Psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung said that most of us will experience a midlife crisis. From the ages of 35 to 50, it seems, we are most likely to become aware of our finiteness. Death begins to appear on our horizon.
Perhaps it is an unconscious trauma of the pandemic or the consequence of a society that embraces productivist rationality, but at only 30 years old, I have been thinking about death on a daily basis for a few years now. And I hit myself on the knuckles when “I don’t live enough”.
A day spent lounging in bed? A waste. Sadness? An emotion that needs to be chased away quickly. A weekend spent reading and wandering? A missed opportunity for adventure.
Life can end at any moment. We must live life to the fullest, we are told. Accumulate extraordinary experiences and incredible anecdotes. That is a life that is “worth living.”
The trouble with this view is that it commands us to fight the void that is inherent in the human experience. Trying to fill it stubbornly is nothing more than fighting against our nature. And it is exhausting, to say the least.
We do not live “less” when we are sad, when we are wandering, when life orders us to stop and listen to it. Quite the contrary. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke has much to teach us on this subject. He invites us to be patient, a quality that is far from popular in these times: “To let every impression and every germ of a feeling blossom deep within oneself, in the darkness, in the ineffable, in the unconscious, in that region where our own understanding does not reach, to wait in all humility and patience for the hour when one will give birth to a new clarity: this alone is to live as an artist, in the intelligence of things as creation.”
Let’s cultivate patience. Let’s slow down. Let’s get bored. Let’s welcome the emptiness. Let’s inhabit our sadness. That’s also what a life is worth living.