I walked past this building the other day as I do most days. It used to be a big old house before the developers knocked it down to rebuild it into something else. Somewhere along the way the renovation has stopped and it’s been left in mid build. As I walked past I thought – that’s what I feel like, a bit empty and in need of a rebuild yet held together by support.
I read a couple of blogs recently that resonated with this. The first was about films being a good illustration of how life often emerges from the middle. We see an opening scene that starts at some point in a character’s life, often we begin in their middle and we go from there full of anticipation about what we are going to find out. It doesn’t matter where they started because we are engaging with them wherever they are now.
The second was about pressing the reboot button like you do on a computer, just a soft reboot to make small changes where things are no longer working for you. It doesn’t have to be major, just a few adjustments, keeping the core functionality in place.
I like both of these ideas they strike me as an easy and engaging way to think about how we can choose to do things differently or change, even in really small ways.
I think when you get to middle age things naturally start changing around you, you can’t stop it and you have to adapt. You lose people, age gaps become a little more apparent, priorities start to shift, time starts to race. I see this building as a representation of this – a down to earth gritty reality of the circle of life without the Disney sentimentality. The emptiness that happens due to the losses and changes and the need to rebuild, reboot and adapt to these losses and changes. Sometimes the adaptations may need to be significant and sometimes tiny, but either way you have to keep developing and adapting to remain relevant, engaged and living. With any luck the scaffolding you surround yourself with will keep everything solid enough to get through these changes and provide the confidence to reboot or restart your film.
It can feel like a long process, every time I walk past this building now it makes me question how far I’ve come in my own adjustments since I walked past it last time. Sometimes I feel stuck and empty, other times I feel like I’ve secured a new brick or two and sometimes I think I could even take down some of the scaffolding. If this building ever gets finished I wonder what it will look like and how far I’ve got.
ps – the blog Raptitude.com is worth a read.
Middle Muddlings 