Mid-Living Crisis.

I love how people give phases of life names that supposedly relate to where you are in your allotment of existence.

Quarter-life crisis. End-of-life crisis. Mid-life crisis.

Since none of us know how much life we’ve been allotted, I think this sort of categorization is hilarious.

For instance, if you will only live to the age of fifty-six, your “mid-life” actually occurs at the age of twenty-eight - not forty, which is the age most of us stereotypically associate with mid-life. So when you reach the age of forty, the term “mid-life crisis” is meaningless because what was the middle of your life span passed more than a decade earlier, and the time that is left to you is very brief indeed.

My point being that none of us know how long we’ll live, so labeling parts of our lives like this only serves to delude us about the eventual end - and when it will occur. In fact, such labeling implies that we have some sort of control over the timeline of our existence, which as I mentioned earlier is laughable.

This is not to mention the fact that such categorization causes us to live all too frequently in the realm of “someday.” As in, “Someday I’ll get another chance. Someday I’ll try again. Someday I’ll start towards that goal.” But this is a risky way to live. Each time you see someone, that might be the last time. Each time you leave things in anger and chaos, that might be how things get left forever. Each time you postpone expressing affection until the next time, you run the risk that there will not be a next time.

And why would you want to do that?

I suggest that rather than living for someday, you instead live all of your life as if you don’t have very much of it left.

Because maybe you don't.