I am a middle child from a middle class family. I had a job
in middle management and after an early mid-life crisis threw it over to teach
what’s known as middle school. I listen to middle of the road music. I have a
middle name that has made life interesting or faintly embarrassing, depending
on your point of view. I have been known to raise my middle finger in a salute
to bad manners. And, despite lingering notes of immaturity, I have reached
middle age.
This “middle age” is variously
defined as having a numerical age between 40 and 60 or 35 to 54. We’re among friends here so let’s confront the symptoms of “middle age” head-on: loss of skin
elasticity, greying of hair, accumulation of body fat, reduction in aerobic
performance, decrease in maximal heart rate, decrease in strength and
flexibility, declining fertility and increased mortality. Ech.
But we don’t have to go gentle into that good night, we can
rage, rage against the dying of the light. We don’t have to succumb to the
condition of being middle aged: we can deny its mediocrity.
Middle
does not have to be the same as “middling”. A quick trip to the dictionary will
tell you that the Middle can be the centre of everything, the point around which
everything orbits. Middle can be central, the nucleus, the pivot point, the
crux - just look at history.
Skulking between antiquity and the renaissance is a period
in history that has a pretty bad rap: the Middle Ages.
One author called the period from the 5th to the
15th centuries “one of civilisation’s longest winters”. Historians
dubbed it “the dark ages” because it was the time in which it seemed all the
progress of the Roman Empire was reversed. According to them it was an age of
ignorance and superstition. Feudalism. The black death. The chokehold of the
church. And wars – lots of them.
But the Middle Ages’ bad rap is not completely justified. This
period is overlooked as a time of huge growth and change, of civilisation overcoming
war, disease, famine, injustice, inquisitions, witch hunts. Huge traumatic
experiences…There’s got to be a parallel here somewhere, if I can just find it.
But let’s think
positively: let’s focus on the good stuff that came from the Middle Ages.
For one, there’s the Bayeaux Tapestry. My mum, being a textile freak, would insist on you knowing that it is
actually embroidery, not a tapestry. There are nine linen panels, of between fourteen and
three metres in length, telling the story of the Battle of Hastings in a
magnificent example of history written by the victors. Or at least by the ones
with the needle and thread.
Next, for my Catholic friends, there is Thomas Aquinas, the philosopher
and theologian. Much of modern philosophy evolved from standing on the
shoulders of giants such as Aquinas, whether in extrapolation or rebuttal of
his ideas on ethics and metaphysics. He influenced other philosophers such as
Hooker, Locke, Dante and Chesterton, and authored my favourite piece of wisdom,
“Beware of the person of one book”.
The Middle Ages was also the time of Arthurian legend, the
beginning of folkloric tales of an English King conquering the Saxons. Such
historic romances brought us Merlin, Guinevere and Lancelot, and the Knights of
the Round Table, giving us stories of the age of chivalry and spawning one of
the world’s greatest parodies - Monty Python’s Holy Grail. But I digress.
I could go on and list all the advances in agriculture and
technology (windmills, clocks, lenses, ploughs), architecture (cathedrals, Gothic
style, flying buttresses, stained glass windows), art (the works of Donatello
and Giotto); I could discuss the advances in thinking and education (which
included the separation of science, theology and philosophy and the beginning
of the secularisation of universities and scholarly endeavour); I could mention
the significance of the codification of laws across European countries, and the
rise of vernacular literature through Dante, Petrarch and Chaucer; then finally
and most significantly for bibliophiles everywhere, I could drop in the
invention of the printing press, the innovation that ensured that we could all have
more than one book.
But I won’t.
The salient point here is that all these achievements belonged
to an era of tumultuous change and development for Western civilisation.
And so, my middle age may also prove to be a
time of growth, of challenge and unpredictable adventures. Perhaps even
tumultuous change. After the last few years, that is not at all difficult to
imagine. But I will have my own Bayeaux tapestries, Thomas Aquinases and
windmills to continue to inspire my hope and thankfulness.
In fact, I can list them for you - the saving graces of my middle age are:
- · A collection of friends who are my sanity and my sanctuary, my wisdom, laughter, diversion, education and recreation.
- · A family, both immediate and extended, who will go to any length to assure my wellbeing, whether physical, emotional, practical, degustational, metaphorical, sartorial, editorial, psychological, transportational, inspirational, muppetational…
- · And a husband whose importance can’t be adequately described in actual words, as much as I have tried.
Thomas Aquinas gave us the aphorism, “The things that we
love tell us what we are.” So you are what I am.
GK Chesterton, who stood on his shoulders, said,
“The power of hoping through
everything, the knowledge that the soul survives its adventures, that great
inspiration comes to the middle-aged.”
For a middle child who’s middle aged, there’s nothing
mediocre about that.
