The Mid 40’s Ache for Cosmic Specialness

Article #5

“Perhaps my best years are gone…but I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire that's in me now.”

Krapp's Last Tape (1959)

I’ve been fortunate enough to have a few chats this year that have really stayed with me.

The first was when I bumped into a buddy of mine a few months back on the street. Since you know what, I’ve lost my sense of time, but it’s definitely nigh on five or six years since I had seen him. And I was glad to see him. He’s the jovial type, never in bad humour.

To protect his blushes, let’s call him Patrick.

Me: Well chief, how are ya?

Patrick: Look Bish, I wish I was a bit fitter, drank a bit less and was earning a bit more. And I think I’m going bald. Other than that I’m grand. Yourself? You still doing that acting craic?

The second was in one of my favourite coffee shops in the world, with a man I’ve been fortunate to know a long time. He was telling me about a retreat he’d been on.

Again, purely in the interests of protecting this buck’s treasured anonymity, let’s call him Terry - like the chocolate orange.

Me: And what was the main thing you took from it?

Terry: I’ve been blinded by the mirage man.

Me: How much weed did you smoke?

Terry: No, seriously. I met guys there in their late sixties and seventies. They said the things we’re striving for more of – the things they worried about when they were our age – like career, cash, the stuff are not the end game. They’re just a mirage.

Me: Antonio…get this man another black coffee.

The sad middle manager

When Keir Starmer, the likely next resident of 10 Downing Street, according to those with a crystal ball handy, called the MP for South Staffordshire, Gavin Williamson, a “sad middle manager” during parliamentary questions recently, a couple of things struck me.

Firstly, Starmer needs to up his insult game big time. Secondly, a lot of us probably fall into the same category as poor oul’ Williamson.

I’m forty-four in August. By any yard stick, I’m halfway through my life. Maybe even more than halfway. Right in the middle of the middle lane.

I mean, not everyone can be table toppers Man City. No-one wants to be bottom-of-the-scrum Southampton, that’s for sure, but not too many are lining up to be midtown mediocre Fulham either.

Going back to my chat with Terry, in the coffee shop, mid life is the stage where you’re neither one thing nor another. You’re not young, but you’re not old. You haven’t made it, but you’re not a rookie. You’re not yet a cynic, but you’re nobody’s fool either.

It’s when you realise you’re probably not going to be Taoiseach, you’re not a millionaire, you haven’t won an Oscar (yet), or whatever else you’re having yourself. And you’re nipple deep in a mortgage (if you’re lucky) with a young family to feed and shelter.

Smack dang in the middle of mid-table mediocrity.

And forget about winning an All-Ireland.

The u-curve

It’s funny, if I got in a DeLorean, got her up to 88 and went back to 2003 and pulled Patrick and Terry aside and told them what their lives would look like in 2023, they’d have chewed my arm off, I reckon.

Both of them have done well for themselves.

So what’s with all the mid-table mid life restlessness then?

This is the point where someone usually pipes up about the mid-life crisis. The U-Curve.

As with anything in science of the social kind, you can find as many arguments for as against. But as Ernest Becker outlines in The Denial of Death: “each of us repeats the tragedy of the mythical Greek Narcissus: we are hopelessly absorbed with ourselves. If we care about anyone it is usually ourselves first of all.”

Becker also talks about a yearning, or even better, ‘the ache of cosmic specialness’. The desire in all of us to stand out. We are scrambling around on an ancient ball of rock, relentlessly spinning through space-time, yet we need to feel we are in some way ‘an object of primary value’.

The hero cometh

Another conversation I had recently that landed was with another buddy of mine, personal health and fitness coach Sean Murphy.

“There’s this sort of concept of – I think amongst our age group – this sort of heroic individualism. We think that’s the thing….it’s the hero mentality. I’ll just crack on, I’ll just do this myself, I’ll get through these struggles in my own way.”

Sean’s words echo those of American psychologist William James, at the dawn of the twentieth century: “Mankind’s common instinct for reality . . . has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism.”

Becker, again, goes one step further: “The fact is that this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behaviour, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call ‘cultural relativity’ is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over.”

If we’re to take Becker’s word for it and accept we’re all stuck in this theatre for heroism, then the signs aren’t too hard to spot. On screen, there’s the hero universe of Iron Man, Superman, Batman, Aquaman, Antman, Maverick even, marching (or flying) over the hill to save the day. Same for the recent rise of the Girl Boss. In the case of the latter, more recently portrayed as a fully formed, flawless ass-kicking machine that skips the hero’s struggle bit and goes straight to the all-knowing, finished article bit.

I don’t know about you, but I like my heroes to have some doubt and contradictions and a bit of good old-fashioned struggle thrown in for good measure. Even more so if they can fly.

Sport, in particular, is a hero system like no other. Just look at the last World Cup in Qatar. Lionel Messi, for so long often vilified as doing it for Barca but not Argentina, the heir apparent who couldn’t nutmeg the shadow of the messianic Maradona. At the eleventh hour, he finally promoted himself to footballing immortality by realising his own cosmic specialness and leading his people to the promised land once more. He truly was the second coming after all.

Or closer to home, Damien Browne’s herculean, almost biblical world first journey rowing single-handedly from New York to Galway. A man alone waging a defiant singular war against a vast, indifferent and relentless sea and sky, not to mention a restless mind and famously winning the day.

Of course, the original hero system has always been religion. The opium for the masses. The religion I grew up in placed a hero at the centre of the legend. I always found myself rooting for Jesus because he showed vulnerability and fear in the garden, alongside dignity and character on the cross. And then he rose again. A supernatural twist like no other.

Maybe that explains why I loved Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight Rises. All seemed lost until our hero rose from the pit, scarred, but older and wiser. Gandalf pulled the same trick. Rocky did alright out of it too. And I’m a sucker for it every single time.

None of us can ignore this theatre of heroism that we move through, no matter which kool aid we sip from or bat cave we duck and dive in.

That undiscovered country

That old mid-table restlessness might be deeper still.

Maybe what is haunting the middle manager in all of us is the thought of that ultimate promotion. That final elevation to the place beyond, or, as Shakespeare put it: “The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn no traveller returns.”

The shady underbelly of our scurrying attempts at heroism is the long shadow of death at the door.

Sigmund Freud thought we should maybe bring the thought of death out from the dark of the doorway into the light of the living room. And even though that might not see you surrounded by a crowd at the summer barbeque “it has the merit of taking somewhat more into account the true state of affairs.”

Or as Becker puts it more bluntly, ‘the terror of death’.

When I asked Sean Murphy what he was afraid of, as a husband and father of two, in his mid-40’s his answer was clear: ”Truthfully I’d say, the only thing that keeps me….that worries me when I look forward is not being there. So, in a way that feeds into what I do now and how I do it.”

The fire in me now

I was never crazy about the seats in the Gate theatre in Dublin. I don’t know what they’re like now, but back in 2013 it was like trying to get comfortable in a small child’s wheelbarrow.

Anyway, somewhere early on during the late John Hurt’s performance of Krapps’ Last Tape my mind started to wander. I was on a date so I was probably more preoccupied with the prospect of post-date theatrics as opposed to the drama that was unfolding before me.

James Joyce’s one-man show is about a tormented bloke in his sixties having a chat with himself while listening back to a tape of himself from thirty years previously. That’s about as much as I remember. That and the fact I thought John Hurt was good but the play wasn’t much craic.

Then these words crackled from the stage:

“Perhaps my best years are gone…but I wouldn't want them back. Not with the fire that's in me now.”

Don’t ask me why, but those words pulled me straight out of my daydream. And stayed with me ever since.

When I think about those lines now, it opens up a door to a corridor of thought I’d never been down before. Maybe Sean Murphy is right: “You’re only a third, or a quarter way through your adult life. You’re only fifteen or twenty years into being an adult…you’re just getting going in your second chapter of adulthood.”

Not young, but not old. Maybe the air is blushed with the beginning of a new kind as well as the ending of another.

As for death at the door? We both know none of us are making a heroic comeback from that one.

Once that velvet curtain comes down that’s it. Show’s over baby.

But I’m not too bothered.

The fire burns - I’ve got plenty of time to be a hero.

And only the good go young.