Midlfe crises can be a time to discover what really matters. Maybe it's time New Zealand had one.
I turned 43 this week. It is a going downhill number: 4-3-2-1. It is also the year I had my midlife crisis. And this week I would like to use my column to encourage you to have one too. Just to recap: in the past year my marriage ended. I bought a new house. Learnt how to use a tool kit. Started a TAB account. Threw out my frumpy clothes. Started running. All that embarrassingly predictable divorcee type stuff.
I'm not suggesting you do that, though. Recently I got asked to fill in a questionnaire to go in Next magazine. Who would you invite to your dream dinner party? What is the best piece of advice you have ever received?
Normally I love these things. It is a chance to namedrop Schopenhauer and say wistfully how you wish to meet Winston Churchill. But this time it was quite hard to fill it in. I am not sure who I am now. None of the accoutrements of exemplary taste seem to matter anymore - who cares? And the best advice I've ever been given - or rather found on Google: nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.
In last week's Sunday Star-Times there was a wonderful interview, published posthumously, with former Fay Richwhite poet - never thought I'd write those words next to each other - Leigh Davis. He died last year aged 54.
I didn't know him but he seems to have lived a remarkable life because he ignored the ideas of how the world ought to be. He seemed to have a vivid sense of the potential to be found if you let go and stop trying to control the world. Just choosing to be both a poet and a merchant banker seems an act of sublime humour and subversion.
Now I am trying let go of my attachment to how the world should be. What would life be like if you suddenly stopped hanging on to all your notions about how you come across to others; your opinions, identities, beliefs?
That you're the kind of person who seems intelligent, knows who Schopenhauer is, likes Nick Cave, isn't friends with people who race greyhounds or vote National or go shooting. That you're the life of the party, the victim, the intellectual, the wallflower, the paragon of virtue, the roue.
Imagine if as a country we had a midlife crisis. Imagine we let go of all those ideas about what makes us New Zealand. That we're down to earth. That we're hard case. That we're no good at building big businesses. That we never save. We only invest in property. That we're just a bunch of hokey farmers, hoons and larrikins. We're good with No8 wire, we're a box of fluffies ... imagine if we let all those ideas go. Perhaps if we released those limiting beliefs we might stop having the same Groundhog Day discussions about our future. There could be a whole different country inside us just waiting to be discovered. Scary eh? I think this may be how liberation feels.
dhc@deborahhillcone.com
