Navigating the Calm and the Storm: A Middle-Ager’s Guide to Life Lessons
“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm.”
Willa Cather pointed out something we only realize after storms roll through. By middle age, we’ve all experienced both sides of this life coin. We’ve had the calm, which we probably didn’t appreciate nearly enough while it was happening, and we’ve weathered the storms.
In our young adulthood we often experienced less severe storms: a messy breakup, the panic of realizing a college degree in general studies isn’t the ticket to a six-figure job, or the existential dread of turning 30 without a five-year plan. After each storm you reach a new level-set of expectation for your life.
Enter the tempests; storms that are longer term and harder to reconcile.
Here we are, somewhere around the halfway point, and we’ve realized that Willa was right: some lessons only come when things are calm, like discovering the pure joy of a quiet Saturday morning with a cup of coffee that you don’t have to reheat three times. Other lessons, however, seem determined to be learned only when everything goes to hell in a hand basket.
Take calm, for instance. When things are quiet, you have time to reflect, to figure out what the heck you’re actually doing with your life. You start to notice things, like how you’ve become way too invested in the Real Housewives or how your teenager’s grunting responses are slowly becoming an actual language. In calm, you learn patience, appreciation for the small things, and the surprisingly therapeutic power of an organized closet. You realize you’re not a failure for enjoying this calm. You’re not lazy. You’re just…mature.
But then, inevitably, the storms roll in. We’re in the autumn of life, after all. Maybe it’s a serious health scare, a job loss, or finding yourself sandwiched between your own aging parents and children who think Wi-Fi is a basic human right. The tempest, unlike calm, doesn’t come with any clear lessons at first. It’s just chaos. You’re caught between throwing up your hands in defeat and Googling “how to fake your own death and start over in Finland.”
It’s in this messy, loud, chaotic phase that you learn the hard stuff. You learn resilience, not because you want to, but because you have no other choice. You learn to let go of things you thought you couldn’t live without, like that high-paying job that came with daily migraines, or the idea that you’d have life all figured out by now. The storm strips you bare, shakes you up, and forces you to dig deeper than you ever thought possible.
Middle age is where calm and storm intersect in a way that you can’t experience earlier in life. It’s where you start to see the pattern in the madness, the rhythm in the chaos. You get a glimpse of the bigger picture, like seeing both sides of the same coin simultaneously, and you begin to appreciate them both in a strange, slightly masochistic way.
So, if you find yourself smack dab in the middle of a tempest right now, remember that it’s part of the process. Take a deep breath and try to find some calm in the eye of it. And if you’re in a calm moment, savor it, because you know the storm will come again. Life, in its infinite wisdom, knows we need both to grow. And hey, if nothing else, the tempest gives us some damn good stories to tell.
So grab your life vest (or your wine glass), and let’s ride this out. We’re learning, whether we like it or not. And if we’re lucky, maybe we’ll even figure out what the hell we’re doing before the next storm hits.