The fun and challenge of midlife.

Does midlife mean anything to you? Do you relate to it as a time of your life? How does it feel to be there? Are you excited and hopeful, confused and disillusioned or caught up in it all and being carried along?

Wherever you find yourself, have a look at what my dear friend Karen Knott is doing. Karen is a coach and facilitator who works with mid-life women to help them make the most of this important transitional life stage and at the moment she is doing a wonderful A - Z of midlife on her blog - http://midlifematters.wordpress.com/

I recommend you take a look and laugh and cry along......

Here's the latest one.

"F is for 40’s and 50’s

When people ask me when midlife starts and ends, I try to explain that it isn’t a definable chronological age, so much as a life stage that we pass through in our own time, according to our own unique circumstances. So why then have I chosen 40 and 50 to represent F in my A-Z of Midlife? Well, because most people WILL move in and through the hugely important midlife phase at some point during this time.

There is something about those ‘big’ birthdays that end with a nought… they symbolise the ending of one decade and the beginning of another (obviously, duh!) but there’s something else about them. For a start, they tend to be the birthdays that many people find ‘difficult’. They seem to represent a psychological threshold – with some determined to stay THIS side of the threshold and others realising that they want things to be somehow ‘different’ the other side of the threshold.

For the baby boomer generation, our 40’s and 50’s represent something very different to that of our parent’s that’s for sure. Age boundaries are considerably more ‘fluid’ now, due in no small part to improvements in health, wealth and education – consequently, we have different opportunities and expectations. When I was 40, I gave birth for the first time, another friend became a grandmother for the second time and another was forging an impressive career path in corporate banking. All a similar age but each with very different realities.

We now know that 40 is the ‘new 30’ and 50 is the ‘new 40’, don’t we? What we don’t really know is WHAT the ‘new 30’ or the ‘new 40’ actually means for us – but at some point during these years, we are very likely to embark on the distinctive midlife journey in an attempt to find out.