Impermanence is one of those words that sounds philosophical when you read it, but hits like a punch when you feel it. It’s soft in theory and sharp in practice. And at midlife — the moment where you look around and realize you’re no longer at the beginning of your story — impermanence stops being an idea and becomes an experience.
Aging is one of the most misunderstood experiences in human life. People talk about it as if it’s a quiet tragedy — something that happens to you, something you must surrender to, something you must “fight.” Yet the body is not betraying you as you age. It’s speaking to you in a new language.
There’s a moment in midlife when you stop thinking about “later” as an infinite place. The horizon becomes real. Finite. Not frightening — just honest. And with that honesty comes a shift in the questions you ask yourself.
Most people avoid this question for decades. Not because they’re shallow or afraid, but because life is so loud, so busy, so consuming, that mortality feels like a distant theoretical concept you’ll “deal with later.” You hear about death, but you don’t really feel the reality of it until something in life presses the issue: the aging of your parents, the loss of a loved one, a health scare, a birthday that lands harder than expected, or simply the slow awareness that the timeline ahead is shorter than the timeline behind.
Resilience is one of those words people throw around casually, as if it’s a synonym for “toughness” or “staying positive.” But real resilience — the kind that actually holds you steady in midlife and beyond — has nothing to do with pretending you’re fine or forcing yourself to be strong.