# Passages ## Metadata * Author: [Gail Sheehy](https://www.amazon.comundefined) * ASIN: B00DGZIBDY * ISBN: B000P15LGW * Reference: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00DGZIBDY * [Kindle link](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY) ## Highlights Times of internal crisis are predictable. To move through the uncertainty and disequilibrium, to take the risk of change and make a leap of growth, this is a passage. The reward is to continue to gain mastery and meaning in our lives. — location: [119](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=119) ^ref-40009 --- Men, who then married at an average age of 23, were expected to shoulder the full burden of family support. Many men I interviewed around age 30 admitted that their wives had become uninteresting as their focus narrowed to being good mothers. At-home wives, as they neared 30, commonly complained of feeling less confident than when they finished school. — location: [145](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=145) ^ref-32659 --- It is entirely possible that we will change our mind around 30 and pivot in a different direction. — location: [162](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=162) ^ref-46241 --- At Catch-30, men and women alike speak of feeling too narrow and restricted. They blame all sorts of things, but that does not mean the choices of their twenties were wrong; they were a necessary tryout. Now the fit feels different. Some inner longing was left out. Important new choices must be made and commitments altered or deepened. The Catch-30 passage often produces a simultaneous feeling of rock bottom and the exhilarating urge to bust out. — location: [163](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=163) ^ref-1335 --- Fifty is the entry to another major life turning point where we can shed a shell and become yeasty and embryonic again. We start all over again, asking ourselves, “What do I want to be now that I’m fully grown up?” Many men and women have an urge to pursue an earlier passion for the creative arts. — location: [195](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=195) ^ref-33818 --- instrument. Most women who enter politics do so after 50. — location: [199](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=199) ^ref-56785 --- Second Adulthood takes us beyond the preoccupation with self. It initiates a search for meaning and greater involvement with the community or the world—a cause larger than oneself. The first time we lose a parent or a contemporary dies an untimely death, the shadow of mortality changes our perspective quite radically. We are forced to recognize that we don’t have all the time in the world. — location: [199](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=199) ^ref-37941 --- In normal circumstances, without the blow of a life accident, these issues affiliated with midlife are revealed over a period of years. We have time to adjust. — location: [272](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=272) ^ref-19238 --- could attach the anxiety to real events. My flight phobia fell under the convenient umbrella of conversion reactions (the process by which a repressed psychic event is converted into another symptom). — location: [285](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=285) ^ref-2502 --- For the moment Maura was safely installed with her father. Despite our divorce, or perhaps as a result of it, we had the kind of long-running love that transcends pettiness because it is built on a shared conviction. — location: [291](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=291) ^ref-32031 --- Together we had made this contract; it was unalterable; it superseded all others. And so we had come to enjoy the special qualities of respect and friendship that grow out of putting another’s well-being first. — location: [293](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=293) ^ref-24843 --- The major task of midlife is to give up all our imagined safety providers and stand naked in the world, as the rehearsal for assuming full authority over ourselves. — location: [359](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=359) ^ref-38818 --- No one ever told them that a sense of stagnation, disequilibrium, and depression is predictable as we enter the passage to midlife. — location: [414](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=414) ^ref-35367 --- Everyone has difficulty with the steps of inner growth, even when the outer obstacles appear easily surmountable. What’s more, the prizes of our society are reserved for outer, not inner, achievements. Scant are the trophies given for reconciling all the forces that compete to direct our development, although working toward such a reconciliation hour by demanding hour, day by triumphant day, year by exacting year is what underlies all growth of the personality. I count my own fortune now in the treasury of lives opened to me in trust. They live in me, resonate in me, teach me every — location: [576](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=576) ^ref-27125 --- graduations, marriage, childbirth, divorce, getting or losing a job—affects us. These marker events are the concrete happenings of our lives. A developmental stage, however, is not defined in terms of marker events; it is defined by changes that begin within. The underlying impulse toward change will be there regardless of whether or not it is manifested in or accentuated by a marker event. — location: [594](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=594) ^ref-44009 --- The external system is composed of our memberships in the culture: our job, social class, family and social roles, how we present ourselves to and participate in the world. The interior realm concerns the meanings this participation has for each of us. In what ways are our values, goals, and aspirations being invigorated or violated by our present life system? How many parts of our personality can we live out, and what parts are we suppressing? How do we feel about our way of living in the world at any given time? — location: [598](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=598) ^ref-28578 --- During each of these passages, how we feel about our way of living will undergo subtle changes in four areas of perception. One is the interior sense of self in relation to others. A second is the proportion of safeness to danger we feel in our lives. A third is our perception of time—do we have plenty of it, or are we beginning to feel that time is running out? Last, there will be some shift at the gut level in our sense of aliveness or stagnation. These are the hazy sensations that compose the background tone of living and shape the decisions on which we take action. — location: [608](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=608) ^ref-27861 --- Times of crisis, of disruption or constructive change, are not only predictable but desirable. They mean growth. — location: [618](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=618) ^ref-31149 --- The wunderkind hell-bent on reaching his goal, having spent little time on building emotional attachments, may ignore through his rocketing years the hollow feeling inside the nose cone of his success. Society goads him on. Or her—think of Dorothy Parker, Marilyn Monroe, most movie queens for that matter. Having spent their energies on speeding along one narrow trajectory, the superachievers may be shocked at the passage to midlife to find they are really behind. On the other hand, people who commit deeply to a goal and play it out to their satisfaction sometimes flourish in midlife when their neglected emotions are released. It can give them a second lease on life.3 — location: [632](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=632) ^ref-50982 --- Yet events that demand a leap of action before we’re ready often have the happy effect of boosting us on to the next stage of development in spite of ourselves. — location: [690](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=690) ^ref-49742 --- One of the terrifying aspects of the twenties is the inner conviction that the choices we make are irrevocable. It is largely a false fear. Change is quite possible, and some alteration of our original choices is probably inevitable. Two impulses, as always, are at work. One is to build a firm, safe structure for the future by making strong commitments, to “be set.” Yet people who slip into a ready-made form without much self-examination are likely to find themselves locked in. — location: [734](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=734) ^ref-11934 --- Consumed with the work of making his own critical life-steering decisions, he demonstrates the essential shift at this age: an absolute requirement to be more self-concerned. The self has new value now that his competency has been proved. — location: [764](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=764) ^ref-43508 --- decade between 35 and 45 that can be called the Deadline Decade. It is a time of both danger and opportunity. All of us have the chance to rework the narrow identity by which we defined ourselves in the first half of life. And those of us who make the most of the opportunity will have a full-out authenticity crisis. — location: [785](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=785) ^ref-15063 --- To come through this authenticity crisis, we must reexamine our purposes and reevaluate how to spend our resources from now on. — location: [787](kindle://book?action=open&asin=B00DGZIBDY&location=787) ^ref-16877 ---