As the new year prompts its customary period of reflection, many find themselves at a personal crossroads. For one columnist, turning 50 has ushered in a distinct phase of contemplation, marked by a newfound tendency to pause and observe the world – a bird in a tree, a snail on a wall – with poetic intensity.
The Science and Sensation of Ageing's 'Jagged Bursts'
This personal experience aligns with scientific insight. Research from Stanford Medicine in 2024 identified that adults undergo two significant 'massive biomolecular shifts', effectively spikes in the ageing process, around the ages of 44 and 60. This confirms a common intuition: we do not age in a smooth, linear fashion but in sudden, perceptible leaps.
The emotional counterpart to these biological shifts is what the writer identifies as an 'inflection point'. It's a period where, after years of relative stability, a profound internal change occurs. The dominant feeling is a 'sense of an ending', not characterised by stark sadness, but by a poignant 'anticipation of future nostalgia'.
Cultural Cues and the Modern Midlife
These transitional feelings are often catalysed by external milestones. In this case, the trigger is her children's final year at primary school, compounded by her own recent 50th birthday. Historically, 50 might have signalled the peak of a midlife crisis, but in contemporary culture, where 50-year-olds may dress and act much as they did in their 30s, such existential reckoning seems delayed.
"Everything has been pushed back by a decade," she observes. This 'looking-at-trees' phase feels familiar, echoing similar periods of acute temporal awareness experienced in her early 30s and during adolescence. She posits these as the three major emotional pivot points in a life.
Confronting Time and Unavoidable Feelings
This phase involves the faltering of a common delusion – the idea that we are 'training to live forever'. It brings what she wryly notes is the typical assumption of ageing: that you are the first person to ever grapple with mortality's intimations.
Children, she finds, are often unsettled by a parent entering this mode. It forces them to confront their parents' complex interior lives and prompts melancholic observations that can be disquieting for the whole family.
While some major life events allow for pre-emptive emotional processing – like moving countries after 17 years – these broader, more nebulous periods of transition offer no such 'hack'. They must be felt in real-time. As actor and director Lena Dunham has noted, there is value in feeling what you're supposed to feel, when you're supposed to feel it.
As time 'concertinas', the writer looks ahead, wondering how this present moment will appear in retrospect, just as last year now seems like 'decades ago' viewed through the 'deep water' of memory. The pivot point, it seems, is both an ending and a new vantage point.
