The Midlife Maze
There's no single correct path and not exit (except the obvious one)
I grew up thinking that life was a ladder. Something to climb and once you reached the top you won.
But midlife has revealed something different to me.
Life isn’t a ladder. It’s a maze.
But not the kind of maze with a single path through and an exit to enlightenment, success, happiness etc…
This maze is full of possibilities with multiple routes and no ultimate prize or exit. It’s just… you. Walking.
But so many of us hit this point in life and panic.
We think:
“I should have it figured out by now.”
“I took a wrong turn.”
“There must be one correct path—and I’ve missed it.”
But what if the point isn’t to get out of the maze?
What if the point is to learn how to be in it?
To stop chasing the idea of a “successful life” as an exit from the mess—and start seeing it as a living, evolving process.
Because navigating midlife is a process.
Living a good life is a process.
It’s not something you reach. It’s something you practice.
And like any worthwhile process, it asks things of us.
To live well in the maze, we need to:
Be open to experience—even when it’s uncomfortable.
Stay present—not lost in future fantasies or past regrets.
Trust ourselves—to choose, to adapt, to begin again.
Take responsibility—not as punishment, but as freedom.
And perhaps hardest of all, treat ourselves and others with… well, what Carl Rogers called unconditional positive regard. (A fancy phrase for being kind without needing anything in return)
Rogers wrote:
“What I will be in the next moment, and what I will do, grows out of the moment, and cannot be predicted.”
That hit home. I’d spent so much of my life racing to the finish line that I forgot that this wasn’t a straight line race. Every next step depends on the step I’m at.
In my former life I was a physicist. We were trained to love the clean elegance of linear equations. Predictable. Orderly. Reassuring.
But I’ve finally come to admit that life doesn’t work like that. It isn’t a set process governed by a fixed set of rules.
It’s more like chaos theory:
Tiny shifts create big ripple effects.
The system is alive. Feedback loops everywhere.
And who you are becomes something new with every step.
So no, you can’t map the whole maze.
But you can be here for each corner you turn.
You can walk with presence. With curiosity. With kindness.
You can trust that who you are becoming is not something to be solved, but someone to be lived.
And that—midlife or otherwise—is the real adventure.