Halftime

There's a new ministry at my church called "halftime." The meetings are based on the idea that certain people are at a stage in their life called "halftime," a stage wherein these people look back at the lives they've lived and forward at the lives they could lead.
My difficulty with this description (you didn't really think I would be blogging about the church without complaining about something, did you?) is that I'm pretty sure everyone is at "halftime," and that this is a light and fluffy way to describe the real issues of middle-aged people.
It's an interesting concept, though; and maybe there's something to the use of "half" as a measurement. I've only been around for a quarter-century, so I have a hard time thinking about the future for anything more than another 25 years or so. Does an 11-year-old have the same limitation?
What I really like about this paradigm is that it's not only reliant on your actual age, it's based on memory. I don't even have 24 complete years of memories, and I can't anticipate 24 complete years of my future life; things start getting fuzzy around the edges. This makes the paradigm continue to work into the later years of your life: when you've only got ten more years (give or take a decade) to live, it gets harder and harder to remember anything that happened more than ten years ago (give or take a decade.) The elderly have the benefit of distant memories, but the youth have the benefit of distant goals.
I suppose the key would be to find a hyperfocal distance... but maybe that's my recent photography obsession creeping into my existentialism.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

I read somewhere that 20 is in fact your psychological mid-life point. The idea is based on our biased perceptions that we spend half our lives waiting to growing up to be independent people, and we spend the other half of our lives being independent grown-up people.

As for me, my future general putts along looking 2-3 months in advance. Currently, I'm not even aware of anything past Thanksgiving.