Happy Realizations From the Dark Wood

Dante's famous poem Inferno starts out with something like "Suddenly in midlife, I woke to find myself wandering in a dark wood." Some midlife transitions are challenging, such as when the youngest child leaves home. In some ways, however, life gets easier once you're past 50. Here are some of the things I like about it:

• It's easier to let irritations, jabs, hostility and snark bounce off. I find it easier to dismiss things that I would have stewed about 20 years ago. Part of this is probably due to the experience of raising teenagers, or maybe it's because I've worked in customer or public service for so long that my "teflon coating" is thick. I think, though, that part of it is due to a mellowing process many of us undergo.
• I've stopped making unkeepable resolutions such as "I'll eat nothing but lettuce for a week and drink three gallons of water a day." Life (or what's left of it) is too short to obsess with extreme self-improvement.
• Along the same lines, I've decided that the point of relationships is to enjoy people, not try to improve them. Of course this is easier once the kids are grown and their fates are out of your hands; that's why this view of relationships would have been almost impossible for me to adopt 20 years ago.
• I've accepted the essential messiness of life. There will always be imperfections, snags, glitches and obstacles. The Japanese have a philosophy of aesthetics called wabi sabi, which means something like perfect imperfection - flaws are part of the beauty of an object. Once past 50 it's easier to lead a wabi sabi life.
• I don't try to work out the inexplicable contradictions of life, or at least not as intensely as I did in college philosophy. On any news service's home page there are reasons to believe that life on earth is both wonderful and lousy. Rather than straining to come up with explanations for the unfairness of random or cruel events, I'm more likely to ask myself what I can do to help.
  
• I've decided that it'll be better to wear myself out having adventures and working to solve problems than it would be to avoid stress (and growth) in order to prevent wrinkles & gray hair or live longer. I've met people who obsess about longevity and they don't seem happy.
• I've found that most things aren't matters of life & death even if they seem like it at the time. A friend being seriously injured in an accident is a matter of life & death; being unable to finish everything on the to-do list is not. Eliminating much of the internal drama makes life more enjoyable.
• Strangely, thinking about death doesn't bother me like it did when I was, say, 7 years old listening to Sunday school stories about Hell. In the end we all pass on but since a lot of people I knew are already there, it (whatever form it takes) can't be a bad place.

In all, even though I enjoyed my 20s, 30s and 40s, I wouldn't go back. In many ways the light in the woods is brighter now.