Thirties Crisis… What Crisis?
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I am supposed to write about the so-called thirty-year-old crisis that seems to afflict many wonderful females of our species. I have to admit I will not have an objective take on what I’m writing, because since I was very young, I always found women in their thirties the sexiest creatures in the world. I’m talking of those beautiful, charming, experienced beans that learned to take almost every situation with ease, facing life with irony and self-consciousness.
Death, since the beginning, has always been part of human life. Humans would live regrouped in big family habitations where all generations would share the same living space. Animals would also be part of daily life, as hunt victims or breeding beings. Death was an everyday experience; animals would be killed to feed humans.
Old people were part of the daily life, integrated in the society in their role of wisdom holders and they would die surrounded by their own community. With no modern medicine available and with harder living conditions, it would be common for children to die before the age of two, for pregnant women to die delivering babies and for young men to die during their heavy works or in battles. Death was common and at the same time, it had a special role; it was part of ‘passage rituals’ together with birth, puberty, and marriage. It was a moment to reunify the community in a public – but intimate – space of collective meditation.
Today, society denies the existence of death. Those who grow up in the city barely see animals and normally buy meat in a supermarket or in a shop, with no connection to their life or death. Old people rarely share the family house; they are taken care of by somebody external to the familial system, and when death approaches, hospitals take charge.
Medicine and scientific progress are considerably reducing death risks in everyday life. This positive progress brings within itself a new vision of death as an unacceptable accident, a mistake, something one cannot understand. But death is whole with life; it is not possible to ignore one of the two without distorting the other; by losing the meaning of death we lose the meaning of our own life.
In our productive system, old people are reduced to become unproductive beings. The world is changing fast and old people do not know it anymore; their experience was build in a different world, where television was a great discovery and internet just did not exist. In a society imprinted on technological development, there is no space for their old fashioned expertise. Old people therefore lose their sacred role of wise guidance of the community; disoriented in the fast spinning of the new era, their experiences become useless, good to entertain kids with old time stories. They end up nothing more than people to take care of.
Aging becomes a shame, because by aging, you get closer to the moment when you will be considered useless. In the spinning and fast world of technology, you have to be young, flexible, functional and possibly pleasant.
Society has a very hard time dealing with undefined identities, so as soon as possible, each one of us must find the way to achieve clear ones: a professional identity, a sexual identity, a social status and a familiar status. The more we are defined, the easiest it is for society to understand if we are in or out and in which sectors we can be useful. Twenties, therefore, for many people, become a struggle; the young adult or the ‘old teenager’ must face the process of defining its own identity. Whether we care about others’ judgments or not, we are still constantly in a position where we’re being judged.
With the progressive loss of life, we lose the importance of our own path towards wisdom and awareness. This detachment leaves us directionless, it steels our power to use technology as a tool to facilitate the path and it enslaves us to the ‘musts of society’. We give up on our own value as humans and we measure ourselves only in function of how much we produce and what we achieve in the material world. Life becomes a series of fixed steps to shortlist as soon as possible.
If we break this vicious circle, our thirties come as a gift: a time where we can finally relax.
Around thirty, you start getting an idea of who you are, of what you like, of what you want, of what you can do and how to do it. All those annoying doubts, “will I be able to….?,” “will I find ….?,” “will I achieve….?” dissolve in the consciousness of your value and your capacities, in the knowhow to use your strengths and your weaknesses. Your experience starts to be considerable; it magically transforms into concrete tools to face known situations and unknown ones as well. The drama level in your life decreases incredibly and you understand that not only you will survive, but that you will probably also be able to overcome it in a pleasant way.
If the twenties are about running after something – a huge burst of energies, most of which are wasted for lack of clear priorities and direction – in your thirties, you automatically achieve the capacity to focus your energy and do many more things with much less effort. No need to prove anything anymore, finally you will be free to just be and to fully enjoy whatever comes.
- Contributed by Camilla
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