When Something Begins to Stir: Midlife, Thresholds and the Invitation to Become

What if the stirring you feel isn’t a problem to solve, but an invitation to become?

There are moments in life when nothing is obviously wrong, yet somehow everything feels slightly different.

You may be successful. You may have built a career, raised a family, developed relationships, accumulated experience and achieved many of the things your younger self believed would constitute a good life.

And yet something begins to stir. It may initially be difficult to name, perhaps its a restlessness, or maybe a growing dissatisfaction with things that previously mattered enormously. Some folk get a sense that achievement isn’t quite providing what it once did and for others it maybe a changing relationship with work, status, possessions or ambition

Or it might simply be a quiet voice asking:

Is this really how I want to live the next part of my life?

Increasingly, I have come to believe that we make a mistake when we rush to silence that voice, because what if the stirring isn’t evidence that something has gone wrong?

What if it is evidence that something is trying to emerge?

The problem with the “midlife crisis”

For decades we have been offered a rather unhelpful narrative about midlife. The language itself tells a story: decline, slowing down, ageing, empty nests, retirement and, of course, the infamous midlife crisis.

Gerontologist and leadership coach Barbara Waxman challenges that narrative through her concept of Middlescence.

Waxman describes middlescence as a transitional period, broadly between 45 and 65, created partly by the extraordinary changes in human longevity. It can involve physical, emotional, social and economic change, but importantly it can also involve questions of identity, meaning and purpose.

Her argument is compelling.

We have become accustomed to thinking about development as something that happens predominantly when we are young. We understand adolescence as a period during which identity changes, bodies change, relationships change and young people wrestle with questions about who they are and who they might become.

Then somehow we imagine that adulthood arrives and development largely stops.

But it doesn’t.

We continue becoming.

Waxman’s Middlescence Manifesto asks us to reconsider midlife as a period filled with potential, vitality and purpose rather than simply the beginning of decline.

That changes the question enormously.

Instead of asking: “What’s wrong with me?” we might begin asking: “What’s changing within me?” And perhaps eventually: “Who am I becoming?”

Standing at the threshold

This brings me to another idea that has significantly influenced my thinking: Trevor Waldock’s exploration of thresholds.

In The Gift of Thresholds: Flourishing Through Challenging Transitions, Waldock explores those moments when life takes us to an edge, when what has been can no longer simply continue as before and we find ourselves facing something new.

I love the metaphor of the threshold because a threshold is neither one room nor the next. It is the space between. Behind us lies the familiar. Our experience. Our achievements. Our roles. Our identities. Our assumptions about who we are. Ahead lies something less certain. And that uncertainty matters. Because standing at a threshold doesn’t necessarily mean knowing what is on the other side.Sometimes all we know is that the old room no longer fits quite as comfortably as it once did.

That can be deeply unsettling.

Our instinct may be to retreat towards certainty. Attempting to fix the uncomfortable feeling, distract ourselves from it, work harder, buy something, achieve something else or recreate the conditions that previously made us feel successful.

But perhaps the task isn’t to retreat. Perhaps the task is to stay at the threshold long enough to listen.

The person who brought you here

There is a phrase that increasingly sits at the centre of my own coaching work:

The person who brought you this far may not be the person who can take you where you now long to go.

That doesn’t mean rejecting who we have been, quite the opposite. The person we have been deserves acknowledgement. They developed the determination, ambition, resilience, expertise and behaviours that helped us build our lives. But development sometimes requires us to recognise that qualities that served one stage of life may need to be reconsidered in another.

Waldock has written elsewhere about moving through thresholds as an ongoing process of becoming and not disowning what went before, but integrating what remains valuable as we move forward. I find that distinction incredibly important.

Transition isn’t deletion. It is integration.

We don’t need to destroy the previous version of ourselves, we need to become capable of holding our experience differently. And this may explain why midlife can feel simultaneously uncomfortable and exciting. We are not starting again. We are starting from experience.

From achievement to meaning

Something else appears to happen during this period, the questions begin to change.

Much of our earlier adult life can understandably revolve around establishment.; Can I build a career? Can I create financial security? Can I establish a home? Can I raise a family? Can I prove myself?

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of this, but at some point another set of questions may begin competing for our attention.

What actually matters to me now?

What is enough?

What do I want to contribute?

Where do I feel most alive?

What wisdom have I accumulated?

Who needs what I have learned?

What do I want the next twenty or thirty years to mean?

This is where Waxman’s middlescence and Waldock’s thinking about eldership begin to intersect beautifully.

Waldock argues that our conventional Western map of life (education, success and accumulation, retirement) leaves something important missing. He contrasts this with traditions in which later midlife involves a transition towards eldership, meaning, wisdom and legacy.

His earlier book To Plant a Walnut Tree similarly asks how accumulated experience might become wisdom that is shared in practical ways with others.

So perhaps the stirring isn’t calling us towards more. Perhaps it is calling us towards deeper.

Horizontal success and vertical development

This connects with something I have written about previously: horizontal and vertical development.

Horizontal development adds to what we have: More knowledge; More skills; More qualifications; More techniques; More experiences.

Vertical development changes the way from which we make sense of those experiences. It changes the person doing the looking, and this distinction becomes particularly interesting at midlife. For years we may have responded to discomfort horizontally:

What else do I need to learn, achieve, earn, acquire or accomplish?

But eventually those solutions may stop working.

The invitation then becomes vertical. Not: “What else do I need?” but: “Who am I becoming?”

That is a very different developmental question.

Flourishing becomes more than feeling good

This is also why my exploration of human flourishing has increasingly led me towards transition. Flourishing cannot simply mean being happy all the time, neither can it mean avoiding discomfort, indeed, some of the most important developmental periods of our lives involve uncertainty, loss, questioning and even grief.

We may have to grieve identities that no longer fit. We may need to relinquish ambitions that once defined us. We may have to accept changes in our bodies. Relationships may alter. Children may leave. Parents may need us differently. Careers may plateau or end. Status may become less important. Time itself may begin to feel different.

Flourishing, therefore, isn’t about avoiding these realities. It is about developing the capacity to engage with them while continuing to create a meaningful life.

Waxman’s contemporary work describes middlescence as fertile ground for clarity, connection and meaning , perhaps an opportunity to consciously shape the decades ahead rather than simply surrendering to inherited assumptions about ageing.

That word consciously matters enormously to me because a good next chapter doesn’t simply happen. We participate in creating it.

From doing towards being

Waldock makes another observation that I find particularly powerful in thinking about the second half of life. He suggests that while our doing may eventually reduce, our being can continue to increase. His emerging manifesto for later life talks about moving beyond ambition towards vocation and continuing to explore meaning rather than simply settling.

That presents a profound challenge to a culture that frequently equates human value with productivity.

Who are we when we are no longer our job title? Who are we without the targets? Without the organisation? Without the status?Without the external validation? Without constantly needing to demonstrate our usefulness?

Perhaps one of the developmental tasks of midlife is learning that our value and our productivity are not the same thing. And perhaps that creates space for a different kind of contribution.

Experience can become wisdom. Success can become significance. Ambition can become contribution. Doing can become being. And leadership itself can begin moving towards eldership.

The wisdom we haven’t yet harvested

By midlife we possess something our younger selves could not possibly have possessed. Lived experience.

Successes, certainly. But also mistakes. Relationships that worked and relationships that didn’t. Risks taken. Opportunities missed. People loved and people lost. Moments of courage and periods of fear. Times when we got it spectacularly right and occasions when we got it painfully wrong.

Yet experience alone isn’t necessarily wisdom. Wisdom requires reflection. We have to turn around and look at the road behind us. What has life taught me? What patterns do I now recognise? What have I discovered about myself? What no longer matters? What matters enormously? What would I tell my younger self? And perhaps most importantly:

What might somebody else need from what I have learned?

This is where the transition towards eldership becomes particularly powerful. Waldock’s wonderful walnut-tree metaphor captures it beautifully: we can choose to plant something whose fruit we may never personally enjoy. Our attention moves beyond ourselves.

From me, towards us, and eventually towards those who come after us.

Maybe the stirring is the beginning

Which brings me back to where I started. That quiet stirring.

I meet people who cannot necessarily explain what is happening.

They don’t arrive saying:

“I’m entering a developmental transition associated with middlescence and need to reconstruct my identity.”

They say things like:

“I don’t know what’s wrong. I’ve got everything I thought I wanted.”

“Work just doesn’t mean what it used to.”

“I want something more, but I don’t know what more is.”

“I’m tired of proving myself.”

“I’ve been successful, but I’m not sure I’m fulfilled.”

Or perhaps simply:

“There must be another way.”

Maybe we should listen more carefully to those sentences. Because they may not be symptoms of crisis. They may be signs of development.

Don’t rush across the threshold

And perhaps this is the final paradox. When we feel uncertain, we naturally want an answer. We want the five-point plan. The new purpose. The new career. The new identity. The destination. But thresholds don’t always work like that. Sometimes the most important thing we can do is resist prematurely solving the question.

Stay curious.

Listen.

Notice.

Reflect.

Reconnect with the body.

Pay attention to what energises us and what depletes us.

Examine the values we are actually living rather than simply the ones we claim to hold.

Notice where our attention repeatedly travels.

Consider what we might be ready to release.

And begin wondering what might be trying to emerge.

Perhaps we don’t cross important thresholds by having everything worked out beforehand.

Perhaps we cross them by becoming sufficiently curious and sufficiently courageous to take the next step.