Why Your Best Chapter Might Not Start Until 60 (Written at 43)

Reinvention isn’t reserved for the young - it’s the reward of living long enough to know what matters.

Carl Jung once said: “Life really begins at forty. Up until then, you are just doing research.”

At first glance, it sounds like one of those dry intellectual quip’s philosophers toss around at dinner parties. But hit forty (or fifty, or whenever mid-life decides to tap you on the shoulder), and you realize, Jung wasn’t kidding.

Because here’s the thing. By mid-life, you’ve already completed one full cycle of what Joseph Campbell, the American mythologist, called the Hero’s Journey.

• You’ve left the comfort of youth.

• You’ve failed (spectacularly, probably).

• You’ve gotten back up.

• And whether you noticed it or not, you’ve been transformed.

But here’s the catch: transformation isn’t automatic. You don’t just wake up enlightened because the calendar flipped. You have to be transformable. You have to notice the markers, like trail signs on a mountain hike. Otherwise, you stumble right past the view without ever looking up.

Let me show you what I mean.

The Early Years: Training Grounds

Markers: impulsivity, intensity, restlessness.

Your twenties are like standing at a buffet with no budget, you pile everything on the plate. Love feels eternal. Work feels urgent. Mistakes are loud, messy, sometimes humiliating. But that’s exactly the point.

This is research.

Every heartbreak, every dead-end job, every overdrawn bank account is data.

The trick? Pay attention. Notice what excites you, what drains you, what you keep returning to when nobody’s watching. These are your first clues about who you actually are.

At this stage, you’re time-rich but experience-poor. So, use that currency. Experiment. Learn. Collect the raw material for later.

The Thirties: Fire and Friction

Markers: comparison, responsibility, ambition colliding with reality.

Now the stakes feel higher. Careers either take off or stall out. Families form, or the longing for them gets sharper. Friends scatter into different universes. Suddenly, you’re weighed down with mortgages, expectations, and the illusion that everything is supposed to be stable by now.

This is the crucible decade. Many of us burn out here. Or break down. Or reinvent ourselves mid-flight.

The key marker is friction. If you constantly feel pressed, judged, or misaligned, don’t ignore it. That pressure isn’t punishment, it’s an invitation. A chance to refine who you are and what’s actually worth carrying forward.

By now, you’ve gathered enough data to build a value system. The work is to align your life with it.

Mid-Life: The Awakening

Markers: clarity, acceptance, choice.

Then comes forty. Or fifty. It arrives differently for everyone, sometimes as a whisper, sometimes as a crisis that rips the rug out from under you. But it always comes as a threshold.

Mid-life is not the end of the story. It’s integration.

You’ve seen enough cycles to recognize patterns. You know what breaks you. You know what sustains you.

The invitation is simple: stop carrying scripts that don’t belong to you anymore. Stop performing for approval you don’t need.

This is the season where wisdom stops being a thing you admire in others and starts to live in your own bones.

Beyond Mid-Life: The Long Horizon

Markers: reinvention, service, unexpected freedom.

Here’s the hopeful twist nobody tells you, life doesn’t crest at forty or fifty. It expands.

Some of the boldest reinventions in history happened later:

• Grandma Moses started painting in her late seventies, after arthritis ended her embroidery. Her work went global.

• Nelson Mandela walked out of prison at seventy-one and led South Africa into a new era.

• Harriette Thompson ran marathons in her eighties, finishing at age ninety-two.

The lesson? Mid-life is just another doorway. And beyond that, more doors. At sixty, seventy, eighty, the chance to grow, awaken, transform is still there, waiting.

Every season of life has its own texture. Its own challenges. Its own treasures. The secret is to stay awake to the markers along the way, so you don’t sleepwalk past the invitations to change.

Because no matter your age, the Hero’s Journey resets. The call to adventure is always waiting.

As Mary Oliver wrote: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

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