Where I grew up, as kids we are kind of forced to attend 12 grades of primary and secondary education. That is, your parent or guardian enrolls you in a place offering a pre-fabricated curriculum that is meant to prepare everyone for long-term living. And the lot of us move through each grade like a pinball– we’re knocked about until we finally come to rest as a legal adult holding a diploma that deems us ready to wade into life. 

The veneer of school, all the perfectly-drawn margins and outlines of concepts that you were forced to create, all of that wears away. What takes over are the less formalized but increasingly complicated skill sets that we are expected to master. We are presented with new patterns. We learn them through trial and error. And while all of this is going on, you continue to age. 

In a practical sense, what all of this looks like is that every day, you set out to do the exact same thing as the day before. Decades upon decades, there it seems to go. The precise details may vary but we’re all doing Live: work, learn, do stuff, work more, and then…I don’t know. At some point or another, you encounter these plateaus of sorts.  I kind of feel like I’m standing on one right now. I’m not talking about the job, or some sort of quest for upward promotion. It’s something more fundamental and abstract. 

I almost feel like there should be some kind of mandatory, unskippable mid-life cycle course that we all should attend. My god. Even as I write this, I recognize that such a thing is precisely the kind of activity that repels my particular personality. But I’m at this plateau. I’m looking for ideas. And I feel like I could use some help finding my way back into the tall grass again.

Maybe I shouldn’t be calling it a course, but instead some kind of mid-life calibration. For many, the term “school” has too much baggage—so perhaps the concept for instruction is kept vague. It would need to be tailored to each person, and vague so that nobody ever has to feel like they’re going to be forced back into learning crap that they’ve judged to be less useful than they’d hoped. Like drawing half-inch margins on a piece of paper. 

So at its core, what would I want it to include for someone with a brain like mine? First, I believe that such an instruction should include folks who are a few decades longer into doing whatever it is that I happen to be doing myself—and I’m not just talking from a career standpoint. And within this cadre, the elders should be drawn from a diversity that is reflected in our society (and not just perhaps in our particular workplace). The syllabus should comprise topics that adult students are muddling with—and are indeed perhaps stuck on. This is what I’m thinking of setting up for myself:

Pre-course reading: Re-read Catch-22 and The Invisible Man. Make a list of grievances, observations, and things I didn’t pick up on when I was young. How do they track with what I’m negotiating in adult society? Are they pointing to what’s keeping me on my current plateau? 

-And the more I think of it, I don’t think the preparation phase should be limited to books. I’d pick out other pieces of art, or a movie or piece of music that would serve the same purpose. The universe communicated ideas to us in mediums far beyond text.

Course 1: I’ve performed the tasks of my daily routine thousands of times now and I feel ­­­­_______.

-In other words, I’d like to sit down and tackle the topic of, “My brain is a pencil, and I feel like there is nothing left but eraser when I try to put it into the pencil sharpener”.

Course 2: What grade school didn’t tell you (probably on purpose) but of course you figured out. 

-In other words, I want to spend some good time talking about “Disillusionment” and what that means…or perhaps why it shouldn’t matter. Maybe I’m not going to really learn anything new in this module — but I do kind of want some validation that comes in the form of other people agreeing with me that perhaps we focused too much on constructing those perfect story outlines in grade school. When you’re little, nobody outright tells you how crazy life would be (and if they did, I probably was daydreaming). Here we’d probably reflect on the truth that there are two sides to living: the theoretical (which school is all about) and then the practical application (which is essentially all of the monkey wrenches that nearly demolish theory and force you to think up responses on the fly). 

Course 3: Refresher Civics Course 

-I’m inclined to say that a person can opt out of this if they can pass the Civics Test that every immigrant must pass before being naturalized (without studying!). I just imagine that most of us adults could do with a recap on how our communities and government are supposed to work. It might spring us to be more active, to help find meaning and understand that we aren’t actually on a plateau. 

Course 4: Guest Speaker Opportunity

-Here you would be given the opportunity to spend a day or two as a subject matter expert, speaking to a younger version of yourself who is bright-eyed and just starting life after school. The end result is far from guaranteed (especially since we know that young people don’t listen to old people), but in doing so, it might have a dual benefit: first, it might help you to find a spark of energy in your own life, and secondly it would give you the chance to impart your wisdom onto the younger generation coming up. Or you might walk away feeling even more bewildered about the younger folks coming up. Even so, I’m a bit curious to find out. 

So this is my half-baked idea about finding some good motivation in mid-life. I claim no expertise or certainty that any of this will achieve my desired endstate, but I still don’t think it’s a terrible idea. When you’re a kid, you think that adults always know what to do and that they have it all figured out. Well, almost all adults (even as a kid, I recognized that there were some older people who were definitely running with scissors). But all the same, I don’t think it’s a completely amazing idea that we’re released from high school and are then left to our own devices. Forced learning is not the most enjoyable activity, but I do acknowledge that there was plenty of good that came out of it.

I don’t know. I’m going to think about it some more. Dig back into some old creative endeavors that I haven’t looked at in a few decades. My pipe dream is never going to happen, but at least this proposal gives me a springboard for assigning myself with some homework that I deem to be worthwhile. I’m open to other suggestions. Because tomorrow I’m still going to wake up and do the same thing as today, and I’ve only got one pencil with which to do all of the work. I want to be smarter about keeping it sharp.