Mid-life

I remember hearing Rob Parsons say there is no point in waiting til your children reach their teens before reading a book on teenagers - you have to start much earlier. That made a lot of sense to me. So on that basis, although I am not having a mid-life crisis at the moment (at least...I don't think so...am I?) I need to plan ahead for it. I don't simply mean making sure I have enough money for an Austin Healey; I mean by reading about it - so I have started Lost in the Middle by Paul Tripp, and the first 50 pages have been great. So I intend to start posting the bits that really strike me.... His essential point seems to be that mid-life itself is not a crisis, but that mid-life exposes issues that were there before - especially our wrong interpretations of life:

...we do not live by the facts of our experiences, but by the ways that our interpretations have shaped those facts for us. The difficult disorientation of midlife is not because the passage itself is disorienting. Whatever trouble midlife brings to us is essentially caused by the wrong thinking we bring to it. Suddenly we see things about ourselves that have been developing for years but went by unnoticed...

p.33.