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In a 2021 Atlantic article that I’ve now learn many occasions, the author Deborah Copaken displays on her time spent with one other author, Nora Ephron. A random telephone name (“Hi, Deb, this is Nora Ephron.” “Yeah, right. And I’m Joan of Arc.”) led to a decade-long friendship between Copaken and Ephron—or, as Copaken calls her, “this daughterless woman who has all but adopted me and several other women.”
Copaken’s article, excerpted from her memoir Ladyparts, catalogs her personal midlife challenges in addition to Ephron’s dying, in 2012. The article helps these of us who’ve lengthy cherished Ephron get to know her higher, however what resonates with me most are the three classes Copaken has gathered from the rom-com auteur about navigating center age. Ephron, Copaken wrote, “teaches me, by example, how to navigate the postreproductive half of my life.” Here’s how:
- Gather buddies in your house and feed them.
- Laugh within the face of calamity.
- Cut out all of the issues––folks, jobs, physique elements––that not serve you.
I’d enterprise to counsel that these guidelines apply at most ages. But as we speak’s studying record focuses on that period of life we name the “middle”—what makes it particular, and easy methods to discover a singular kind of happiness inside it.
Three Rules for Middle-Age Happiness
By Deborah Copaken
Gather buddies and feed them, giggle within the face of calamity, and reduce out all of the issues––folks, jobs, physique elements––that not serve you.
The Puzzling Gap Between How Old You Are and How Old You Think You Are
By Jennifer Senior
There are good causes you all the time really feel 20 p.c youthful than your precise age.
By James Parker
Your physique begins to betray you. You have neither the vitality of youth nor the license of previous age. But being over the hill has its pleasures.
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I’ll go away you with some phrases from James Parker’s ode to center age:
“You’re more free. The stuff that used to obsess you, those grinding circular thoughts—they’ve worn themselves out. You know yourself, quite well by now. Life has introduced you to your shadow; you’ve met your dark double, and with a bit of luck the two of you have made your accommodations. You know your friends. You love your friends, and you tell them.”
— Isabel