I turn 39 in less than month. With the average female living to be 81 years old and some change, this puts me smack dab in the middle of my life. This means I am officially middle age, or in the terms of this post, mid-life.

Normally you hear about mid-life crisis in terms of those who are in their 40’s, even 50’s, which isn’t necessarily mid-life. It would be a quartile of life, if we were to look at it as such. If the average life expectancy of a female is around 80, then the distribution would be 0-20, 20-40, 40-60, 60-80. Which the mid-life would span over 50% of 2 of the bins, 30-40, and 40-50. Going on 40, I correct myself, I’m ALMOST mid-life. I’ll be mid-life in the next year. Though, that is the assumption that mid-life only exists for one year, if we expand that distribution, then this will go on for a while yet.

Anyway, my point, I’m of a ripe age to have a mid-life crisis.

This isn’t the type of crisis that you would stereo-typically see, I’m not going out to buy a convertible sports car to drive around and jet off to exotic locals. I’ll be doing that in a Subaru Forrester, instead.

It goes back to the question one asks earlier in their life, “what do I want to do with my life?”

Seriously, what do I want to do with my life? It keeps coming back to food for me, I love food. I love the culture of food, the history with it, I love the taste of food, the presentation, I love the permanency of it.  Well, really, depending on climate change and how quickly we begin to fry from solar radiation, the permanency exists for only certain parts of our world. I happen to be lucky that I live somewhere that has accessibility to food – so maybe, permanence from the stand-point that it’s something that sustains our on-going respiration. We require it to live.  Onward for more happy thoughts, though, I bet we humans would smell delicious while we are being cooked. Whew, going to dark places today.  Continuing on, my crisis.

I work in a great job, first, and I have been happy with this job. But I keep coming back to food, and wanting to spend more time working with food. However, I have the caveats of financial goals.

1. I don’t want to go further into debt.
2. I don’t want to work in a kitchen, necessarily, or restaurant.

 

Which means, I somehow want to find a full-filling career being self-employed, around food, with minimal debt. Hence the crisis. How do I change that?

Slowly? Over-time? Beyond mid-life?

I’ve been thinking of my options, and they all require patience. My love and I have been thinking of moving to another country in the next few years, and opening a bed & breakfast there, option 1. Option 2, thinking of buying a place more locally and somehow incorporating our love for food there. Do we do weekend stints at the local farmer’s market? Do we have a road-side stand? Somehow start incorporating a bed & breakfast? But these are all hard goals unless I become financially independent from life. Life requires a certain dependence on money and the on-going payment to the “man”. The man being the corporation that would lend me money to work out this dream.

I want to travel, though, and feed people. I really want to feed people tasty things, and have parties where I feed people these tasty things, and they keep coming back for more. I do that in my social life now, but is that really an alternative career?

So I will muddle over these things, and think about them, and wonder what I could do. But I do feel somewhere along the line I will need to take a chance, and doing that is really scary. I’ve been lucky to this point in my life, that my risks have reaped great reward, and uncomfortable moments. There have been many of those, don’t overlook the use of the uncomfortable space in your life, they help you too. But I anticipate that if I go this route, that I’m in for a larger than average amount of uncomfortable moments. If those could be distributed evenly among my age buckets above, instead of condensing neatly into the current 20-40 bucket, that would be great.  That’s not life, though, is it.

And the life worth living isn’t the comfortable one where you avoid all the difficult choices.

A friend told me this weekend, that sometimes you have to let go of having everything in place and just go for it.

Now to define the “it”.  Another country? Or do we try it here….of course the internet must vote on my life.