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Chapter 1

The Other Side Of The Mountains
Reaching midlife and celebrating

Rachel Green

When I was forty years old I was delighted to have made it. I'd gone through a horrid time health-wise in my thirties and it was a wonderful relief to make it that far. I had huge celebrations. For three weeks I partied. I had forty friends around for dinner parties, lunches and musical evenings. I went out to restaurants. I received gifts, cards, phone calls, flowers, letters - I was on a high.

Then I went away and stayed in a hotel where I was asked to fill in a questionnaire and tick my age bracket. Scanning across the boxes, I saw "25 - 39 years". I realised it wasn't mine any more. Instead, I had to indicate the "40 - 59 years" group. I shuddered. It seemed too old.

Despite this, I presumed that being in my forties or fifties was simply a time when my hair would turn grey and I'd become a bit more wrinkled. I didn't expect to have anything else to worry about or pay attention to. It was surely a time when mortgages were discharged, families grew up, careers reached full peak, relationships satisfyingly deepened, and everything we'd worked towards paid off. And of course, as a woman, oh joy of joy, I could expect my periods to stop. There was certainly a lot to look forward to. After all, life begins at forty, doesn't it?

I'd heard about midlife crises, but only ever with an image in my mind of hairy-chested older men, wearing gold chains, making fools of themselves with younger women and buying red sports cars. It certainly never occurred to me that it had anything to do with me. After all, I'd done so much personal development in my twenties and thirties, there couldn't be anything left to do, could there? I was going to cruise through it.

As I continued into my forties my life changed in unimaginable ways. Demons arrived. Doctors came. Darkness visited. I discovered I was as vulnerable as anyone to the physical and emotional turmoil that could be associated with midlife. I was stunned by the profound changes I was forced to make.

The reading glasses, the grey hair, the aches and pains, the menopausal symptoms - they were only surface changes. The real struggles occurred at a much more penetrating level. I was challenged from all angles to re-evaluate my life. Anxiety, emptiness, confusion, insecurity, and old wounds painfully surfaced. I was forced to take a fresh look at myself, my path, and my reason for living. And I needed to do all this in order just to keep going.

Then came a surprise. I underwent a metamorphosis that made the changes in my thirties seem trifling. Emerging from my struggles came an indisputable and unexpected happiness. A happiness that I had never expected nor experienced before. I thought I was already happy - but this was different. It was deeper. It was enduring. It was independent of my external world. It was inside me. It was wonderful.

It became clear that midlife was not simply a matter of moving from forty-nine years to fifty years to fifty-one years in a linear progression to old age. Rather it was a pivotal life stage, a turning point. A crossroads ...

Find out what this incredible journey was about and how the other women and men in Midlife and Happiness also found happiness.

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