This is the middle of my life, I think of it as a place, like the middle of a river, the middle of a bridge, halfway across, halfway over. I'm supposed to have accumulated things by now: possessions, responsibilities, achievements, experience and wisdom. I'm supposed to be a person of substance.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on the expectations and self-assessment that come with reaching the midpoint in life.
In this quote, Margaret Atwood contemplates the notion of a 'midlife' phase, using the imagery of a river and a bridge to symbolize transition and reflection. She muses on societal expectations to have achieved certain milestones by this point in life, such as material possessions, responsibilities, and wisdom, highlighting both the pressures and the introspection that define this stage.
In practice
During a midlife career workshop, I shared this quote to encourage reflection on personal and professional growth.
If I am good enough and quiet enough, perhaps after all they will let me go; but it’s not easy being quiet and good, it’s like hanging on to the edge of a bridge when you’ve already fallen over; you don’t seem to be moving, just dangling there, and yet it is taking all your strength.
I would like to believe this is a story I’m telling. I need to believe it. I must believe it. Those who can believe that such stories are only stories have a better chance. If it’s a story I’m telling, then I have control over the ending. Then there will be an ending, to the story, and real life will come after it. I can pick up where I left off.
What else can I do? Once you've gone this far you aren't fit for anything else. Something happens to your mind. You're overqualified, overspecialized, and everybody knows it. Nobody in any other game would be crazy enough to hire me. I wouldn't even make a good ditch-digger, I'd start tearing apart the sewer-system, trying to pick-axe and unearth all those chthonic symbols - pipes, valves, cloacal conduits... No, no. I'll have to be a slave in the paper-mines for all time.
We love each other, that’s true whatever it means, but we aren’t good at it; for some it’s a talent, for others only an addiction.
I've learned quite a lot, over the years, by avoiding what I was supposed to be learning.
Knowing too much about other people puts you in their power, they have a claim on you, you are forced to understand their reasons for doing things and then you are weakened.
From the age of 15 to 50, I'd hardly stepped out of a kitchen. I just wanted to live a little, to spend time with my wife and children. The first time I saw snow was when I was 50, because I'd never had the time before.
It was life, often unsatisfying, frequently cruel, usually boring, sometimes beautiful, once in a while exhilarating.
Everybody is an expert on one thing - that's what I learned in my high school journalism class - and that's, of course, his own life. And everybody deserves to live and have his story told. And if it doesn't seem like an interesting story, then that's the failure of the listener, or the journalist who retells it badly.
anyone who gets up early by inclination or has been forced to rise early out of necessity finds it intolerable that others should go on sleeping soundly
Tomorrow I will curse the dawn, but there will be other, earlier nights, and the dawns will be no longer hell laid out in alarms and raw bells and sirens.
We have reached the age, those of us to whom fortune has assigned a post in life's struggle, when beaten and smashed and biffed by the lashing of the dragon's tail, we begin to appreciate that the old man was not such a fool after all. We saw our parents wrestling with the same dragon, and we thought, though we never spoke a thought aloud, 'Why doesn't he hit him on the head?' Alas, comrads, we know now. We have hit the dragon on the head and we have seen the dragon smile.
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