When we are young we see the world as a largely unknown prelude to the miracle of ourselves. By middle age our understanding has matured to the point where we recognize ourselves as prelude to unfathomable worlds yet to come. Nothing helps us to this realization more than the astonishing fact of our own children’s existence, growth and orientation to parts of life we had ourselves neglected.
By middle age, words like hope and faith and love and despair and joy and sorrow have changed their meanings so many different times and in such subtle and profound ways, that when we use them we have the peculiar awareness that we are referring to whole strings of marvelously variegated colored translucent glass beads rather than to any one bead.
Our minds at maturity are like warehouse districts where the cargoes of ships whose voyages have spanned the globe across generations have been stored and forgotten so that they now exist in a variety of states of disarray and decay.
If, by the time we have reached fifty, our lives do not seem as much hallucination and dream as history, then we have not let ourselves explore our experiences fully.
Maintenance is to middle age what discovery is to youth.