Word: ager
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Delight & Risk. No man in the land gets a higher paycheck than the middle-ager. The average age for incomes of $10,000 to $15,000 is 47, for incomes of $15,000 and up, 51. This makes delayed pleasures possible. A man may have been sports-car minded for years, but when he climbs behind the wheel of a Mustang, his average age is 48. With no small children underfoot, husbands and wives discover the pleasures of each other's company, share convention trips, take that second honeymoon to Europe...
...adds and feeds to gorge the ego; after 40, one subtracts and simplifies to slim the soul. With the final image of one's existence even faintly in view, the self seems pettier and the words "service," "love of others," "compassion" not only creep into the middle-ager's vocabulary but add meaning to his life. In church work, social work, community fund drives, culture centers, middle-agers are always at the fore. Sol Linowitz, 52, chairman of the executive committee of Xerox Corp., defines his abiding purpose: "I want to leave the world a little better place...
Sometimes a middle-ager finds that meaningful cause in adversity. Four years ago, Lynn Selwyn, now 40, was apathetic, morose, and her marriage was irreparably cracked up. One day, Jeanne Cagney, sister of Jimmy, said to her: "Frustration is the shirking of potentiality." Says Lynn: "In that instant I knew I had to do something with my life, learn how to live without being dependent on someone else...
Wisdom & Panic. As Aristotle once pointed out, there are no boy philosophers. One of the philosophical satisfactions of middle age is not being young. The sign of health for the middle-ager is that he prefers his own age; he has no desire to go back to 20 because he knows what 20 is in a way that 20 does not. It is a difference in perspective: youth's is flat, middle-age's is three-dimensional. It is the difference between ignorance and wisdom, impulse and judgment. The young think there is no tomorrow; middle age knows...
...middle years can be wise and felicitous, they can also be foolish and frantic, fraught with nerve-frazzling doubts and despairs, somber with peril and melancholy. The middle-ager usually knows better than to stay up till 4 a.m., but he sometimes finds himself waking up at 4 or 5 a.m. in a swivet of inexplicable panic. He has reached the age of what T. S. Eliot called...