This is where we find ourselves collectively today. The institutions, beliefs, and systems we inherited—things we assumed would stand firm—are crumbling. We are unsure where to hold and how to navigate. But perhaps the truth is: what we inherited was never meant to carry us where we need to go.
In the chaos, we cannot yet see what is emerging. Yet being the operative word. Who we are—who we are becoming—is still unfolding. I want to be clear: I ache for all who are suffering and will suffer because of this unraveling. It is devastating. And I, like so many others, am committed to alleviating suffering and resisting the pull toward tyranny.
And yet, even as we grieve and resist, we are being called to something even more radical—to wake up. To embrace who we truly are.
Cynthia Bourgeault, in The Wisdom Jesus, describes the moment she realized what Jesus was doing in the midst of the passion drama swirling around him:
He was just sitting there—surrounded by the darkest, deepest, most alienated, most constricted states of pained consciousness; sitting, if we can imagine it, among all those mirroring faces of the collective false self that we encountered….sitting there in the midst of all this blackness, not judging, not fixing, just letting it be in in love. And in so doing, he was allowing love to go deeper, pressing all the way to the innermost ground out of which the opposites arise and holding that to the light. A quiet, harmonizing love was infiltrating even the deepest places of darkness and blackness, in a way that didn’t override them or cancel them, but gently reconnected them to the whole.
This is our greatest task now. Our small selves may balk at the seeming insignificance of this, dismissing it as doing nothing at all. But the radical power of love is stronger than all the forces of destruction arrayed against it. We cannot see nor appreciate the most powerful energies in our world—such as quantum mechanics or the impact of distant planets in transit—until we have eyes to see.
Going back to the way things were, even if we could, is not enough. We are being called to more. To embrace the Love we are and move through this hard and heartbreaking season into one where all can thrive.
Individually and collectively, we are meant to stretch past what we think we know, to expand our consciousness in ways that both include and transcend all that came before.
We are far more than we imagine. What are you doing to explore the inner awareness frontier while remaining grounded in community, connection and kinship?
Below is an audio to a meditation and reflection on kinship, community and connection from a recent live zoom call, where we explored some of these same themes.
With love always,
Elizabeth
Video meditation and reflection on Restoring Kinship, Connection and Community with audio only below
Audio for meditation only