Midlife Crisis Bingo Recap: Out of Time

Welcome back to our 2021 Leaning Stack of Books Midlife Crisis Bingo recap. Today we'll focus on the Out of Time square. Hopefully you have a minute to take a break from all those time management conversations you're having with your young adult. I know it's a constant race against the clock to get it all done.

 

Here's a reminder of the description: It seems like just yesterday that you were a teenager waiting impatiently for the thrill of adulthood. Now the sink is backed up, there’s a stack of bills to pay, and the child you’ve been nurturing all these years with your love and energy just called you “Karen” when you asked him to put his dirty socks in the hamper. Today is kind of a bummer. Take this opportunity to read something about a time long ago. Or read about the future. Or both.

 

For this square, I read Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell. I loooove this author. This book was recommended to me when it came out in 2020, but I. Just. Could. Not. Pick. It. Up. I was not – and am still not, really – ready for a book about a viral illness that wipes out lots of vulnerable people. But this was a stunning novel (a rare 5 stars for me on Goodreads) -- gorgeous all the way through. It's a fictional account of the marriage between William Shakespeare (who goes unnamed) and his wife, who is called Agnes in this telling. Hamnet is one of their children, and the reader gets to understand the dynamics of this family as the plague sweeps through their town. I sobbed and sobbed at parts of this story. If you have any pandemic-related grief or anger or dismay at all, be warned.

 

Reading Hamnet makes me wonder about novels that have too much of a connection to big, painful things happening in real time. In March 2020, Emily St. John Mandel, whose novel, Station Eleven, is set after a pandemic wipes out most of civilization, tweeted: “Maybe don’t read my book right now.” I recently finished Gary Shteyngart’s Our Country Friends, which is set in the early months of the pandemic. Critics love it, but for me it was just too soon. I don’t need to revisit those early months where everyone was rubbing hand sanitizer on their pizza boxes and hoarding toilet paper. Not yet.

 

One of the things that I love about O’Farrell is that she has an extensive backlist. I keep discovering more. She has a signature voice in all her work, but you can really see the development of her writing over the years. I particularly loved The Hand That First Held Mine (2010) and The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox (2014). I just learned today that she has a new one coming out in September, called The Marriage Portrait. It appears that she got some work done while I was doom scrolling the internet during quarantine.

 

While this Bingo topic prompted us to read about the past or the future, there’s another way to think about being “out of time.” Feeling like you’re running out of time to do the things you want to do is a key theme of midlife crises. And there’s a whole self-help industry around finding strategies to seize the day. Of course, those books and their pearls of wisdom are competing with bills and meals and mortgages and Facebook for our middle aged attention. And also, seizing the day competes with sleep. In my twenties, I was a “let’s stay up and watch the sunrise” kind of person. Today that’s still true, except for the staying up part.

 

When is it important to make the most of every moment? The urgency behind that idea makes my blood pressure rise. It often seems that we sit between two poles – doing all the things all the time at a breakneck pace and feeling badly about it or doing very little and feeling badly about it. See how I judged myself above for my lack of accomplishment during the pandemic? And experts and marketers are hell bent on giving us whiplash – Life is short! Hurry up! or Slow down! Smell the roses!

 

I just confirmed my inability to hurry up and seize the day AND my inability to meditate meaningfully about the world around me by slowly spelunking through the internet. My search term was “middle aged advertising.” It turns out that some companies are targeting middle aged people by using the phrase “the new young.” Give me a break. That’s kind of like when my life partner and I were trying to get our toddlers to accept the fact that they couldn’t always be the first one to do things. We coined the terms “first first” and “next first.” That way, everyone got to be first all the time. We felt pretty pleased with our parental ingenuity. The strategy worked for about 5 minutes, and then the kids put down their pacifiers and told us that they wouldn’t allow us to perpetuate trophy culture in our household.

 

Get up and make your dreams come true, my new young friends. Or lie on the floor and stare at the ceiling. Both paths are perfectly acceptable. We’re all winners here.